By Adreanna

I’ve officially reached the age where the celebrities and cultural figures of my time are starting to die, and it’s messing with my head.

We all know Instagram’s algorithm tailors itself to our interests, but lately, mine feels like a death march. Diane Keaton. Malcolm-Jamal Warner. Angie Stone. D’Angelo. James Earl Jones. Every scroll feels like another goodbye.

And when it’s not death, it’s aging. Watching my idols—people who once embodied youth, energy, and the pulse of culture—grow older right alongside me. Some gracefully. Some… not so much.

Seeing the Backstreet Boys, Nelly, Ashanti, *NSYNC, Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, Lil’ Kim, Britney Spears, PINK, and Nelly Furtado, the whole crew, on reunion tours, press runs, and all over Instagram brings equal parts nostalgia and existential crisis. The mom and dad bods, the gray hairs, the makeup trying its best to blur the lines time carved out, all mirror the quiet betrayals of my own body. Even Beyoncé, our forever Queen, moves differently now. Blue Ivy’s the one on stage with the fire her mother once had, and it’s beautiful and jarring all at once.

I remember when Beyoncé announced her pregnancy. I was watching the MTV Awards with my then-girlfriend—who later became my wife, and even later, my ex-wife—and I joked that when Blue Ivy turned eighteen, I’d be forty-five. It felt like a lifetime away. And yet, somehow, here we are.

Now, the songs I used to pregame to before hitting the club are playing on Magic 102.1, the “old school” station. Absolute malarkey. I feel both too young and too old for everything, all the time.

The perimenopause isn’t helping.

I’m still young enough to identify a hit song within the first few seconds, but old enough to know I don’t want to hear that noise. I’ve gone from blasting the radio on my commute to preferring podcasts, classical music, or, more often than not—silence.

Sometimes, I feel like I’ve lived too much life for my age. Other times, I feel like I haven’t lived nearly enough. Watching the cycle of death and aging play out across my timeline has made me deeply reflective. I think about what I want my life to look like, what success really means, and what regrets might find me on my deathbed.

People love to say, “Live each day like it’s your last.”
But that’s not how life works. You can’t live every day as if you’re about to die—you’d never get the laundry done. Life, real life, happens in the in-between.

Still, I think about death more often now. About how much time might be left on my clock. About whether I’m wasting days or using them well.

And when I think about what I still want, it’s surprisingly simple:
I want to buy a Sprinter van or convert one myself and hit the road for a while.
I want to write and publish a book.
I want to see all fifty states.
I want to retire early, comfortably, and live a slow, intentional life.
I want to live to be at least a hundred—if my health will let me.

That’s it.

I’ve been quieter, more withdrawn, more reflective. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re standing at the threshold of forty and perimenopause.

But as forty approaches, I can feel a new kind of anxiety humming under my skin. I recently read a novel where the main character was my age, wrestling with the same shifts I’ve been feeling—the changing desires, the craving for authenticity, the internal rewiring that sneaks up in your late thirties. It feels like my life is ending and beginning at the same time.

Relearning myself—what youth, vitality, and purpose mean inside this new body, with these new thoughts and new needs—has been rocky, to say the least.

Even the country feels like it’s aging, shedding its old skin and growing brittle before whatever comes next. The rich have gotten more brazen, the poor more desperate, and the middle feels like it’s evaporating. It’s as if the nation itself is having a midlife crisis—one last gasp before a rebirth.

Was this what it felt like for the generations before us? Did they feel like a change for the better was right around the corner, only to realize things were actually getting worse? Did they sit the way I sit now, watching the state of the world and thinking, surely it can’t get any worse than this?

Is this hope I feel just misplaced optimism? And if it is, is that delusion passed down too, just another generational inheritance?

Lately, I’ve been noticing the connections between everything. Life, death, growth, decay. It’s wild how it all loops back around. Watching my idols’ kids grow up, seeing where they started and who they’re becoming, it’s like watching time fold in on itself.

With any luck, they’ll find themselves sitting where I am someday, looking out at the world and realizing that everything changes. People age. Things die. Life keeps moving whether we’re ready or not.

And maybe that’s what youth and vitality really are — not something you lose, but something that shifts. Something that changes shape as you do.

Maybe being “young” isn’t about how your body feels, but about still being curious enough to notice the beauty in it all, even when it hurts.