I’ve always felt … that I belonged … in a slightly different, earlier era. For me, it’s the ’60s. I dig the whole crazy era: the music, the hippies, the lava lamps, the slang, the psychedelic graphics & clothes, the whole taking-it-to-the-streets energy and organization that literally changed our culture—into the one I grew up in. Civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, hair peace, contraceptive peace, and eventually as time melted into the ’70s ending the draft and lowering the voting age to 18.
Of course, I only know any of this from TV shows, movies, documentaries, talk shows like Donahue and schoolbooks and teachers.
But another career crisis brought up what at this point have been lifelong feelings deep in my psyche: I just don’t belong here in this time. My life would have been so much better if I had lived at a different time. Or just in my lifetime, if opportunities had arrived at earlier points, my careers in journalism and education would have been … smoother. ?
So, in this 21st century age in which I live, I decided to research the internet on my iPhone and type in the search bar: Why do I feel like I do not belong in this time period—you know, just putting it out there into the cosmos that may or may not be cyberspace.
And from my lonely sincere question flowed a plethora of earlier posted comments by many other humans on earth … who feel exactly the same way.
Huh.
I read musings by people who in great detail pondered why they feel like the life they are living is just not working out as it should and that in reality they should be living in an earlier time. (One did write to say his real life is from the future and in this era, he has traveled back in time.) Several wrote about a desire to live in the antiquing age of 1920s or 1890s with many simply liking the 1950s and hippie ’60s like me. They brought up the fact that perhaps their longing for an earlier simpler time has to do with being influenced by TV (reruns) and movies of times in which we have not experienced given our age now.
If nothing else, I gained the knowledge that basically everyone on earth, well maybe Americans or Westerners or modernists, live with this overwhelming feeling that we just don’t belong in this time period and we’d rather live in an earlier time, perceived as happier, stable … a time period that, for lack of a better phrase, would put up with people like us. A few young adults went on about liking the clothes, movies and music of the ’80s—like they thought that was the era to live your youth. Well, honey, I was there throughout my 20s. The 1980s was the worst decade of my life. And the music at the time made me LONG for the folk rock of the 1960s. So, in the 1990s I started going to the Kerrville Folk Festival. Talk about belonging!
Out of place
If it is simply part of the human condition to long for a life in a previous era, even life in another country, then that’s just the way it is. Still, all my life I kept my deep lament to myself, never expressing it until very recently.
This feeling of ‘I don’t belong here’ or ‘I don’t belong here anymore’ is part self-pity and part depression. Life is just not going the happy-go-plucky way we think it should go, so it’s give up and lament about how much better our lives would have been in (fill in the time and place). I wonder about people who really experienced the worst times on earth like wars, like the folks in Ukraine or the Middle East or the Holocaust.
I think of my parents who thoroughly enjoyed their teen years and young adulthood in the 1950s. Best music, best cars, best clothes, best TV, best prices, best everything.
And I always thought of the flip side going on in the ’50s, which was not so carefree and wonderful for Blacks and gays and women, practically everyone who wasn’t white and male. And there was polio, too. And the worst cancer treatments.
But I don’t want to take away someone’s pleasant moment of nostalgia. In many ways, that’s all people have that makes them feel happy. The old photos, music, movies, books, clothes create a time we can experience vicariously if we didn’t live through it to begin with.
The irony of all this ‘why do I feel like I don’t belong in this time’ is answered if not resolved instantly by the internet. And I’ve always believed that each of us is meant to be here and now doing whatever we do, riding the ups and downs of life. We don’t like the bad times, but time and again we survive them. Besides, nothing lasts forever. We need to focus on the life we’re dealt, the Now in which we are living, even if there’s just so much about these times we can’t stand. Nothing our human predecessors didn’t feel and deal.