There’s a strange cultural phenomenon happening right now where turning thirty has become some sort of expiration date for youth, relevance, and possibility. Scroll through social media and you’ll find twenty-somethings posting preemptive eulogies for their upcoming thirtieth birthdays, as if they’re about to age out of life itself. It’s absurd, and it needs to be said plainly: thirty is not old.
Let’s start with the most obvious point. The average life expectancy in most developed countries hovers around eighty years. By that math, thirty puts you at roughly 37% through your life. That’s barely past the first act. You wouldn’t leave a movie theater a third of the way through and claim you’d seen the whole film. You wouldn’t read four chapters of a novel and insist you know how it ends. So why would we treat thirty as if it’s some kind of final chapter?
The truth is that most people at thirty are just beginning to figure out who they actually are. Your twenties are largely an extended audition for adulthood, a decade spent trying on different identities, making spectacular mistakes, and slowly accumulating the self-knowledge that allows you to make better decisions. At thirty, you finally have enough experience to know what you want, enough confidence to pursue it, and hopefully enough wisdom to avoid the worst of the disasters that plagued your younger years.
Consider what’s actually happening in people’s lives at thirty. Many are finally earning decent money after years of entry-level salaries and unpaid internships. They’re forming relationships built on genuine compatibility rather than proximity and convenience. They’re discovering hobbies that bring real joy instead of just resume padding. The decade that follows thirty is often when people do their best work, make their most meaningful connections, and build the foundations for everything that comes after.
The idea that thirty is old also crumbles when you look at human achievement across history and into the present day. Many people don’t hit their stride until their thirties or well beyond. Vera Wang entered the fashion industry at forty. Julia Child published her first cookbook at fifty. Samuel Jackson didn’t become a star until his forties. These aren’t exceptional cases meant to inspire us with their lateness. They’re reminders that the timeline we’ve constructed is largely arbitrary and often wrong.
Part of what makes the “thirty is old” narrative so pernicious is how it particularly affects women. There’s enormous pressure around fertility, desirability, and social relevance that gets weaponized against women as they approach and pass thirty. But even the biological arguments don’t hold up to scrutiny. While fertility does decline with age, the cliff that popular culture describes is more like a gentle slope for most women. Plenty of healthy pregnancies happen in the thirties and beyond. And more importantly, a person’s value isn’t determined by their reproductive capacity.
The obsession with youth has always been with us, but social media has amplified it to a toxic degree. Platforms designed to capture attention have discovered that anxiety sells, and age anxiety is particularly potent. Influencers build entire brands around looking young, staying young, and panicking about aging. The algorithm rewards this content because it generates engagement, which generates revenue, which generates more content about how terrifying it is to get older.But here’s what that endless scroll won’t tell you: getting older, including turning thirty, is actually pretty great. You stop caring as much about what other people think. You learn to say no without guilt. You develop taste and preferences based on your actual experiences rather than what’s supposed to be cool. You form friendships based on genuine connection rather than circumstantial proximity. You make peace with your face, your body, your personality. The trade-off of a few gray hairs and laugh lines for actual self-possession is a bargain.There’s also something liberating about stepping out of the relentless comparison game of your twenties. At thirty, you’ve usually seen enough of life to know that everyone’s path is different, that timelines are meaningless, and that the person who seemed to have it all figured out at twenty-five might be completely lost at thirty-two, while the late bloomer is just hitting their stride. Success and happiness are not races with a finish line at twenty-nine.
The physical changes that come with aging are real, but they’re also wildly exaggerated in our cultural narrative. Yes, your metabolism might slow slightly. Yes, you might need more sleep or find that you can’t drink like you did at twenty-two without consequences. But you’re not suddenly falling apart. Athletes compete at elite levels well into their thirties. Dancers, artists, and performers of all kinds continue their crafts. Your body at thirty is still capable of remarkable things, assuming you treat it with reasonable care.
What’s perhaps most frustrating about the “thirty is old” mentality is how it robs people of the present moment. If you spend your late twenties dreading thirty, and your early thirties mourning your twenties, you’re essentially throwing away years of your life to an imaginary crisis. You’re letting an arbitrary cultural narrative convince you that your best days are behind you when they’re very likely still ahead.
The antidote to all this anxiety is simple, though not always easy: stop buying into the narrative. Thirty is just a number, a marker of time passing, which it will do regardless of how you feel about it. What matters is what you do with that time, how you grow, who you love, what you create, what you learn. These things don’t diminish at thirty. In many ways, they’re just beginning.So if you’re approaching thirty with dread, or if you’re past it and still mourning some imaginary youth you’re supposed to have lost, consider this your permission to let it go. You’re not old. You’re not past your prime. You’re not running out of time. You’re exactly where you need to be, with most of your life still stretching out before you, full of possibility and change and growth. Thirty isn’t an ending. It’s barely even a beginning. It’s just another year in a hopefully long and interesting life.
And that’s something worth celebrating, not mourning.