on turning 23

math, music, randomness, and the Jordan year

Growing up, I didn’t bother thinking about any ages after 22. 10 is double digits, 13 is becoming a teenager, 16 is driving and Sound of Music, 17 is Dancing Queen, 18 is legal adulthood. 20 is 20. 21 is drinking.¹ 22 was my golden birthday (and happened to also be the day I graduated college) so it felt like the last birthday I really needed. After 22 there were only three milestones left: being old enough to rent a car, being eligible to become President of the United States, and being able to retire.² 

I conceptualized age as a discrete variable until 22 and continuous one afterwards. 23 is the first age I never thought I needed to be. Turning 23 is the initiation into real adulthood, where you turn ages like 33 or 41 or 74 and it kind of just feels like another ordinary day.  

I don’t even like the number 23. It’s a red digit and then a green one—a very square, uninspired combination. I don’t perceive the number 23 as being special or beautiful, it’s just a default number that had to fill the space between the warm, delightful symmetry of 22 and the guts-and-glory, swords-and-chariot-wheels, red and gold of 24. 

And it seems like no one else is excited about turning 23 either. 

When I turned 22, everyone called it my Taylor Swift birthday, surrounded me in choruses of “I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling twenty-two.” That year that would be “miserable and magical,” a year to have “breakfast at midnight,” to “fall in love with strangers,” to believe that “everything will be alright if/ we just keep dancing like we’re twenty-two.” 

No one has sung me any songs about turning 23. Probably because the lyrics that play in my head are blink-182 saying “Nobody likes you when you're 23.” Or Coolio’s haunting question: “I'm 23 now, but will I live to see 24?/The way things is goin', I don't know.” In a similar vein, Chayce Backham sings “Now I'm 23 and there ain't nobody who can drink like me/Soon I'll be 24 and the Lord knows that I can't drink no more.”

My twenty-third year will be very different from the years that each of these singers describe, but the similarities across these songs makes me think that there must be some shared experience of being 23 that no one talks about. 

The songs about being 23 are mournful. They’re songs about moments of transitions. 23 is the age where we realize we aren’t young anymore, and for the first time we’re old enough to be nostalgic for the lives we used to live. Actually, I think that at 23 we are still young, but it’s not fun anymore. We’re haunted by our mistakes and regrets and wondering how long we can keep living like this.³ We’re not dancing at midnight, we're just mortal and uncertain. At 23 you have a broken heart and a disappointed momma. (Maybe you get over it by 24 if you’re one of the people who make it that far?⁴)

Perhaps more objectively, we can look to math, where 23 isn’t haunting, it's just… random. We have 23 chromosomes and the earth’s axis is tilted at 23 degrees. It’s the atomic number of Vanadium. It’s a “sexy prime,” which is a bit ironic since I actually think it’s an unattractive number.

Apparently, once 23 people walk into a room, the probability of two of those people sharing a birthday are higher than 50%. So in my attempts to discover what might make a 23rd birthday special, I found out that 23 is actually the number associated with birthdays and not being unique. 

Once you start researching, there’s seemingly infinite small significances behind the number 23. Caesar was stabbed 23 times. The 23rd Psalm (“the LORD is my shepherd”) is perhaps the most famous. There’s actually a theory, the “23 enigma,” that the number 23 has a special meaning. It just keeps showing up everywhere. 

But is there anything significant about the number 23? Probably not. If you look for any number, you’ll start to see it everywhere. It’s just the Frequency Illusion.⁵ I think every number—even random ones like 23—have meaning. 

So no year of our life is truly “random” either. No year is ever just a default year, existing only to get us from one age to another. Every year, every month, every week and every day does matter because if we’re only measuring the milestones then we’re not counting the quiet content of our lives. Our lives might be anchored on special occasions but they’re shaped by all the moments that seem forgettable.

So 23 matters. 31 matters. 47 and 56 and even 59 matter. 67 matters. Thursdays matter, 4pm matters, the month of August matters. Life itself, in all its odd little folds and wrinkles, matters. 

When I first started writing this piece, I could only find neutral or negative associations with the number 23. But a few hours ago, a friend gave me a birthday card with a drawing of a Michael Jordan jersey. I’d forgotten that 23 is the Jordan year. 23 isn’t just a good year, it's the greatest year. It’s a year to be unbelievably amazing.

Nothing is truly random. But everything can be wonderful.

1. This is the most well-known milestone, but in reality the 21 year old’s privilege that's actually been relevant to my life is finally being old enough to be the “supervising adult” responsible for minors at the mall in my hometown. 

2.  I would like to acknowledge my colleague’s point that actually turning 30, 40, 50, etc. are all milestone birthdays as well

3.  I would like to clarify that I personally don’t feel like this at all (which is kind of a great thing to be able to say?) but I’m using the first person because this seems to be the predominant cultural narrative surrounding 23 year olds

4.  The probability of dying within a year of turning 23 is 0.001714 for men and 0.000666 for women, so most of us will. (from: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html#fn1)

5.  AKA the “I just bought a new car and now literally every single person on the road is driving the same one” illusion