Time, time, old friend…
Reflections on aging, digital life, working, and being a woman
The reference for today’s text title is this beautiful song by Pato Fu.
The other day, Ca Fremder went viral by “clapping back” at a comment on TikTok and wanted to frame the response, put it on the wall, but since I don’t have a house, I’ll just quote it here.
A girl sent “What are you doing here?! You old hag!” and the diva replied:
Here’s how it goes, I’m 42, dear, tomorrow you’ll be 42. If everything goes well! Because you could die. How crazy is that. And the idea is to get old, got it? Because I don’t want to die. So unless you want to die, you’re going to be old. Got it? If you still don’t get that, it’s tough for you.
If you want a good laugh, watch the original here (pt-br)
This intergenerational online jab got me thinking about how difficult it is for us to understand time.
Time is just a matter of interpretation, it is not a defined law, even Einstein believed that the concepts of space and time are free creations of human intelligence.
All cultures try to make sense of this river-time that seems to pass by, bringing and taking each of us. Ours, more recently, has been metricating it with wristwatches and google Calendar, which raises a notification on the screen to remind you that it has been 30 days since you started dating, or 365 days have passed since the life of a loved one.
Grada queen Kilomba was saying on Roda Viva (pt-br):
…time is not fragmented, time is not linear. This is a construction of colonial history: “there is a past, there is a present, there is a future.”
In African thought and that of many other diasporas, time coexists. I cannot be in the present without the history of the past. My present is futuristic, it surpasses the present and is in the past. It is a complexity of times.
We are coexisting here in all these times, with our memories of different ages, added to the writings and knowledge of other eras.
This is beautiful and very complex to conceive, especially for those of us who grew up in this linear fiction, thinking that necessarily younger people have more life ahead of them and that being promising — having this promise of life — is better than what has actually been achieved in each person’s life after getting older.
Living dreaming of youth or what could have been — without ever thinking that our time is now, fearing becoming invalid or discarded in old age, and comparing all aspects of life with all other people of completely different ages and realities… to me, this is partly a result of our concept of linear time and it seems very hard to live like this.
aging in different cultures
Here in Brazil, the old person in the collective imagination has a hobby of filling the preferential lines in banks or taking the seat in the morning, making you surf on the bus to work, especially if your line passes by the city’s hospitals.
This is for very old people, all other adults should be at home taking care of the kids or basically working offline, away from tiktok. Boring, right? These fics can only generate a non-will to age, indeed.
The other day I saw that there’s a bar in the United States that doesn’t accept people under 30 years old, I thought it was great, but it should be totally common, right? Most of life happens there — we continue making friends, learning new things, earning money, getting to know places, and living life well beyond our 20s.
In Italy, most people in cafes and bars are between 40 and 60 years old. Since they are the majority, it must be unthinkable for anyone to believe that people with adult-formed appearances cannot have a voice or do not have a promising life.
But to not compare only with much richer countries, I want to say that when I went to China, it was worse, I saw old people everywhere! There they lead active lives, exercise (and dance!) with friends in the park (super common), go to places using public transportation at any time, work in shops…
Back in Brazil, the other day I was at an Elba Ramalho concert at the biggest São João in the world, in Campina Grande (sorry, Caruaru), when I heard two buff, tattooed guys next to me saying:
Look at the mummy over there
The 72-year-old diva energizing a crowd they will never captivate in their lives, and this is the handsome guys’ comment… I doubt they said that at Alceu Valença’s or Geraldo Azevedo’s show.
is it possible to rejuvenate or… not die?
Looking old is obviously not horrible, but a social construct.
In fact, some countries have a preference for older women in p*rn searches — it’s really the preference, but in most parts of the world, people with wrinkled sacks are easily bought by cheap media, they like to see teenagers having s3x.
The global hegemonic capitalist culture is increasingly obsessed with making everyone look 20 years old — which for me was the worst decade of my life, for the love of God, no, please don’t take me back to that purgatory!
We could set the beauty standard in the 40s, with a more sculpted face, the well-developed muscles of a person who has been active for years…
And if we start living until 100, we can update the sexy standards to 50 years old. It would be much more realistic, less frustrating, cheaper… How about that?
Of course, that won’t happen. Maintaining these beauty standards that deny the nature of life — aging — is nothing more than an infallible way to keep an entire market spinning.
We are inside the wheel, so it is completely justifiable to want to appear younger to avoid being run over by prejudices. But it’s good to remember that even if I distract myself from the inevitability of aging by getting preventive botox or any other crap to more or less fit the standards (these days I’m obsessed with plump lips)…
There is no cosmetic procedure that guarantees I’ll be alive tomorrow.
