Moving to a small town in the middle of the countryside isn’t the typical choice for someone who has just turned 25. But this summer, it felt like the right step for me. In the sleepy town near Brighton that I now live in, the median age is 48. (The UK’s youngest region, London, has a median age of just 36.) I’m surrounded by families, friendly pensioners and retired hippies – it would be easy to feel out of place, but in fact I feel the opposite.
My friend Romalie says I’m an old soul. My first memory of using Spotify was searching for Ella Fitzgerald’s Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall on my dad’s desktop computer. I never loved clubbing, and freshers’ week was my lowlight of university, so a slower paced life has come naturally to me. But what I had not expected was how much I would be drawn towards friendships with older people as a result.
Since moving here, I have befriended my live-in landlord – something I never thought I’d say – a keen 60-year-old swimmer who braves the cold water of the nearby coast and local lido almost every day. One sunny day, she offered to take me to the beach with her.
I recently lent her Three Women by Lisa Taddeo after having finished it, and she regularly offers me a glass of wine over an evening chat about the state of the world. Being around people older than me has made me feel less anxious about what I think someone my age “should” be doing, and instead reassures me that I have time.
I often associated my age with certain milestones in life, and the pressure to reach them. For my mum, the age I am now is just three years away from the age she had me. When my grandparents were young, it was the norm to be married with children and a home by this age. I’m nowhere near any of those things, and since turning 25, I’ve been shocked at just how much weight that little number we identify ourselves with holds. Since moving, though, I’ve felt the weight lifting.
I’ve become close with a mum called Karen, who recently packed us a picnic to enjoy by the river one evening while her son was at cubs. I felt grateful that in the small window of time she had to spare as a single mum, she chose to spend it with me.
She tells me how she has seen the toxic views of Andrew Tate affecting boys her son’s age, who unlike me have grown up using TikTok, and I try to share what tips I have for making sure her son stays safe online. I find solace in talking to someone who is as concerned as I am about the toxic side of social media, something my generation has largely been socialised to accept as normal.
I’ve also grown closer to my friend Tony, the oldest of all my friends at 88, whom I taught to use his smartphone after connecting with him through the community newsletter. We watched the Euros final together over a Chinese takeaway in his sheltered accommodation, while I updated him on the recent chaos that has unfolded in my life.
He always seems happy to hear that I’m never in one place for too long – be it a job or a headspace – and tells me I’m full of life, something that comes up often as he tells me how he is becoming more at peace with the reality of death. As someone whose paternal grandparents have died and whose maternal grandparents don’t speak English, I often wonder if these would be the sort of conversations I’d be having with them if circumstances were different.
Growing these intergenerational connections hasn’t only showed me the vast possibilities of the human experience, it has also allowed me to get out of the social media bubble of cyclical trends that is easy to get stuck in as a gen Z person. It has shown me there is more to life than the talking point of the news feed that week. As someone who has grown up online, I often make the mistake of replacing offline community with online interaction, but I’m learning that this can never be truly fulfilling.
Making friends with people of different ages has also shown me that while your 20s are scary, they’re not as serious as we often make them feel. There is always time to change our mind and start again. Learning that from my community of older friends, and knowing that they are learning from me, has helped me to get some relief from the idea that my life has been on the clock since I hit 25.
Adele Zeynep Walton is a journalist and online safety campaigner
