You and I Are Too Old to Engage in Popularity Contests: When Are We Enough?
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
It’s time to stop trying to be All That and a Bag of Chips
Love being popular? I remember a moment when I was walking down K Street in Washington DC, back in the 1980s. I was wearing a white dress with small red polka dots.
I was in my thirties, tall, slim. The breeze pressed the dress against my body while my hair played around my face.
A man walking by whistled, stopped me and said that I was just “too much.”
At the time I was racked with eating disorders, starving myself, hated my looks, convinced I was stupid, fat and ugly. Yet here was this cute guy telling me that I was “too much.”
Bet you can relate, or know someone who can relate. We can’t see what others see, being on the perpetual gerbil wheel that we aren’t there yet.
The American economy would grind to a halt overnight if we all realized that we really are enough, right here, right now.
All I knew back then was that I was never, ever enough. No matter how hard I worked to look a certain way, it wasn’t enough. The best grades, the highest achievements, the best clothing, the best makeup, skinniest body, most impressive achievements, it would never be enough for me to be worthy of love.
Memory fails, but most of us aren’t terribly fond of our early school years. Unless, as they are for some, the pinnacle of our lives, possibly topped off with our being crowned homecoming king or queen, or the quarterback, or some other star position, like valedictorian.
Just as a quick aside:
Fascinatingly, valedictorians aren’t typically overachievers, usually finding their way to suburbia with their average lives and 2.1 children. They are masters at coloring inside the lines.
Just saying: A survey of over 700 American millionaires found that their average college GPA was 2.9.
(YES, she screams, and fist-pumps)
Creatives, outcasts and non-linear thinkers who get criticized and often belittled? Those are often the world-changers even if they pay for it early on.
Some good news for those of us who grew up as underdogs, just saying.
Much of school can be distinctly unpleasant as it’s ground zero for social training. We’re subjected to the worst of humanity, or inhumanity for that matter, as kids jostle and fight and scrape and push to find a place.
Long before we develop coping skills, we might read ugly comments about ourselves carved on bathroom stall walls (before social media, I’m dating myself here).
For many of us of an age, growing up well before social media, early school was bad enough. We work out (or develop, as the case may be) our inner jerk, we try to find our way, try on a hundred identities by the age of fifteen, copy, emulate, try to be popular or at least find popularity in one of the many groups that form in society.
The geeks, the athletes, the elites, the nerds, and for my time and place, the greasers.
Those cliques haven’t changed much. Add or subtract a few like goths, gangs or dopers, kids gravitate where they find grudging acceptance.
McDonald’s set up shop just up the drive from beautiful Lake Howard in our tiny town in Central Florida in 1963. All the guys who had muscle cars- the Vettes, Mustangs, Camaros and the like-would drive through slowly, revving their engines, and show off the girls that their cars snagged them.
Even the greasers had their turns with the cheerleaders if they had the right car.
Not much has changed as we’ve aged.
We’re all so raw and vulnerable that what is carved then, likely still lives in us now, like letters living in ancient bark, cut right to the quick.
As well as how it felt, perhaps still feels, to be considered an outsider, whether due to race, accent, income level, disability or some other caste differentiator. In so many cases, those are the very stinging nettles which push us to be who we can be.
But what if we’re never enough even after we’ve done some incredible things?
When do we shake the yoke that chokes us?
When do we stop being Sisyphus, whose push to the top never ceases for all eternity? Granted, King Sisyphus deserved his punishment.
But do we?
At what point do we just STOP trying so hard to be, accepted, popular? At what point are we enough?
One reader shared with me that her sister, now in her mid-sixties, is bitterly angry that she isn’t still in high school. Back then she was homecoming queen, the most popular girl, at the absolute pinnacle of her now long life.
Her great disappointment has been that once she left high school, all that dissipated overnight.
Since then she has never been young enough, pretty enough, popular enough. My heart goes out to her that she lives in such a prison.
I lived in one too. I suspect perhaps we all do in some way.
I wonder if we ever ditch the story that we have to be this, have that, to be worth loving. In our society, or even as humans in general, I wonder if we ever stop competing in no-sum games to get the girl/guy, win the prize, get the crown, get the eyeballs, the subscribers (it works the same way on Substack).
It manifests in so many ways from how we dress or dress up our faces, try to look younger and Be All That. Social media has put that compulsion on steroids in ways which are sickening billions of us in the race to be worthy.
I worked with a perfectly lovely woman named Janine shortly after I got out of the Army. We were both in training and development for a big company in Denver. She was pretty, slim, athletic, bright, well-educated, driven. In every way she had achieved it all in her early twenties.
Still, her great love dumped her. She confided to me at the time that she had “done everything right,” as per societal expectations.
Why couldn’t she keep a man? Why wasn’t she enough?
Maybe she was too much.
What a horrible trap. I’ve fallen into that one. I strive and strive and STRIVE and end up being so much that people can’t stand me. Yet all I was hoping for was to be enough to be worthy of love.
