Influencers made me excited for my 30s

Influencers can inspire optimism, not dread, about aging.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

Please send me all your favorite creators in their late 30s. —Kate

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I prefer my therapists, my bosses, and the influencers I follow to be older than me. When I first started following creators in my early teens, they were all in high school, and I watched from a few years behind as they graduated, went to college, started jobs, got married, and, now, are moving into houses and having children. I want influencers to inspire me, and at 30, I am not aspiring to the life of a 24-year-old.

I’ve been thinking about this because my boyfriend and I are both in this new decade and have started to do a number of very 30-year-old things, like becoming domestic partners, looking into opening a joint credit card, and talking about our future house. Things like Friday nights in and picking out tile sound genuinely exciting to me. But for my boyfriend, these small boring tasks of adulthood serve as painful confirmation that we’re not kids anymore. They instead feel like, to put it dramatically, the first dominoes to fall in a sprint towards death that gets exponentially faster with every passing milestone.