An intergenerational friendship forged in an online writing class has prompted one woman to rethink her relationship with ageing, comparison and mentorship, in an essay published by Business Insider. Andrea Javor, who describes herself as a Chicago-based marketing executive and memoirist, writes about meeting someone 21 years her junior and how the connection shifted her perspective in ways she had not anticipated.
The intergenerational friendship writing class that started it all
Javor explains that the friendship grew out of a weekly online writing course in which participants shared highly personal material on video calls with dozens of strangers. The format, she writes, demanded a level of vulnerability that compressed the usual timescales of friendship. She and her younger friend eventually broke away into a smaller writing group together, navigating the distance between New York and Chicago as they went.
The intimacy of the format matters here. Sharing unfinished, emotionally raw work in front of others creates a different kind of trust from the kind built at a dinner table or in a workplace corridor. Javor credits that vulnerability as the reason age became, in her words, “not actually important” to the dynamic between them.
Comparison, the Instagram meme, and a shift in how she saw herself
For a period, Javor found herself caught in an unflattering loop of comparison. She writes about envying her friend’s skin, her friend’s curls, and what she perceived as her friend’s greater discipline at the same age. The friend, she notes, worked hard to earn multiple offers to graduate school and approached decisions about her life with a thoughtfulness Javor felt she had lacked at that age.
The pivot came, as pivots sometimes do, from an unexpected source. Someone sent Javor an Instagram meme that read: “The goal isn’t to look 25 in your 40s, it’s to make 25-year-olds excited to be 40.” She describes the line landing immediately, reframing her role in the friendship from envious observer to something more useful. From that point, she writes, she thought less about how either of them looked and more about how to be a role model capable of showing her younger friend what the decades ahead might hold.
It is a small but telling detail that the reframe came not from therapy or a self-help book but from a piece of ephemeral social content, which says something about how people absorb these shifts. What mattered was the effect: Javor began treating her age as, in her own phrase, “a badge I’d well earned” rather than a liability to manage.
Mentorship in an intergenerational friendship runs both ways
The essay is at its most persuasive when Javor describes the reciprocity. She brought her boyfriend along when she visited her friend, who commented on how healthy the relationship appeared. She tried to be, as she puts it, “a calming voice from the future” whenever her friend fretted over graduate school applications or the uncertainty of her mid-twenties. In return, her friend’s willingness to speak openly about subjects including sexual compliance and family estrangement pushed Javor to examine and articulate her own views on those topics.
The quality Javor returns to most often is what she calls her friend’s “unfiltered authenticity.” Where Javor had accumulated what she describes as “protective layers of cynicism” from corporate life and romantic setbacks, her friend had not yet built those defences. The effect was a standing challenge to the rigidity that can settle over middle age: when Javor caught herself thinking “this is just how the world works,” her friend’s perspective prompted her to ask whether it had to be.
Javor’s memoir work is ongoing. Details of her writing and essays are available at andreajavor.com, where the intergenerational friendship writing class that started this particular thread of self-examination continues to inform what she puts on the page.