What does aging mean when you are in your twenties? Becoming more of an adult or less of a teenager?
Thousand Reflections by Sandbox
Issue #42
About Thousand Reflections: Sandbox is full of people from all walks of life and background. Here, we try to tap into this collective wisdom by offering a prompt every month and sourcing short responses from the members.
This Month’s prompt
Our 42th issue must talk about the meaning of life. And as the majority of this group is still in their twenties what’s best than that seemingly arrogant feeling we’re getting old so early in our youth? Seemingly, as age is definitely relative to the way we feel our time is passing by. And aging becomes critically painful for the first time during this period in our life in which one is trying to leave his true youth behind while looking for the doors to adult life. What does this mean to you? If you felt like you successfully dealt with this period what do you have to share with those that are still grappling with the first experience in this repeating cycle? If you don’t feel like aging is a problem what do you find comforting in your perceived youth?
Many of my peers talk about how old they are getting. How they fear turning 30 because they aren’t successful and they feel like failures. They talk about how they wish they could be in college again, be in their early twenties.
I can’t really connect to it. There is nothing old about thirty. Why should I go back to being twenty? I had no idea what I was doing back then. I wasn’t competent, I didn’t know how to do what I wanted. Now I both know what I want, and I have some tools to do it. Of course I haven’t figured everything out. What a horrible life it would be if we all peaked at thirty!!
My father was fifty four when he changed his entire life and career. On her sixtieth birthday, my mother said she’d finally done everything she wanted to do in life and now she could take time to play and discover something entirely new — now she paints. And they are past double my age now — imagine the vast amounts of life they have lived, and yet are still starting over, starting new, discovering, learning!
I can’t say I’m excited about aging, because I don’t even know I know what that means. But I do love being an adult. There are some things I’d like to do before I’m thirty, sure, but if I have not achieved the highest point of my career and gotten all my life sorted by then — well, thank goodness! I still have lots of time!
The idea of aging and getting older frightens me a little bit and creates pressure to think about the usual questions, like meeting a partner, finding a place to settle in, have kids, get more security and so on.
I have mixed feelings about aging. My conservative self asks me to put down roots like finding a home and creating more secure relationships, but my liberal self asks me to explore more, look for something else, something more. That side tells me that life itself just an experience, so keep roaming all through it, collect as much as you can of it.
When I compare myself with others I feel more insecurity, but I’m also skeptical if more security brings more happiness or not.
I used to set goals for myself in this way, that by a certain age I would like to achieve certain things. But I’ve historically failed badly in achieving those goals, so now I have few things I want to achieve but I haven’t set a time frame.
I am also keeping an open mind to just go with the flow as it occurs, but one thing I’m cautious about these days is that I don’t create regrets for the future.
I want to do the things I have always wanted to do and get more and more experiences from diverse dimensions; as for creating roots, I am still not sure if I will or not.
Not age nor aging are painful. It’s the inability to do what you feel you should that is. And while for the earlier part of our lives — after we cease being babies or young children at least — that inability largely doesn’t concern our body, but the responsibility others allow us to take, that story soon becomes different and sooner or later one starts feeling their vitality changed.
In our twenties our bodies start to reach their peak. And after feeling its full power we tend to feel bad about what we used to perceive as an acquired right. While it’s possible to start running marathons in your sixties, you’ll never be able to start sprinting past your thirties. That angst comes well before we reach our prime, at the earliest sign of physical failure.
Why the need for sprint — you might wonder. Isn’t life about the long run after all? I tend to think so — but I don’t know anyone who is comfortable losing whatever strengths they had. The key then is to forget that youth is about your body and that you can find new strengths outside it. Well, one can try to find the cure for physical aging — but even that is going to take some time.
Meanwhile, I don’t find arrogance in feeling old young — it’s part of being conscious of our limitations, a property of humbleness. I find aging one of the best things of being human, even though I would appreciate living in a world without a forced physical decay — and eventually one in which we aren’t born indebted to death. But for now we can only let the years numb that desire.
Rui Maciel
The 20’s are the most challenging years of our lives. It is when you start to dream big, it is when you have had almost the first time in everything, it is when you can finally look in the mirror and finally say something about yourself. You should have done some deeds, you have some regrets, someone close has already passed away and you probably had moments where you felt alive like you never thought you would.
The biggest challenge is that you need to reinvent yourself, because everything normal has already been done, so from then on you must think bigger, sense something higher. That is why some people stagnate, they struggle to keep up with being interested in a life where novelty has already passed away.
When I am at the table with my elders, they usually talk a lot about university, their girlfriends/boyfriends of the adolescence, some classes that they had in their college, but they usually never talk about their thirties, forties. This scares me as I do not want to be this person who only talks about when I was bla bla. I want to prolong this feeling of youthfulness; thus this endeavour starts now.
The best way to do this is to look to the events that have shaped you. What was the moment of your life that you know, retrospectively, know that you are someone different? What were the moments of your life that you felt most happy? Do you want to strive for momentous happiness or a more contending but more stable happiness? If you had to imagine a picture of your life, which you would feel harmonious with yourself what would it be? But afterwards, always question why, because from the why you will import those into your everyday life and start living it every day.
In the 20’s you should use your knowledge about yourself the best way you can, it is the biggest asset of your life and you will never be as free as you are now. So the best way to enjoy it is to not have that claustrophobic feeling that this is the time when everything good will happen, but to create a life that will structurally change you in order to keep this feeling forever.
Aging has come to mean comfort. Comfort with my body, my ideas, my way of moving around the world. After a quarter-century of running around the world trying to please everyone but me, I finally realized that I only need to turn inward to find that joy and peace. Entering my later twenties has caused me to reconcile what I think I want versus what I’m actually willing to sacrifice to get out. In some ways, my hunger has given way to pragmatism. As a bright star, I wanted to gobble up anything in my path. Now I recognize time as the finite resource it is and I am focusing my efforts on
a select group of projects.
Ultimately age is nothing but a number. While that number climbs upward I will continually remind myself that youth is a mindset. I must act young to feel young. I reject cultural notions around aging and getting older which make it seem like I have to abandon things like fun and spontaneity.
I used to fear becoming 30 because I had this idea that everything had to be in place or else I was a failure. Now, I realize that 30 is just another point in a lifetime journey of becoming yourself. My advice to those younger would be in cultivate inter-generational friendships. So much of my stress about aging was nullified by having friends 5–8 years older than me.
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