Relationships and Age

It’s been a while since I went to a typical dinner party with my family. Now that I’m back home for the long weekend, I ended up going to my first one in a long time. It wasn’t much different than how I remember – the food was good, but the conversation was pretty mundane. As per usual, the topics the “adults” always seemed to talk about seemed superficial and never seemed to interest me. But then I started thinking – it wasn’t just about the “topics” that didn’t interest me but rather the whole cordial tone of the conversation. It was hard to imagine that these were what I would say were my parents “so called” best friends and yet their conversations seemed so much…less shallow than how I felt when I converse with my friends. Is this the fate I would be ultimately doomed to as well?

            Now, of course, there are several reasonable explanations for this. For one, I’m not my parents and maybe they really do enjoy this type of talking. Secondly, maybe I’m just biased because the topics they do talk about in general don’t interest me. But I  think it’s rather depressing that adults seem to talk about things that are less “deep” and focus on the bigger picture – almost everything they talk about it just centered on their lives or jobs or how their kids are doing etc. Why does it seem like as we get older we lose our ability to talk about things bigger than ourselves? Why do we never have those conservations where we talk about what we want to be when we grow up or in a few years? Is it because we’ve already got there? Is there nothing left?

            I hate to imagine myself in 10 or 15 years as the kind of person who can’t just sit down with a friend and talk about, REALLY talk about, how I feel about my life and society and the universe. I feel as the years go by these invisible walls separating the deepest part of us from others slowly are built up. We seem less reluctant to share who we really are, because who we really are has been buried under layers of societal indoctrination. Is the only ray of light the possibility of having a significant other whom we can share these things with? Or has everything sacred been stripped away by the machine that is modern society?