History begins to absorb you as you age. With each decade your perspective shifts back ten years; having started thinking only of the future, you end by thinking only of the past. Just before you die your mind is already embedded in history then, a moment later, you become history yourself.

But before that point, you find yourself wondering what life was like for your grandparents, and their parents. How did they talk to each other? What amazed them? What were they proud of? What did they hope for? You realise that distant historical events, like wars and disasters, were not that distant after all. Your parents and grandparents lived through them. You remember how often they talked of these things when you were small, and how tedious it seemed for them to keep going back so. It was so old-fashioned, in the most literal interpretation of that phrase.

And somewhere along the line you found, to your amusement and chagrin, that you were doing the same thing. Saying ‘I remember when…’ no longer elicits amazement from your audience, just a detached kind of sympathy for the older generation, who had to put up with such primitive times. People suddenly seem to assume you have first hand experience of events that took place many years before you were born. It irritates you that they know so little about things that happened only yesterday, but before they were born.

You learn to keep your mouth shut. It didn’t serve any purpose for your parents to tell you how things used to be, and in revenge, the same applies now to you. Past mistakes don’t serve as warnings, past successes are no longer indulged with celebration. What do you know and what did you do, anyway? Was it that different from what your parents did, or their parents before them? No, you come to the painful realisation that you are not the culmination of history, or evolution. You are simply a link, indistinguishable from that which came before and that which comes after.

Slipping from the present to the past means a loss of presence. Invisibility begins to shroud you. First you become transparent to children, then to adolescents, then to people you desire (the hardest part), and finally, process complete, you become invisible to all. No menu meets your tastes, no advertisement catches your eye, no shop sells what you are looking for, and no official has any interest in you.

Even the language betrays. New and ugly phrases replace perfectly good older ones. Stick with the old and sound dated, use the new and sound pathetic. You seek out those who share your predicament. There is reassurance in pretending together that the old is still here with us, that the past lives. You become interested in history, but have no-one to talk to about it. You once thought the voting age should be 10, now you think it should be 50. History shows you are right, but there are no votes in it.

The baby boom is your only consolation. Weight of numbers will give your generation some say. No-one else is going to help you, you have to help yourself. In a world where competition is the new cooperation, take what you can, don’t be content with the next generation’s leftovers.

You were born into a world that wasn’t yours. You leave it the same way.