Too mature for the 22 year-olds, too not-dead-yet for the 35 year-olds

[Andrew]

In casting about for a way to get the Radiohead show eighteen miles outside of the city May 11, I went by Meetup.com, which features local groups with names like, "20s and 30s DC Indie and Local Music Meetup," and, even more ridiculously, "GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN! MID 20's EARLY 30's." I thought that people like to at least make a show of age-agnosticism? On the idealistic internet, at least? Even if it's perhaps unavoidable for the young and the old to have some distance between them, the degree of shortsightedness in "mid 20's early 30's" is still hilarious. By defining their group so narrowly, they promise to exclude themselves within just a few years. It's fun to imagine the 32 year-old member of the group who necessitated expanding the age range into the years of honorary youth, the very-late-twenties. Perhaps she was the organizer?At meetings of these groups of young people selected and brought together, not automatically by school, but artificially by choice, isn't there an uncomfortable sense of an effort to duplicate the school environment? When people working in offices miss their recently lost school life, is it really literally the presence of people their own age that they're missing? It just seems like passing up an opportunity -- to make the effort to reach out to others, but then to not try to find something more universal -- to instead arrange a little cult of youth and "indie." Surely people trying to use the internet to make themselves less lonely should have a somewhat ironic understanding of their situation?Of course, the excluded middle-aged have formed their own "no young people" groups in reaction, such as "Women of Purpose - 40+" where those traumatized by their lost youth, and wondering "Why am I here?" can turn to Christ for answers.