My Two Cents: 24 and Being With The People
Hi!! It’s been a minute since I’ve jotted down my thoughts. Writing has always been a favorite pastime of mine – I am, as the youth say, a thought daughter. So as this past semester amped up, I pushed my favorite hobby to the back burner. Which was a mistake because I feel most myself when I am lost in thought, reflecting, scrambling through, and reworking them via my keyboard. But I blinked and January turned to the end of April! And before I knew it, I had missed my annual Ns2c birthday post. I started it a couple of times, but lost the motivation to work through the kinks. Which is often the best part. Putting pen to paper is the best madness method for us ADHD folk. So that’s how I ended up writing my Year Twenty-four Kick-off on May 10th, 2026. About three weeks after I turned twenty-four.
Twenty-three were the tits! It rocked. Twenty-one is the best because you are cool and young and can still be stupid. Twenty-two is cool because you are basically twenty-one, so no one bats an eye if you have a few (eight) too many Coors Lights on a Thursday. Twenty-three is when the nay-sayers start telling you to “wrap it up” because you are no longer a twenty-blah year old. These nay-sayers like to think they know it all. They like to think there are deadlines and set-in-stone cutoffs. But what these naysayers fail to recognize is that there is no cutoff to having fun. There is no age cutoff for when you have to stop visiting new cities and trying new hobbies. There is no one who says you can’t listen to the Rocky Soundtrack on blast as you do laundry to pick yourself up after a long day. There is no immediate endpoint for any of these things. Fun will keep reinventing itself as we continue to reinvent ourselves. We will find older things less entertaining than our twenty-blah year old selves used to find them – but the disintegration of one medium of enjoyment is often accompanied by the sprouting of another. And through the ebbs and flows and highs and lows and ruts and rows of twenty-three, I found the true key to adult fun. Being With The People.
What is Being With the People? Great question. I’m glad you asked. My buddy DJ Dixon coined the term – he often finds himself stuck in the tedious minutia of work. Work that is meaningful and enjoyable, but also selfish. It’s led him to deprioritize hobbies that were the cornerstone of his personality. Like, being a Wedding DJ. Someday, he will call himself a “professor,” “PhD,” or something frivolous like that, but his friends will always refer to him as DJ. But, DJ Dixon didn’t always realize that DJing would always be in his blood. Until he spent some time away from the people. He quit DJing in pursuit of a “doctorate.” (I know, we often remind him how lame this is.) And a couple of years after he hung up his set, he vocalized the knowledge he had gained through pain – he missed his time With The People. Being with the people is what makes us, us. We feel connected to something! There is something so simplistic yet so fulfilling as being in the thick of it, with others in the thick of it.
I said at the beginning of this that I feel most like myself when I am writing or when I am lost in thought. That may be a half-truth. The other half lies in the fact that I also feel like my most me-ish self when I’m With the People. The people know what the fuck is up! I’ve felt happy writing in my lawn chair with a beer, but I’ve also felt top-tear thrill a couple of years ago at a Nickelback concert. A concert I went to with My People! How awesome it is to be with them. How awesome it is to go out and explore, go to new places, try new hobbies, and reignite or reinvent old ones with our people. Our people are ThePeople.
To conclude, my goal for year twenty-four is to Be With the People. Life is so rare and wonderful and worth living – and that is best done by remembering to devote adequate time towards Being With the People.
Regards, Hugs, Coors Light,
Kate
(Expect a response in 3-5 business days because I’m busy With The People.)
