The 20s Paradox — A Comprehensive Guide for Lost GenZs
Whether you are purposefully delulu, a high-achiever, or just lost: We all struggle. Here is collective evidence of what you should do in your 20s…
I will admit that I am a GenZ in my twenties and just like most of us, I am asking myself the question: What now? My teens are long gone, I always feel much older than I am and the nearing three in the first position of my age is projecting horrible futures onto my horizon.
House. Husband. Kids. That was always what you were supposed to have until you’re thirty and I think it is laughable that though our society has come so far, these ideals are imprinted in every one of us.
Even when I watched an Interview of Emma Watson — who I would think has achieved a great deal before the age of 30 — with the British Vogue, she described that at 29 she suddenly felt extremely pressured.
And since I am a GenZ and she is a Millenial, everything has to be quicker, better, and in general MORE in my lifetime. Especially with the luring climate crisis and digitalization distress around the corner, I’d better hurry.
But hurry in doing what? When I watched videos of role models who provide a roadmap of what to do in your 20s, I found myself marveling over how many suggested to just “enjoy”. Considering the expectation for entering your 30s this seems like the most perverse way to go.
This might be my most comprehensive article yet, so I am excited for us to dive into this rabbit hole together, buckle up!
Delulu is the Solulu
So I turned to more accredited resources: TedTalks about your twenties and GenZ. Turns out, there is not a lot out there, but I will summarize the two that I did find, which were both up-to-date and related to my lived experience.
The first one was by Danielle Reyes in the Philippines, who described her 20s this way:
(My twenties) was a wonderful period of a lot of confusion and a lot of questions and a lot of identity crisis. A lot of adopting and trying to break through my own limiting beliefs. — Justine Danielle Reyes
I felt very reassured hearing this. Especially since she proceeded to explain that you don’t have to figure out anything by thirty. No, you’re officially grown up by 40, because that is when you are finally exiting your “question era”. “Era” is such a beautiful piece of GenZ lingo.
Her main critique was that of a very common GenZ phrase: Delulu is the Solulu. She described it from a psychologist’s point of view and how it is a symptom of a pathology in this field.
Controversially, we are being born in a day and age where the default is not success — like for the millennials — but survival. This holds true in the face of digitalization and climate change, which traps us in a big, deadly vortex. She described GenZ as having a…
Collective hunger for practicality and solutions. “Delusional” is a definition of detaching from reality, because we need to. — Justine Danielle Reyes
This all seems very relatable, but also like a cry for help. A help that we will never get because the older generations have no way to recognize our struggle. This is evident in how social media often perceives GenZ as detached and dramatic. Basically, we are a meme to many.
High Achievers
When looking at GenZ's working attitudes, we encounter a very “non-delulu” image. We are being described as diligent workers, high achievers, and people who strive for stability. Maybe because are often also described as highly pessimistic, yikes.
Yet the advice we get for our 20s, our current decade, is: “You’ve got time. You’ll figure it out.” And this might have been fine for Millenials, but we have 10 years less than them to get our sh**t together, so how about we start now?
Why don’t we train our brains at the age of 20, setting us up for a better life down the line? GenZs tend to be well educated on the fact that earlier is usually better. A girl called Livi Redden held a TedTalk on GenZ and our 20s, stating that 85% of the most life-defining moments happen before the age of 35. Not the best, but the most pivotal.
She described her experience in her 20s as:
A feeling of constantly being at war with your mind. — Livi Redden
Again, relatable. And tragically similar to the last speaker. However, she takes a different approach to solving the issue. She argues that self-alignment along the trajectory of your life goals is important in your twenties.
Her biggest argument is “The sooner you grow, the better”. While this might add some weight to our shoulders, maybe it doesn’t feel that hard considering the 100 other kg that are already on there?