When my grandmothers over 90 tell me they used to take the streetcar in the drizzle and chat with their friends after work near Mappin, I think they have the same advantages as I do of living in the here and now, alive and lucid to share their memories.
Do they have more pains? Oh! The old ladies no longer have cartilage in their joints! But they are definitely lucky because they lived their lives without major accidents, they are doing well.
As for me, I don’t know if I’ll have an accident tomorrow — God forbid — or if I’ll be able to tell future generations how many times we’ve renovated the Anhangabaú Valley — they are still counting!
Maybe this bitter view way of looking at life is because I lost young people when I was younger, my stepfather died at 33 years old (my age today) in a car accident — I was 13 — and another friend also passed away like that, but at 15 years old — I quickly realized that long life is not a certainty for anyone.
In general, except for Buddhist monks — like in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying — we don’t even want to think about it. Rightly so, who wants to think about the unknown end?
The obsession with not dying is timeless (and is usually tied to not aging), we want to believe that we will transcend death, just like the yogis from thousands of years ago.
Today, there are billionaires out there selling eternal life, perfect diets, supplements, exercise routines… just like those exercise manuals perfectly perfect from a hundred years ago that I mentioned the other day.
It’s always been like this, but I think it got worse with the screens.
Our external world is increasingly filled with screens showing images of young people pushed by algorithms, constantly making us lose track of time or how our body is sitting in the chair while glued to the screens.
the digital life
Digital platforms allow us to have multiple “lives” simultaneously as real as material life, each with its own varied narrative, in videos, texts, photos, memes, audio in 2x speed…
Kant thought that our knowledge of the world is limited to what can be known through our perception:
space and time are not independent physical realities, but rather mental constructs that we use to organize our experiences and the external world.
And we have organized things in a very different way from anything humanity has ever experienced before…
If you don’t know me, nice to meet you, Michelle. If you know me, you already know, Michelle.
I travel the world working as a systems developer, but despite being a techie girl, I’ve always been kind of a bit of a rebel against the over-digitalization of everything.
If you also like to criticize people who scroll through timelines in the bathroom, but, like me, are reading this newsletter from the throne, stay, subscribe :)
It seems a bit black mirror but it’s real, our lives have indeed been passing in a different time that makes us forget where we are, how much time has passed, and perhaps, that we are aging or will die one day.
where are we?
The other day I was talking about how we strike up fewer conversations with strangers in the big city, remember?
I said: it seems like we feel more belonging and closer to groups and people online than with those who are in the same place or frequent the same places as us — like those who go to the same gym.
- we already know, we’ve already felt that our perception and connection with space doesn’t entirely relate to being physically present in that space with our material body.
how much time has passed?
Let’s combine this with another fact down here:
I don’t know if it’s ever happened to you (lol) or if it’s just me being weird (lol), but you know when you’re on the phone and completely lose track of time (lol)? You thought you were on the screen for fifteen minutes, but it’s actually been two and a half hours (lol)? So (lol).
- we already know, we’ve already felt what Grada Kilomba mentioned above: time doesn’t pass linearly, our perception of it changes; sometimes it feels like the year flew by, “sometimes when I’m with you, time stops” 🥹
This gives a different perception of time-space: with the internet, we can experience more events and interactions outside our immediate physical contexts, creating a new dimension of reality.
new places, new times
Space and time are part of a complex, multidimensional mix that makes up reality, along with other things like energy, light, sound, heat, etc.
John O’Keefe calls this an “n-dimensional energy soup.”
To interact with the world, animals — including humans — need to divide this complex “soup” into distinct parts or “objects.”
This allows the hippocampus to map environments so we can identify, interact with, and navigate among different elements of our surroundings — John won a Nobel Prize for studies on the relationship between the hippocampus, space, and time.
And now in this soup, we have the cellphone.
It is a new object that expands our ability to perceive previously inaccessible dimensions by exposing us to elaborate virtual stimuli and environments that we do not find in the physical world — well-edited videos, with pre-planned movements and speeches, strategic cuts, and music…
how long does it take to … ?
How much time and skill do you need to prepare ramen? On shorts it takes 1 minute, seems easy. How long does it take to learn to program? On YouTube, there are people who teach hoW tO Be A proGrammEr iN 6 MOnThs.
Everything is resolved digitally in a decontextualized way — you don’t even listen to a whole album anymore (!!) and the artist’s message? (!!) — We lose track of how long it takes to do things.
Looking outside ourselves for a standard of the best time to do something denies what we feel in our skin: everyone gets into the flow in different ways and for different reasons.