For a truly awful but honest journey into the cost of giving up who we are in order to be popular, please see this article from
’s The Prism. It’s a study of what some will do for a rapacious public addicted to spectacle.Are we not entertained?
Apparently, not enough.
Recently, K-Pop actor Lee Sun-kyun took his life when investigated for drug use in a culture where South Korean stars have no lives other than allowed them by their managers.
K-Pop stars don’t have permission to be human. Flawed. Perfectly imperfect.
We already are worthy. We are already whole. We don’t need trimming, additions or fixing. We need accepting- starting from ourselves.
We were born with a birthright to love, handed a planet full of Paradise.
Our lack of self-worth drives the destruction of the very Paradise we were handed. At what point do we have enough of anything? Money, love, food, riches, clothing, cars, yachts? All in our desperate attempt to be worthy of love?
You and I are WAY Too Old to still be competing in popularity contests.
Go back to any high school or college reunion and see if that doesn’t bring up all those feelings of inadequacy again.
Worse, we may gloat (and in all fairness, embarrassingly, I did). Especially if compared to the obese quarterback with no hair, the cheerleader who now looks like trailer trash with twelve kids, when before, we idolized them?
What does that get us, that gloating?
I know that it still matters as we grow up, guilty as charged. As we mature, we still need external validation. But at some point, a good part of that needs to bubble up from within us as well. Being comfortable in our skin, comfortable in the confines of our own minds, is a true skill.
Not many of us have it. I don’t yet, but am a lot better than I used to be.
Let’s talk about this.
We humans seem to have two primary addictions:
The need to be right (and for YOU to be wrong, just ask my father)
The need to feel superior at least to somebody/group of people
This is my observation only. However if you break down all the relationship issues we humans have, chances are we will find one or both of those addictions deep at the heart of it.
Before I go all George Carlin on you, and I won’t, you see my point.
I’ve written for websites for women over sixty where the emphasis so often is still primarily on makeup, hair, clothing. To “get the man.” Or partner, or whatever. To be younger-looking and prettier than those dumpy women over there.
Which smacks of Golden Bachelor, which I have already eviscerated here.
Perhaps the most painful part of Golden Bachelor was the message to older women: even at seventy or thereabouts, it’s all about the perfect body/hair/makeup. To feel superior or get the prize. What, this guy?
Same high school bullshit, just with plenty of age on it.
Last week I had lunch with a minister from our local Science of Mind Church. (Not to be confused with Scientology, please)
Our conversations are full of the kind of hearty hilarity which are part of terrific, late-in-life friendships between people who see the rich humor in our silly conceits, our ridiculous choices and our aching humanity.
We’re in our seventies, full of stories and losses and face plants and failures and the stupid shit we’ve done. We’re both wrinkled and we’ve shrunken somewhat and color our hair to stave off the inevitable.
She is interesting and smart and funny as hell. We should all have such jewels in our lives.
Here’s my January 1st gift to all of us from Linda:
As a coach, Linda teaches that ultimately we can’t erase or remove those less-than-attractive or imperfect parts which embarrass us. Laughing too loudly or loving purple hats or listening to ABBA’s greatest hits (that proclivity infuriated one ex-friend), whatever habits others find irritating.
That’s their problem, not ours.
Linda says to NOT try to exorcise the demons which inhabit our underworld.
Rather, we invite them to sit with us for coffee and ask them what they want.
“They’re screaming Mommy Mommy Mommy,” said Linda, smiling. “They are parts of us dying for recognition. When we embrace all our parts, good bad and ugly, that helps us become whole. Each of those parts has something important to teach us.”
Only then can we can finally and ultimately feel enough, as we are.
That doesn’t mean we stop striving. There are so many things worth our effort.
Instead, the striving, the becoming, is a gift, not a Sisyphisean prison sentence.
Then what we do, we get to do for ourselves, not for some imaginary, avaricious audience who will never be pleased.
The rest of it, finally, can be play.
Indeed.
Let’s play.
Thank you for spending precious time out of your life with me today. If this article gave you pause, thoughtful value or in some way was worthy, please consider
If you know someone who can use a boost, please also consider
Either way I wish you an extraordinary beginning to your new year. My you dot it with jewels in the form of fine friendships, and striving which gives you great joy.
It's like we were all recruited into a sport where we were never going to win no matter how hard we tried. One day, we figure it out. As you say, there are better reasons and better ways to play.
Loved this article, Julia, thank you for taking the time as always to be so funny, incisive, thoughtful and to write so beautifully. Loved especially this: :We were born with a birthright to love, handed a planet full of Paradise. Our lack of self-worth drives the destruction of the very Paradise we were handed. At what point do we have enough of anything? Money, love, food, riches, clothing, cars, yachts? All in our desperate attempt to be worthy of love?" I am working hard on being comfortable in my own skin. It may have taken me 63 years to get here but it is never too late. We're Too Old to Think That's It's Ever Too Late, right?