She suggests taking stock of your current life, setting goals, unlearning unhealthy patterns, and doing what needs to be done to move the needle. Though I love her passion, drive, and the actionability of her advice, I can’t ignore the sour aftertaste of hustle culture and young burn-out that this leaves on my tongue…
The Crossroad of “Adulting” and “Learning”
Taking into consideration both points of view, I was left with a split personality. Being “de-lulu” and “aligning yourself on your life’s trajectories” are two very different things after all. It sounds to me like we GenZs expect ourselves to know everything. If we don’t actually know, we pretend in true “fake it till you make it” fashion. This is because strong opinions make strong people and we HAVE TO be strong for what lies ahead.
My inner philosopher disagrees, however. Didn’t Socrates tell us that “knowing what you don’t know” is the highest form of wisdom? Isn’t it cleverer to admit your own unknowing and be a learner? And considering that we are still very young and have so much potential we cannot anticipate, maybe we should admit that we don’t know and lean back a little.
The thing is that we have to make our voices heard, on the streets, in businesses, or elsewhere because we are the ones who will experience the crisis we are steering towards. We need to urge the older generations to act.
But if we admit that we are young and unknowing, are people going to look down on us? Are people even going to listen to our issues?
Maybe life is about storytelling, but life is also about opinions. Opinions are the cornerstones of a strong personality, which leads to success. Fragile people don’t make it in this world, even though it might be cleverer to keep things to yourself sometimes and act later.
While we are definitely learners, I think it is an inner GenZ strength to speak up and voice our opinions. All of this while making sure that we allow for our viewpoints to be malleable enough for discussion and new information.
I think Emma Watson said it best in her UN speech for HeForShe:
If not me, who? And if not now, when? — Emma Watson, UN Speech, He for She
Common views on our 20s
At this point, I decided to delve into what social media could teach me about my 20s. After all, these people called “influencers” are making money off influencing people right, so why not make them a little richer?
All jokes aside, I spent a good 4 hours just watching videos and taking notes in order to write this bit of this article. And we are not tallying in the writing and editing. I personally think that that is enough of my lifetime dedicated to this question to give you a comprehensive overview.
Three of my sources were doing retrospective advice videos from their 30s, one was a GenZ doing a book review of “The Defining Decade” (by psychologist Meg Jay) and another was in her 20s, reflecting on her learnings thus far. You can find each video linked to their name in the following citation.
One commonality in their advice, which was highly influenced by the generation they came from, was their description of their 20s. All three 30-somethings agreed on negative descriptions like:
I was a mess, which I should’ve been. — JennIm
I recently turned 30, which means my 20s is over, and damn, what a relief. — Struthless
Our 20s are amazing because we are young, we’re exploring the world, we are learning about ourselves and at the same time it is tumultuous, it is hard and it is so freaking lonely. — Rowena Tsai
While the GenZs, who were still in that phase of life, used somewhat more confused, less negative descriptions of this decade:
This is a weird age for two reasons: everyone tells you it is the time of your life. (..) And yet you are hyperaware that every choice you make (…) matters. — Unjaded Jade
My 20s have been a period of huge change and discovery, to the point that I would hardly recognize the girl I was two, three, or god forbid, five years ago. — Elizabeth Filips
At the point of finishing video nr. 5, I decided that I will verbally slap the next person in the face who tells me they wanted to be 20 again. Shut up, you f***ing liar.
Funnily enough, two people mentioned specifically that they thought their 20s were supposed to be filled with alcohol and drugs. Yet they both expressed grief over overdoing it and putting too much emphasis on partying. JennIm said:
Sobriety gave me all that glamour alcohol promised. — JennIm
So I guess that is at least one definite takeaway from this discussion. Those who had not engaged in so much partying seemed to not regret it. In summary, FOMO really is only a fear of the present and will (most likely) not affect you in the future. And alcohol or drugs are not the answer.
Gathering the evidence
I will now provide a “The Master List” of all the advice I gathered, so you can see that there is A LOT out there. And maybe most of it, if not all, is to be taken with a grain of salt, the size of melon. Seriously, after compiling this, it seemed like “the decade of all or nothing” to me.
