One Day, Baby, We’ll Be Old

One day, baby, we’ll be old, she breathes into the microphone, oh baby, we’ll be old and think of all the stories we could have told. Julia Engelmann was a psychology student when she performed this at the 5th Bielefeld University Poetry Slam, and the video spread the way things spread when they hit something people can’t admit they needed to hear.

The argument isn’t original—live your life, stop deferring everything, the clock is moving whether you feel it or not—but Engelmann doesn’t argue. She just describes. Going out more. Getting fit. Calling people back. She does it with a kind of warm, patient precision that refuses to let you disagree, because she’s not accusing you, she’s only naming what she sees. The effect is that you feel caught, specifically and personally caught, in a way that the same sentiment on a motivational poster never manages.

I’ve watched enough of these spoken word things to know when I’m being worked, and I still couldn’t get my guard up in time. The question at the end isn’t whether she’s right—she is—but whether knowing that changes anything. You already know the answer to that one too.