superproxy 2k26

Admittedly, I haven't been fully confronting the reality of my age. Not because I'm afraid of mortality or trying to outrun it, but because growing older never hit me the way I thought it eventually would. At least not until recently. Something about entering my mid-30s has made aging feel less like a milestone and more like a slow awareness of simply existing under expectations I never fully agreed to. Society tends to treat life like a sequence of checkpoints, measuring people against a rigid timeline as if there's a correct order to becoming someone worthwhile. But I drifted from that path, not exactly out of defiance, but mostly through a mix of circumstances and my own poor choices. 

I couldn't say it's worked out fine, or confidently claim that I've only benefited from it. That would make me a liar. Because we live in a system that rewards productivity above almost everything else, and I've never really been someone who fits neatly into that structure. Not in a deliberate way, but in the way some things never quite align. I have control over how I spend my time, but not much over the system that assigns meaning to it. And it's jarring to live in that tension. I don't ever dream of labor. I don't feel driven by conventional goals. But unless you come from generational wealth, or somehow manage to succeed financially within the system itself, there really isn't much room to reject it. And even trying to step outside of it doesn't remove its influence, it just changes how directly it weighs on you.

Over time, that pressure seeps into everything. Your financial capacity shapes relationships, stability shapes confidence, and participation in the system quietly becomes a measure of personal worth, whether you believe in it or not. You can reject those standards intellectually and still feel them pressing down in practice. There's something deeply depressing about realizing how much of your life gets filtered through economic value.

I'm not speaking from a place of extreme deprivation. I was brought up in a relatively stable household. My parents worked their asses off to provide what I needed, even if not everything I wanted. There was comfort in that, even if it was never entirely secure.

More than anything, the best thing I was lovingly given was time. Time to exist without immediately being consumed by survival. Time that feels both invaluable and strangely wasted—or at least in the way the system wants me to feel. I can casually resist that framing, but it becomes harder when it comes from outside me. Under enough pressure, I internalize it until it turns into anxiety, and I start to question my own worth for not moving in step with what I'm "supposed" to be doing.

But is this really all there is to living?

Or am I just trying to make peace with the life I'm already living?