Too Old for TikTok, Too Young for Death
There is something deeply unsettling about the speed of the world now. Everything moves too fast. Algorithms. AI. Trends. Businesses. Opinions. Identities. Every five minutes there is a new expert, a new millionaire, a new spiritual guru with Botox explaining detachment from Bali while selling a $10,000 course on authenticity.
How is anyone supposed to keep up?
Ironically, I used to be the fast one. Too fast. People spent years telling me to slow down. Life itself tried to stop me several times. Burnouts, disappointments, heartbreaks, exhaustion — little love letters from existence begging me to sit the hell down for five minutes.
And now? Now the world has become faster than me.
Forty is a strange age. People romanticise it online with their “life begins at 40” nonsense, usually posted under a photo of someone standing barefoot in linen next to an overpriced matcha latte. But honestly? Forty feels more like the beginning of the end. A slow psychological apocalypse with good skincare.
This is the age where the midlife crisis quietly enters the room and sits beside you like an unpaid tax collector. You realise you cannot compete with the younger generation — they are faster, more adaptable, born with technology glued to their nervous system. Meanwhile, you cannot fully connect with the older generation either because they are either too tired, too slow, emotionally fossilised… or dead.
Death starts becoming visible at this age. Not philosophically. Literally.
People begin disappearing. Family members. Friends. Mentors. Versions of yourself. Entire worlds you once belonged to vanish without ceremony. The music changes. The conversations change. Even your reflection starts looking at you with concern.
You realise it is now or never.
And this is the terrifying part: everything you thought mattered slowly collapses into irrelevance. The friends you made. The sacrifices. The achievements. The endless proving of yourself. Nobody cares anymore. Society has the attention span of a cocaine addict scrolling TikTok at 3 a.m.
At twenty, people judge your potential. At thirty, they judge your success. At forty? They judge your final score.
It feels like Judgment Day in hell.
The dead judge you through memory and regret. Your own guilt devours you for all the lies you lived, the compromises you made, the dreams you abandoned because you wanted to be loved, accepted, safe.
And the living? The living simply leave.
That is the cruelest form of judgement. Not hatred. Not conflict. Indifference.
People disappear when you are no longer entertaining enough, beautiful enough, useful enough, successful enough, or profitable to their fragile little self-development journey. Human connection today feels like a corporate collaboration agreement. Everyone asks: “What value does this person bring into my life?” as if they are CEOs interviewing souls.
God, I hate people sometimes.
Not individually, perhaps. But collectively? Absolutely. Human beings are unstable creatures pretending to be evolved. Muddy. Contradictory. Performative. Morally flexible depending on lighting and financial circumstances. Everyone wants depth until depth becomes inconvenient.
And how exactly is someone supposed to survive this?
How do you survive when the dream disappears? When the spark fades? When your speed slows down? When you no longer feel connected to the world around you?
Maybe that is the real crisis of middle age.
Not wrinkles. Not aging. Not death.
But becoming fully conscious of the emptiness behind the performance.