It took me a while to notice, but I don’t know who most famous people are anymore.

Some random internet headline announces that someone I’d never heard of has done something important, shocking, brave, offensive, hell, all four at once, and that it should matter. To me. The article refers to this person by their last name only. A little fucking presumptuous, I must say. Yeah, I guess we’re all just supposed to know who they are.

I did not.

For a while, I’d look them up. I wasn’t going to become another middle-aged asshole who stopped paying attention during the Clinton administration and then spent the rest of his life complaining about how everything had gone to shit. I was going to remain engaged. Current. Relevant.

But there were too many of them.

So, yeah, eventually I stopped looking them up. And wouldn’t you know, nothing happened. Nobody came to the house. My abilities as a mostly functioning member of society remained intact. I kept buying groceries and paying bills. I was still permitted to operate a motor vehicle. As it turns out, you can live a surprisingly normal life without knowing who the hell everyone is.

This extends well beyond famous people. There is music everyone seems to know that I’ve never heard. Television shows I’m supposed to be watching. Words whose meanings have changed without anyone bothering to notify me. Entire controversies begin, consume the internet, and end before I realize anyone was angry. By the time I figure out what everyone is pissed off about, they’ve found something else to be pissed off about.

Somewhere between Saturday Morning Cartoons and 9/11, the culture had put a few empty seats between us.

And yes, I know how all this works. Culture changes because it can’t help itself. Every generation is blamed for the world’s problems by the next. When we’re young, it’s our job to make things that belong solely to us, to use words our parents don’t understand, to wear things that anyone over 40 would deem absurd, and generally behave as though we’re the ones who invented sex, drugs, and music.

Knowing all this doesn’t stop me from occasionally thinking your generation’s music sucks.

Maybe that’s the true discomfort of middle age. You start to see yourself turning into the person you used to roll your eyes at. You hear yourself saying things that sound suspiciously like something your parents would have said. And you discover that the things you once dismissed as evidence that old people were hopelessly out of touch were actually just evidence that they were getting old.

Shit. Just shit.

For most of my life, I was happy to be a part of the audience. The key demographic. Movies were marketed to me. Advertisers wanted to know what people like me thought. Employers wanted to pay me. The larger culture appeared interested in keeping me entertained, employed, spending and consuming, and generally dissatisfied with whatever things I already owned.

It was so easy to mistake all that attention for importance. When you’re standing near the center of something, it doesn’t occur to you that the center moves. You assume you’re standing still because you’re in the right spot. The center is you. Then one day you look around and notice the crowd has moved.

I’m 52, far from ancient. I haven’t started yelling at the clouds and cursing neighborhood kids for playing in front of my house. I can still operate pretty much every electronic device without help from someone half my age. I don’t begin my sentences with phrases like your generation or back in my day. So far, I’ve even resisted the urge to tell some random Gen Zer how much my first house cost back in 2000.

But I can feel it. That slow, nearly motionless drift toward the edge of the photograph, and I’ve got feelings about it. They’re…complicated.

Some of it’s wonderful. Keeping up is exhausting, especially when you finally admit that you no longer give a shit. Not that you ever really did. Bonus: I don’t need to understand every reference. I don’t need to know who everyone is fucking, feuding with, canceling, following, or unfollowing. I don’t need an opinion about whatever millions of strangers have agreed to be furious about today. More and more, I’m happy to let the world go on having conversations that don’t include me.

And yet there’s just something so damn insulting about discovering that it can. Maybe that’s the part about the transformation into irrelevance that nobody tells you about. It’s not just the inevitability of the world losing interest in you; it’s finding out how much of your identity was built around the assumption that it should be in the first place.

I don’t want the world’s attention anymore. I honestly don’t think that I ever did. But apparently I still want it to notice that I don’t.