Ancient

 

Last week was my 52nd birthday. Among the gazillion of wishes I received that day, I got a particularly heartwarming one by one of our team's interns, whom I hang out a lot with when we're in the office together. She's 26 and it reminded me that I was an extremely prejudiced brat when I was her age and genuinely found it weird to socialise with people twice your age as I had an image of them being half-dead and super boring. Well, some of them probably were, but my own Mum is the best example that age is just a number and you can be full of ideas and projects, no matter how old you are. When I started at my first job there were two colleagues who I am still in wishing-one-another-a-happy-birthday touch with. One of them is two years older than me, the other about 13 or so. I liked them both and got to know them really well over the 9 years I worked there, but naturally gravitated more towards the younger one, who was closer to my age and in a similar situation in life (recently graduated from university, lived in Vienna and had a boyfriend) than the older one who was married with two teenagers, commuting from rather far away by car and train as she and her husband had built a house in the village she was born. For me it was like a fascinating "study project" to see that they were friends just like anybody of the same age group. I remember that years she quoted her new boyfriend as saying he just realised that the other colleague was almost a generation older and felt a bit relieved that it apparently was not just me.

Well, since then I've come a long way and made friends with people beyond my age cohort in both directions, including "dating" somebody considerably older than me for a while. I still admire these Gen Zers in the workplace who treat the old farts like one of their own. Well, coming to think of it, maybe this privilege is extended only to those who treat them as equals in the first place...