If 50 is the new 30, then 30 is the new 13. That’s the only conclusion I can come to after seeing the first part of 30 and never again… unhappy Thursday evening (PowNed). Life is certainly not easy for the thirty-somethings who are portrayed, in fact, life is very disappointing. Pauline from Amsterdam used to be a biology teacher, but on a ten-day trip to Thailand she came to the “realisation” that she did not want to go back to life in front of a class with thirty teenagers. I understand, but I don’t think she’s much happier now that she’s a performer and a training actor. She’s already 34, she says, and she doesn’t like her life that much. She even wonders if it will “ever be fun.”
Bibi (32) from Eelde was so fanatically busy with becoming happy that she had an epileptic attack. She did reading sessions, meditated, visited a horse coach, did breathing courses and became a coach herself. The combination of intensive breathing and kickboxing quite literally caused her to blow the fuses. She has now stepped off the “high-speed train of self-development” and feels “a victim of the happiness industry.”
And so, ripe and green mixed together, a few more desperate thirties pass by. Mara who graduated and found a job, but soon got “a deep burnout”. She has stopped working and is now traveling to a rainbow gathering in Wales to live for a month with like-minded people according to the laws of nature. She receives a basic income from her parents. “My mother always says: we can give money to charity, and our charity is Mara.”
We are also in Nijmegen, with Joris for a truffle ceremony. Performer Pauline from Amsterdam would also participate, but she calls from “because it doesn’t feel right”.
A microdosing mom
I understand that the program makers look for the extremes and end up with people for whom the existential misery and search for happiness has become an end in itself. But are they really an enlargement of what lives among people in their thirties? Not if you watch the series Thirties, (BNNVARA). Every working day on television, Thursday was episode 12 of 24. In this fictional group of friends, everyone has a job or is looking for a new one. Everyone is in a relationship, two couples have even divorced. There is co-parenting, there are children’s wishes. Some have a smoking adolescent at home, the other has to care for a mother who suffers from dementia. These thirtysomethings don’t even have time to do self-development.
Does the lust for happiness stop as soon as children arrive? Would you, judging by Thirties , almost start thinking. Yet there are also parents among the fortune seekers. A mother of two daughters 30 and never again… unhappy has a “shortcut” found to be a more pleasant version of themselves. She takes 1.2 grams of truffle once every four days to make it easier to get through the day flow. This microdosing mom achieves the same effect with a small amount of psychedelics as with “hours of yoga and meditation”. More patience, less stress, the household runs smoothly. She has found her “own mix of tools” to find happiness and persevere in motherhood. Then we briefly see happiness professor Ruut Veenhoven in the picture to scientifically promise that when the children have left home, the happiness curve of parents rises again.
There will be four more episodes of the never-more-thirties series. No more going to the doctor, no more working for a boss, no more possessions and no more ugly. I wonder what will be left to suffer from then. By Thirties, the fiction series, will never have an episode after this season. All the protagonists are just about forty. Time for other problems, if you’re lucky.