"Jaded."

The other week I caught up with a college friend and someone else who lives in the same town, a guy who I know from my Ph.D. program, and it turns out that they went to high school together, or rather were a year apart in high school and vaguely knew about each other from that period in their lives.

Anyhow, the guy from my Ph.D. program was interested to know the biggest different between me then and me now, and my college friend said that pretty much a lot was the same with me, only now I was a bit more "jaded" about the world, where I was still enthusiastic to go out and engage things and learn about random stuff, but I was just "jaded" now, somehow.

I think, for example, when he was quizzing me about city politics and whether they were really changing, I pointed out how it seemed to me that wealth inequality and social tension would continue to increase for the foreseeable future, given the magnitude of the problems and the lack of any real major solutions on the table, not to mention how the stuff being sold as the most progressive thing possible like the push to raise the minimum wage a buck or two was actually just barely making things tolerable, in terms of being able to make ends meet for like 90% of the population.

Anyhow, later that night I mentioned that to a bartender I know who works downtown, that a guy who knew me for a long time had observed that I was now "jaded," and he was like, "Buddy, they call that 'life.'"