Busy bein’ boring

I recently met up with some old friends I hadn’t seen in a while. It seems a truism that as we get older we get more boring and laugh a lot less, and the evening consisted of chatting about the three unavoidable subjects we find ourselves discussing once we hit our thirties, that holy trinity of work, babies and mortgages; apparently a sign of growing up, maturity, independence and freedom, I find it hard to think of any topics more boring (though TV comes a close fourth), so all three in one evening was a tad too much. In the old days, when we were young, if we weren’t going out (which we probably weren’t) we’d be staying up all night listening to music; doing or talking about doing drugs, getting drunk, debating sex, politics, Godard, Dylan, Kafka… and laughing. I used to laugh quite a bit when I was younger but going out nowadays is so sedate and serious; people have to be back by ten and/or it’s a work night and/or the missis won’t like it and/or the baby will be crying. We used to talk of our hopes, dreams, ambitions and desires with a candour lacking nowadays. For the first time – for better or worse – I looked at my one time best friends and thought, they are now mature adults; bizarrely I felt almost proud of them, they had made it through the wilderness and emerged as grown ups. I also felt a little sad, perhaps for things which will never be the same again. Once everything seemed possible, but now it seems hard to deviate from our chosen (or unchosen) paths, things now seem more set in stone than when we were young. Time is pushing on, our options are narrower, perhaps even our earlier aspirations have faded and reality has finally shown up.