The Rest Of My Life

or, now I'm an adult and is this really it?

Hi, as you might know, I am 27. This is the age that you start to realise that oh fuck, you are an adult now and your life is changing and you're stuck with it forever.

This is a weird experience, and I will prepare you for it by taking you through the lyrics of a cool song:

Der Rest Meines Lebens by Kummer

I'll be translating the text to English (in italic) and talking about my own experiences between the lines (in regular text).

Maybe this'll help prepare you a little bit for this stage of life you will inevitably get to.

Slowly time is running out.

The Club of 27 I have seemingly already missed

Half a year until this is true for me so I guess I better get famous and die soon. I tend to post an age related song every birthday so I guess this will be the one come March.

With 180 [km/h] through town

Balancing wasted on the roof

One week awake, thousand bottles of Schnapps

However then comes the first Friday night where one gives it a pass

Goes to bed early, while one still has something on Saturday

I guess most of us were never big enough party animals in uni that this is noticable in that way, but I do nowadays pass on gaming regularly because I have work tomorrow and it makes me feel old. Also fuck working on Saturday I just did it today and it was ass.

That's what it starts with, just one weekend off relaxing

Easy Easy, and then comes the first Sunday brunch

I guess this is a thing Germans do but imagine making your own Sunday roast for the first time

The first couple's holiday, ironically meant bougieness

Once you start going on holidays with your partner you are slowly transitioning from doing stuff with your friends to becoming an adult who mostly just spends time with their spouse. I have noticed this with my high school friends, the ones in long term relationships never show up anymore.

Anti-escalation, pro niceness

It starts quite harmless, with a boardgame night

What the hell Kummer, board game nights are epic when you do them with friends and have many drinks

But ends in conversations about risk investments

If your friends talk about stock trading on nights out you need better friends. But I do notice my friends talking about other finance related topics more. The kind of stuff you only talk about when you have a fulltime job and a place of your own and you gotta think about your long term financial situation. I do feel young when I listen to my friends do that, because I'm simply not there yet. Makes me glad most of my British friends are younger than my Dutch ones so I am considerably less behind. Anyway, when you notice conversations going this way it's a far cry from the talks you had with your friends on holiday when you were 20 and your biggest worries were if there's enough alcohol in the house, who slept with who, and how shitty your midterms were. You start to miss it now.

Chorus

Someday it's too late, to go too soon

Someday I'll be too old, too old to die young

Though I have tried, I have really tried

Really tried, believe me I've tried

But maybe not hard enough

Believe me, I have tried. I spent about a decade living fully convinced I wouldn't live past the age of 25, which is why I didn't put too much thought into uni or what I wanted to do later. And then you turn 25 and you're still there and you're like "what the hell do I do now?". I've still not figured it out I'm just kind of existing whilst life passes me by. Maybe I should've tried harder as well, but it might already be too late to go to soon. I've already passed the adult event horizon, I just gotta try make something of it. But 27 is still young, so the option is always open. Chorus ends.

The first ones live outside the city because of the children, better area

Two of my high school friends have children and they live in terraced houses in small towns. This line is on the money. Few things to make you feel old like your friends raising kids in the type of house you grew up in. Once you have children, your youth is well and truly over in every aspect. They are the ones who never ever show up to anything cause they have to work and look after the kids and kids are expensive so they can't afford to go anywhere. Even if I still feel young, my friends who are younger than me feel much older.

but nice, that that works out, we haven't seen each other in forever

I have not seen my high school friends in half a year. I see them less often than my friends in London. We used to meet up so much more regularly, and it sucks cause now I have basically no one in the Netherlands. Get me back to England where everyone is still young and not married to their fulltime job or their wife and kids.

the first bbq parties, weddings, class reunions, wine tastings

We're not quite at the point where we're hosting backyard bbqs inviting people to stand around with a drink and talk about work and the kids. Thank fuck the default is still pub or drinks and a film. But I have been to three of my friends' weddings at this point. The first one was a very religious friend who got married at 20 so she could go live with her husband. The second one was my best friend from primary school and all the way through high school. He got married in his wife's parents' massive backyard. It was nice but it's fucked up to go to the wedding of someone you have spent your entire childhood with. It feels very surreal. The third wedding was last summer in Switzerland where we went with the entire friend group and it was epic. Can recommend German style weddings. At this point we were 26 and he was 27 and he had been with his wife for years and they'd been raising a child together for ages. That wedding felt like adults doing adult things, like we're finally at the point where a wedding feels completely right. Like we had accepted that we're old now and that's okay. In other news, I missed the class reunion cause I had uni in Scotland and wine tastings make me think of Sam and then I feel like it's not an old people thing.

Pouring lead on new year's eve, sales receipts instead of a plastic bong

What the fuck do Germans get up to during new years?????

The first time supporting Bayern in international games

Imagine Liverpool winning the Premier league 10 times in a row whilst you're an Arsenal fan and you start rooting for Liverpool when watching the Champions League because they're the English representatives. Supporting Bayern feels like a massive sin as a German football fan, but when you get old enough you stop caring as much about the tribalism and you just wanna watch a fun game of footie. It's like you have too much life experience to still think that football rivalries matter. Nochmal Bayern.

Then the fan zone isn't that far away anymore either

No more talking about politics, then we just fight again

You ever have friends grow up and start supporting more centre-right parties because they start making a ton of money and want to secure their own financial interests? Yeah, I would stop talking about politics too.

and friends for life become acquaintances from back when

I can make a long list of people who I've considered my best friend and who I now speak to a couple times a year. It's kinda sad thinking about it. My high school friend who I've known for 14 years (that's the majority of my life) are drifting away and I'm still kind of coping by convincing myself it's not happening. We haven't yet broken the cycle of going on holiday together every other year but I fear for next summer. Even if we talk like we never left whenever we meet up it's kind of inevitable that when people are settling down and getting jobs and hanging out with colleauges and partners you just end up drifting apart. It sucks and idk what to do about it. Maybe this is why my dad has literally no friends despite being an awesome person. At least I still have the England people, y'all better not leave me too.

Chorus

Ah, and now I'm almost thirty

What is when the best phase of my life is already over

I pray the best phase of my life is yet to come because so far it has kind of sucked at all points. Guess that's what depression and transitioning and dropping out of uni does.

Who knows, maybe I'm having a quarter life crisis

I think we're all kind of having a quarter life crisis cause no one really knows what the fuck to do when transitioning between uni and employment and you're there like "is this really it for the rest of my life? this sucks"

Maybe I am also just a little bit jealous

I think I am to some extent jealous of the people who are having fulltime jobs and are getting married and are just kinda chilling in life despite the eternal employment. It's not very exciting yet I wish I could be at peace liek them.

Maybe I also quietly wish for a small house in a green area

Maybe someday I'll stop missing the small stages as well

Maybe I'd be up for putting up with this nonsense

Being an adult sucks I don't wanna have to put up with working and doing chores and buying a house and having to go to garden parties and whatever. But I guess the only choice is to give it a shot. Maybe I'll become one of those people who saves up and then travels the world for two years and settles down in some weird ass country. Maybe I'll find a partner someday and stop feeling the need to see friends all the time. Maybe I'll even get a job I actually enjoy, whatever that may be. The time of pot noodle dinners and lectures and getting drunk every weekend and having infinite time on my hands is over. But now I'll have money and can go see the world and decide what I want to do with my own life. Who knows what the future holds.

Maybe it won't be so shit after all, the rest of my life