Millennial, Confused but Still Trying
I did not think apps would be the thing that made me feel old. I thought it would be my knees, or the way I now say “back in my day” unironically about dial-up internet, but no. It’s the apps. Specifically, it’s the fact that there is now an app for everything, and instead of resenting that the way I resent most modern nonsense, I’ve reluctantly decided some of them are actually good.
Let me back up. I am a millennial in every clichéd sense of the word. I remember a world before smartphones, I have genuine nostalgia for MySpace, and I distinctly recall being told throughout my twenties that I could do anything, be anything, that the world was mine to figure out through sheer improvisation. And for a while that was true. I moved abroad without a real plan. I started a business. I went back to school in my thirties and somehow made it work. Improvisation got me pretty far.
But improvisation does not get you a padel court on a Saturday afternoon anymore, and this is the small, humiliating hill I’ve decided to die on. A few months ago a friend convinced me to try padel, and I showed up expecting to just wander onto an open court like it was 2009 and nobody had thought of scheduling yet. Reader, there was no wandering. Every court was booked through padel booking software, an app I did not understand, downloaded reluctantly, and then, embarrassingly, grew to appreciate. You reserve your slot, you show up, you play, nobody’s standing around a fence arguing about whose turn it is. It’s efficient in a way my twenty-something self would have found deeply unromantic, and my late-thirties self finds genuinely, almost tearfully, convenient.
This is the part that gets me. I resent feeling like I don’t understand the world anymore, the slang I can’t parse, the apps I have to have explained to me by people half my age with the patience of a kindergarten teacher. But then I use one of these apps and it just works, and I have to sit with the uncomfortable fact that maybe I’m not smarter than the systems replacing the chaos I used to romanticize. Maybe the chaos wasn’t actually that charming. Maybe it was just inefficient and I was young enough not to mind.
I still miss the feeling, though, that bottomless certainty that things would work out, that I could show up somewhere with no plan and figure it out on the fly. Now I show up with a plan, a reservation, a confirmation email. It’s less thrilling. It’s also less likely to end with me standing in a parking lot at 9pm with nowhere to play.
So here I am, older, still confused by half of what the youth say to each other, but weirdly at peace with the fact that an app booked my court better than my twenty-five-year-old instincts ever could have. Growing up is strange like that. You lose the drip of potential and gain a decent scheduling system. Not a bad trade, most days.