Initially, I was just going to post a short list of condensed bullet points, but turns out, even across 7 different people’s lengthy counseling sessions for the lost 20-something soul, there was very little common ground.
So I did what every GenZ does in a moment of desperation: I asked ChatGPT. I gave it the entire list of bullet points and advice I had accumulated and asked it to divide them into areas that shared commonalities. Here is what it initially spit back to me:
This list contains 47 pieces of advice. The most common themes center around personal growth and self-discovery (27), followed by social connections (4), career development (5), and sobriety (2).
Though this answer was certainly interesting, it taught me two things:
- Your 20s seem to predominantly be centered around self-growth and self-discovery. This is interesting considering that by 30 we are expected to have a partner, career, home, and kids, all of which are not necessarily tied to self-awareness.
- I will be the first to say that I suck at math, but ChatGPT is worse than a primary-school kid. I mean, since when does 27+4+5+2 equal 47?!
Consequently, I switched my strategy and asked it to sort all advice directly into three proposed categories: “Love &Social Connection”, “Personal Growth & Development” and “Career &Professional Life”. The result of this are displayed in the image below:
As you can see, most of the results fell into the “personal growth & development” section. This is also the reason, I had to split it into two columns because there was too much advice. What this tells me is, that our 20s are actually a high time of self-centered development, in contrast to the common belief that it is the time we have to fix our careers and relationships for the long term.
I also asked ChatGPT to separate all the advice into two categories: Ones who had used negative adjectives to give advice and ones who had used positive wording to provide insights.
Turns out that 15 pieces of advice were written using negative wording, while 21 contained positive wording. The rest was unidentifiable. Seems like even though everyone talks so negatively about their 20s, maybe there is something likable about this decade? And even if our 20s are so hard, at least this seems to prove that there are at least more do’s than don’ts.
The holy grail of 20s advice
After leading you down a very extensive rabbit hole of advice for your 20s, I hope you find your head less clouded than mine was. And even if you are puffing steam from your ears, here are the simple takeaways I have from all of the information above:
Firstly, it has become very clear to me that there is a vast amount of advice out there and maybe there is no need to apply all of it to my life. Maybe it is fine to just take what resonates and leave the rest.
Secondly, there is an obvious dissonance between the very capitalist-focused “ideal path in life” — where you hit x-many milestones by 30 — and what most people recommend you to do in your 20s. It seems like Millenials were already recognizing that these values are a thing of the past, but were still somewhat drawn to it.
Now, for GenZ, it should be clear that the 30-deadline at its subsequent requirements are to be buried in history. With our love for diversity and our lived global community, such stiff values cannot fit our lived experience any more or accommodate our dreams.
Another clear learning I draw from this is that change really is the only constant. And that is good because change means growth. In your 20s especially, this should be growth in the shape of personal development rather than career, monetary, or relationship building.
The words that most people used to give advice were “learning”, “choices” and “grow”, as is evident from the word cloud above. This is why, yes, you should try and do everything you can now, but don’t fix yourself on a path already. Stay open for opportunities and unexpected learnings. This quote specifically resonates with me related to this:
“If you are not completely embarrassed by the person you were 12 months ago, then you haven’t grown enough.” — Alain de Botton
Finally, I find that the entirety of the advice given does not only apply to your 20s. Sometimes we center so much around our own issues, that we forget to take in the grander picture. All of the people I have referenced were quite young, which means that their lived “adult experience” mainly consisted of their 20s.
Who knows, maybe if we asked 80-year-olds about their 20s they would say it was very insignificant. Even the psychologist who accumulated her patient's reflections on their 20s in a book, only interviewed people in their 30s and 40s. I think we should take the pressure off this decade, because really, all age ever is, is a number.
Thank you for reading, I believe GenZs can rest assured now and all other generations have maybe received a little food for thought. I hope you had a nice coffee with this article and I send a hug from my mug to yours.
Sincerely, Hug in a Mug :)
