I’m a 28-year-old man, which due to the sequential nature of numbers in age-measurement, means I’m not very far away from being 30. The big three-oh has hovered ominously over my entire 20’s like a thick, black rain cloud of mundanity and although I have already resigned to sprouting grey hairs, developing wrinkles and finding it increasingly dangerous and stressful to climb out of most baths, I still fear passing into a fourth age and all of the stigmas that might come attached to it.

One that I have considered recently is the depreciation of my opinions among the young. Unless I attain the status of a public intellectual or become the figurehead for some big technological advancement – like an app that begs passers-by to validate your existence or something – then it is likely that soon my feelings and beliefs on any given subject will be seen to be worthless by the under-30s.

I have already had a taste of what this might be like – last Sunday I was stopped in the street to answer a few survey questions on the state of parking in Brighton city centre. I offered up a selection of responses that were so normal and acceptable to me that I can’t even remember what they were for the purposes of this anecdote. At some point the young, tattooed girl who was conducting the survey broke into hysterics, shook her head, muttered ‘fucking newb’ and sped off on a miniature skateboard blasting dubstep from her smartphone.

The increasingly worthlessness of my ‘square’ opinions does bring with it some form of respite however, as it will soon be just as socially acceptable for me to not have an opinion as it is to have a worthless one. This last week I have felt conversationally neutered among my peers when it has come to debating about whether a royal baby was a thing to be celebrated, completely ignored, roundly jeered-at or even sautéed.

I have tried, with little success, to form an opinion about the matter, but I have found myself on the fence at every turn – albeit on the fence hurling mud at both sides, who have simultaneously failed to offer up compelling arguments to agree with anything. Instead, I have found myself having a host of different feelings on supervening positions rather than the actual points of the debate: I am happy that people are unhappy about people’s happiness, ambivalent about people broadcasting their ambivalence on social networking sites, and pissed off that there’s even a debate to be had in the first place.

Good, then, that in less than two years my opinions will matter little anyway. I am slowly coming around to accept that the world I live in will soon be run by people that don’t know who Zig and Zag are or what Pogs were; people that have only enjoyed 90s pop music ironically; people that txtd their m8s b4 learning how 2 write with a pencil. It won’t matter what I think about royal babies or parking in Brighton city centre, because every utterance that comes out between my wrinkled, old lips will be deemed ‘biff’ (or whatever the kids are saying instead of ‘biff’ these days.) Here’s to being irrelevant!