Sometimes, there are peaks of interest, hours and days absorbed in building something or solving a mystery, and this isn’t necessarily a neurodivergence, it’s just nature acting in cycles. It makes me think about our relationship with work.
work time
I have been internalizing the criticism that the ideal 40-hour work week is a fiction. Measuring productive time by the clock is a relic of the industrial revolution and only feeds the linear narrative, which can only generate unnecessary anxiety and does not align with the nature of time.
I am traveling as a nomad and sometimes, instead of sightseeing, I work many more hours than I used to at home. I thought it would be the opposite, but I have been enjoying it, you know…
I used to call anyone like that a corporate slave, but let’s face it, it’s very common, when we’re not working, to spend an extra 2 hours a day on the phone — which is nothing more than being a data donor for big corporations.
No one works constantly at an exact cadence. There are days when everything can be done in 4 hours, other weeks might be for catching up or learning something difficult…
The hours of work can be more or less, over a (wish you) long life — and this is realistic, it’s not a fiction of factory floor times.
Besides that, clearly factory work is different from screen work. How can we measure the new complex layers of space-time generated by new technologies?
Technologies that are much, much more immersive than those from 200 years ago, like good books with great stories that (still) make us lose track of time.
What is 3 hours and 26 minutes spent watching tweets? What is 3 hours and 26 minutes spent watching Killer of the Flower Moon? You tell me.
So, things take the time they need to take — everyone feels their own time.
time for women
Going back to the mini-attack on TikTok to wrap up this text…
This event ties into the issue mentioned by Elba Ramalho — time passes differently for women, because no matter how badass we become, we end up being reduced to our age.
It’s understandable, after all, we were raised on Cinderella juice, her stepmother was powerful, but what she really wanted was the youth of her stepdaughter. So, eternal youth should be every woman’s desire.
In fact, we all live in a supposed eternal competition between all women — unfortunately, it’s more likely for a 16-year-old girl to feel threatened by a 42-year-old woman and attack her by calling her old (lol) than to feel happy for a female representation on the network, a role model to follow.
There are many men of Ca Fremder’s age on TikTok and I highly doubt they receive this kind of comment. On the contrary, they are probably voices that are admired by younger guys who — want to be like them someday, in fact, the sooner the better!
This kind of mentality is so ingrained that the other day I experienced it unexpectedly:
I was on the road, listening to some music, looking at the scenery, and I commented to my friend that I felt a strong envy of a girl we know:
she does yoga daily, is surrounded by female presences… two things that bring me happiness, which I had been missing on the trip, and I wanted to talk to him about needing to do something about it.
He’s usually a great listener, we’ve known each other for years and he likes to chat, but the first thing he said was:
maybe you felt envious because she is younger.
We women are always, in the deeper layers of everything that is said or thought socially, in a race against time different from men — those who can sit on the porch and point at our wrinkles while their bellies grow without anyone noticing.
Why did he think she was younger than me? And why would I be jealous of someone younger? Could it be that, approaching his 30s, he felt jealous of younger people — and was projecting that onto me?
I think he didn’t mean something like:
You’re jealous because she has more time to live than you 🍃
He probably meant:
Maybe you’re jealous because she’s prettier than you.
Anyway, we’ll never know his real intention… I was so engrossed in discussing the yoga and friends issue that I didn’t question it at the time, but I’m bringing it up here as an example.
Time for women has to pass differently, and this permeates our imagination and daily life. Women have their place: older women cannot enliven shows, those over 30 have to envy any (supposed) youth, and those over 40 should not express themselves on social media.
the end
That’s it, friend. These are my musings about time lately… wandering around aimlessly again has made me put so many things into perspective, sometimes I feel
what am I doing here, I’m only 6 years old
many questions without answers, for those I already have some formed opinions, here are the “conclusions” of this text:
- use our experiences of perceiving time to remind us that the narrative of linear time is a horrible prison — form our own conception of time;
- I must build what is beautiful within me, including sexual beauty — and never give men who haven’t discovered the power of this any attention;
- The time I spend talking to people online is as real and valuable as face-to-face interactions, since it’s also time passing — the online space is different from what we knew, but it exists and shapes me as much as offline interactions.
- Traveling, reading stories from other times, cultures, and social realities makes us certain that we are never too old to do something we are mentally and physically capable of trying.
- It’s good to be an inspiration for younger people instead of competing — and it’s great to see older people as mentors — and also the younger ones.
- Experimenting with thinking about work in your own time and way is liberating — even if there are deadlines and goals, changing the quality of thought about it.
That’s more or less what I meant… and a bunch of photos that make us realize it’s not common to see photos of elderly people doing things out there on the interwebs.
Thanks for reading ❤
I’ll leave you with an art piece I saw the other day on the road to Igatu — Bahia:
