What Should Every 20-Something Do Before Settling Down?
In my quest to live my best 20s in my 50s, I have realized it’s maybe not so easy to know exactly what I missed out on…I’ve got this general image of actin’ a fool and staying out late, but I needed concrete ideas. Here’s where social media shines: I crowdsourced other people’s thoughts on what every 20-year-old should do before embarking on a marital commitment. It was remarkable how much commonality the responses shared! I have smart friends — I think most of them lived their 20s when they were actually in their 20s.
One takeaway was that very basic human tasks can help a person learn about life and about who they are. Paying bills doesn’t seem like a lesson in personal growth, but somehow that act — and creating a life where you’re making decisions to be able to pay those bills — seems to advance someone’s development beyond the formless clump of knowledge and ego that is a 22-year-old fresh college graduate.
Somehow the 20-year-old self and the who-am-I-now-that-my-kids-aren’t-at-home self seem related — like they would wave to each other across a crowded room and maybe run over excitedly to hug each other and catch up after all those years. The former helps prepare the latter for that void left after the primary, day-to-day parenting obligations are gone. As a result, my who-am-I-now-that-my-kids-aren’t-at-home (and I’m single) self is sort of awkwardly looking around the crowded room for a familiar face, and she’s striking out.
In your life, how did your grown-up self come to understand your grown-up self? The process probably takes place several times throughout our lives. We get to know our rebellious teenage selves, our exploring collegiate selves, our expanding but inexperienced 20-year-old selves (pretty much skipped this one), our sleep-deprived parent-of-young-children-selves, our novice professional selves, our expert professional selves, etc. You get the idea — there are stages of self-knowledge that we attain through living.
Here are some of the crowdsourced suggestions of basic tasks of 20-year-old human-ing that I skipped completely:
- Sleeping in a house alone. Seriously — I was nervous doing this until maybe 10 years into our marriage.
- Choosing an apartment or house that I wanted to live in and deciding whether I could afford it.
- Planning the logistics of moving into that house.
- Developing a budget for the household and making daily decisions to live within that budget.
- Going out to clubs/bars and dancing with (or without) friends!
- Dating casually — not because I was looking for a great future father or a current co-parent. Dating for fun.
- Buying a car on my own.
- Living completely independently for at least one year.
- Taking myself on dates and adventures; demonstrating that I can be fine and fulfilled whether I am single or partnered. As one friend put it: “learn that you’re enough 100% on your own so that the company/love of others is a beautiful sidecar to your journey vs. your life support.”
- Handling some sort of house-repair disaster on my own.
- Living life with wide curious eyes.
- Going to therapy to unpack childhood and family traumas.
- Developing my own goals, dreams, and aspirations that do not involve another person.
- While dating, learning to set boundaries in that relationship.
- Learning to be my own advocate in life.
- Going to concerts.
- Failing at something at least once a month.
- Learning a new instrument or new form of art.
- Knowing how to live without someone else coming to my rescue.
- Changing a flat tire.
- Finding exciting possibilities that scare me and feeling around a little for how to face up to them and move forward — and then finding the next possibility that scares me.
- Choosing what I want. Me. No one else. What a crazy idea.
In my quest to reintroduce myself to my core, I hope to undertake all of these tasks and more. I plan to explore these basic self-discovery tasks and write about them — what I learned, what I liked, how I made a fool of myself, how I got to know myself better, and all of those things.
I would love to know what other thoughts people have. If I want to live my best 20s, what should be on the list?