The other day, I was sitting in a shaded patio of a Tex-Mex restaurant on the east side of Austin, watching a multifarious parade of life go by, shortly after having visited the BEWM artist collective and coffee dealer. It had been a day of quirky artists, community, active street life, and multi-ethnic experiences, and there was more going on in the next day or two than I could have possibly kept up with. While we were happily chatting, my wife mentioned having recently seen (on Reddit of course) yet another person griping about how there was nothing to do in Austin anymore, and lamenting the loss of the 33 Degrees record store.
Quickly, before she could answer, someone else responded "it's called End of An Ear now, it's still open". Now, one might naively have thought the original poster would have answered with thanks, even enthusiasm, to discover that their favorite record store had reincarnated (new address, new name, but same principal owner and a very similar vibe). In fact, there was no response at all, and if there had been it would have likely been a grumpy one.
That is when the title of this blog post came to me.
Austin is a larger city than it once was, so if your lament is that Austin is more expensive, you are likely correct. However, more people tends most often to result in _more_ options for things to do, not fewer, and that is my experience. There is more to do in Austin now than there was before, not less, and a lot of it is still the offbeat, funky, artistic, non-commercial sort that existed several decades ago, just more of it. So, why do so many people who experienced Austin in some previous decade, insist that it was cooler then?
Well, we all know the answer. While Austin has, no doubt, changed (because everywhere changes, all the time, either growing or rotting away but never staying the same), the change in Austin is not what they lament. What they lament is that Austin "back in the day" seemed full of possibilities, a place where anything could happen, and now it doesn't. Why not? Because they are no longer young adults. The change in Austin, is not what they are really lamenting, it's the change in themselves. They may still have possibilities before them, but they are very much limited by the facts of their own history. Whether their own possibilities were ever "limitless" or not, they seemed to be then, and now they are very much aware that we all have limits, and only so much life before us.
At some point, you have decided what you're going to do with your life, even if you put off that decision, because _not_ deciding eventually forecloses a lot of the possibilities. Your life is, at some point, no longer a blank canvas. That doesn't mean you don't have possibilities before you, but it does mean you very much know them to be limited, not limitless.
This doesn't mean that it's worth your time to try to argue with such people, which would in any case be as rude and unproductive as the title of this blog post. But just because it's not polite to say (or comfortable to think), doesn't mean it isn't true.