h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

...but then, I'm only 25. Perhaps the fear will creep up on me as I get older.

If anything, I've usually been the reverse. As a July baby I was always the youngest, especially as many of my friends were September born so were planning their next birthday before I'd had mine!

Most of my friends are older too, so they've already had their moments, dealt with them and moved on.

I think I stopped caring about my age at 17, at that's the default age that my brain presumes I am.

Yeah, I found that once you hit a certain age it's just a number. Honestly, I've been known to forget.

I'm planning on staying 23 for a while, personally. If I don't feel any older in my mind, surely that means that I'm... not any older, right?
I'm pretty sure that's how it works. Maybe I'll concede to 25 in a while to bring my car insurance down.

I spent 3 milestone birthdays (21,25 and 30) in Cyrpus just by sheer luck more than anything else I suppose and each one was different and had different people who meant so much to me, with me for each one

38 now and I suppose in a way 'dreading' the big 40 but only 'cos it means the missues and the kids going to take the mickey more

I hit the big 40 last year, and it wasn't that bad for me. It feels like the pressure's off! In younger years I was worried about fitting in and what others thought of me. Now I'm happy be to me and others can take it or leave it! Hope you'll find this interesting, though:

Some years ago I met someone who didn't know for sure the date of his Birthday. He knew to within a few days, but not the exact date. He was born in a country without an 'administrative culture' for keeping official records of the significant milestone of people's lives. Maybe our culture has made us a bit obsessive about these things because date of birth is one of the significant identifiers we're so often asked to provide, and because many of our rights and responsibilities are officially tied to age.

>>>Some years ago I met someone who didn't know for sure the date of his Birthday. He knew to within a few days, but not the exact date. He was born in a country without an 'administrative culture' for keeping official records of the significant milestone of people's lives. Maybe our culture has made us a bit obsessive about these things because date of birth is one of the significant identifiers we're so often asked to provide, and because many of our rights and responsibilities are officially tied to age.


Excellent point. Especially the possibility that 'our culture has made us a bit obsessive about these things'. I think you're probably right.

My uncle doesn't even know which year he was born in - officially, he's his sister's twin, though they were born years apart!

So he got to pick a birthday for himself.

When he asked his mother when he was born, she said "while the trees were in bloom", so he chose May. When he asked about the year, she said "oh, that was the year the goats were so sick...". Which year exactly that was, nobody knows.

This story sounds like something out of "A Hundred Years of Solitude" from G. Garcia Marquez!