To her sheer and utter dismay, it turned out that everything that she had ever been told about aging was true. That one minute, you were young and then, suddenly, you weren’t. As if, in a blink, your generation was no longer the “hot” topic every media outlet and/or corporation was talking about or examining or trying to profit from by marketing and selling something that appealed to the latest trend. And you never thought that it could happen to you, to your “birth cohort”—this seemingly abrupt lack of interest in you after getting so much attention. Because you were no longer part of the demographic “driving culture.”

At times, Leah’s shift away from youth felt gradual, briefly duping her into believing that no time had passed at all. And then would come such jarring moments as listening to a radio station and being informed by the DJ that she was listening to “Retro Hour—nothing but the biggest pop hits of the 90s and 2000s.” And, of course, the only time that Leah ever actually deigned to listen to the radio was when she returned home for a visit with the family members that had stayed behind in their small California town. This included essentially everybody except one of her brothers, Reston, who had moved to Chicago when Leah was just starting high school. The era when songs like Britney Spears’ “Oops!…I Did It Again” and Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around… Comes Around” were still considered “fresh” hits (released six years apart). Which is why KBYE radio chose to play them back to back during this so-called retro hour. A little “tongue-in-cheek” (read: extremely stale) nod to the duo’s longstanding association, both as a “happy” couple and as the embodiment of an acrimonious breakup…at least on one side. For it was plain to see, even then, that Spears wasn’t the one doing any shit-talking. And yet, the Timberlake-pushed narrative that she was some kind of heartbreaking ho persisted over the years. To the point where, in order for her to get any sympathy or understanding, it took the revelation that Spears had been held captive by her conservatorship for over a decade, pretending everything was “fine” until finally reaching her breaking point when the Spears family tried to pimp her out again for another grueling Las Vegas residency.

The DJs on the radio were mentioning the conservatorship, having the kind of innocuous and vacuous dialogue that made Leah wonder how “normal” radio still existed at all. And, more to the point, why she was bothering to listen to it. Then she remembered that both of her parents were staunchly opposed to shelling out any amount of money for satellite radio, which was the type of service they would put in quote marks, as if to question its very authenticity. After all, they were of a generation when the tenets of technofeudalism (whose chief characteristic was paying a monthly subscription for things that should have a one-time payment or, in all honesty, not cost anything) were unfathomable. To try and adapt to such a “system” now would be unheard of for Sherri and Dave. Almost as unheard of as bothering with something like divorce. Even though, as far as Leah was concerned, they ought to have done so decades ago, like most of her friends’ parents had when she was still in elementary school.

Regardless, staying married—no matter how unpleasant a relationship could get—was still emblematic of the baby boomer generation. Along with easily buying property and peace, love and serial killers. Despite how maligned the boomer generation now was (not just for “selling out” all of its alleged ideals in favor of succumbing to “comfort” [a.k.a. capitalism], but for “single-handedly” ruining the planet for subsequent generations), Leah thought that millennials, sometimes referred to as “echo boomers,” were starting to get closer to being branded in a similar manner. That is to say, “cringe.” Mocked for their sincerity, their hairstyles, their jeans-related fashion. Yet, in the moment of the “millennial heyday,” Leah never could have grasped that her “time” would come to an end. That, like the generations before her, especially starting with baby boomers, she and “her kind” would be deemed “no longer relevant.” Granted, there were many outlets that still lumped millennials and Gen Z together as one bulk, ergo making it easier for some millennials to tell themselves they were still technically perceived as part of the “youth market.” But then there were those who were classified as “elder millennials” (which some might conflate with an “xennial”), making it all but impossible to feel in any way “young” with the synonym for “old” contained within the branding. Even though Leah wouldn’t be counted among that “side” of “millennialism,” hearing her former idols (mainly Britney) being referred to as “retro” and then further belittled with such commentary as, “If you were Justin, would you have reached out to Britney after the conservatorship?” made her want to turn back the clock to a time when it would have been inconceivable to imagine the late 90s and 2000s as part of the “distant past.”

Indeed, there was no denying that, the further away from said time period it got, the worse it all seemed to be. A constant and ceaseless devolution of politics, art and culture. But whenever Leah “caught herself” thinking this way, she was reminded of how all truly old people felt this way about existence/the “current” (read: most influential/relevant) generation. Prompting them to prattle on about how things were so much better in “their” day. Leah didn’t want to succumb to that trap. In fact, she told herself—while trying to drown out the sound of the DJs’ yammering “dialogue”—that if she did, then she really would be as old as Gen Z (and now, Gen Alpha) saw millennials. But before she could make the full resolution not to become that cliché (as the baby boomers had [though Gen X slightly less so]), her quota for being annoyed was, all at once, so pushed to its limit that she screamed out at the DJs who could not hear her, “Will you two fucking retards just shut the fuck up and play a fucking song?” That’s when she realized it: she was now the type of “old” to 1) shout at inanimate objects and 2) still use words that were no longer considered “correct.” Along with calling people “spaz” or “gay,” “retard” was right up there with such dated “tells” about what generation one was from.

As this dawned on her, the DJs then announced their next song as Ludacris’ “Move Bitch,” which happened to feature rapist and sexual assaulter Mystikal on it. Hardly a “golden oldie” on par with something from the baby boomer era, like, say, the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” (which Leah was). That, in part, is what made Leah admit that the “olds” who had come before had been right about something else, too. Not just the fact that you blink and, a second later, your youth is gone, but that music really does get more unlistenable with each passing decade.