It doesn’t matter what you do in your twenties

It doesn’t matter if you wander foreign continents or find a place to call home, if you find love, lose love, do everything you love or love everything you do. It doesn’t matter if you party until your body aches or settle down and learn to take care of yourself, indulge your wildest impulses or learn to control them. It doesn’t matter if you secure your dream career or drop everything to try something new, adopt a new identity or find peace with the one you own.

It doesn’t matter what you do in your twenties. The only thing that matters is what you do today, that the next 24 hours of your life are an immersion in your identity and not somebody else’s.

Too often we get caught in the identities of others. In the generously-liked profile pictures and carefully crafted humblebrags that permeate our ways of thinking, the egotistical projections and vainly celebrated milestones that corrode our self-esteem. Too often we get caught in the image of the ideal twenty-something who, like us, craves the feeling that they aren’t wasting this enigmatic and supposedly short-lived decade. Who feels that there is always something else to do, somewhere to go, energy to expel.

We share each other’s dreams until we forget how to feel satisfied. We spin webs of want so wide and intricate we find ourselves suspended in the middle, paralysed with the inability to recall who we were before we became so entangled in the lives of others.

The Internet is littered with words about what we should be doing in our twenties (backpack Asia, have our hearts broken, and drink Bud Light, apparently). We are spreading consciousness of our fleeting time, reminding each other that we won’t have this freedom, these bodies, this energy forever, so there are some activities that we should probably do now rather than later. And that’s a good thing, but we’ve convoluted the message.

You can’t get the most out of your life by living off of somebody else’s checklist. You don’t need to do anything that doesn’t feel right to you. If it doesn’t support your health, happiness or relationships it’s not essential. Billions of humans lived happily and died at peace without having done any of the things that twenty-somethings tell each other we need to do, lest we live a vacant, miserable life because we didn’t go bungee jumping when we were 22, or whatever.

Combine this need-to-do rhetoric with the fact that our friends’ social media accounts comprise the most interesting aspects of their lives and it’s no surprise that many of us get tricked into feeling that we are doing our twenties wrong. You read a write-up about one friend who has launched a successful tech startup and a post by another who has dropped their career to work at a coconut stand in Costa Rica, and somehow you feel jealous of both of them. How is that even possible?

Social media circulates appearances, not experiences. We use it to make our existence look glamorous, to justify our presence and declare our worth. With many of us having 500–5000+ contacts on our combined social media accounts, it’s easy to understand how we can quickly deceive ourselves into thinking that everybody is doing something awesome all the time and judge ourselves for not being as awesome as everybody else. I read most nights and I thoroughly enjoy it, but I don’t set my profile picture to a picture of me reading. Instead, I go surfing, or scuba diving, or skydiving once and use a picture of one of those, because I want people to think that I’m that type of person. And I contribute one more fabrication to the fallacy of the ideal twenty-something.

Do what makes you happy, and forget everybody else. Whether you are 26, 47, or 82 has nothing to do with it.

Seriously. Who cares what everybody else is doing? You don’t know if it’s as fun as it looks, if it’s as enjoyable as they make it appear. Under the influence of social media, in an age of visual representation and constructed identities, we need to remember that what looks good on somebody else won’t necessarily feel good for us. We need to realise that we can’t tell the future to find out if others are experiencing their twenties properly, that we can’t access their minds to know if they are fulfilled.

You only have access to one mind, and it rests vicariously between your shoulders. It can be your friend — your lantern in a dark universe — and it can be your enemy, but it is the only thing you have.

Your mind is layered, like an onion (or an ogre), and the bulk of your life happens in the outer layers. They are your stimuli, your short-term wants and needs, feelings and conceptions; the basic, sensory experience of being you. They are your mental chatter, and the conversation is endless.

But if you put the conversation on hold for just a moment and look inwards, you find there is a deeper part of you that has been listening and observing all along. In its quiet contemplation, it’s amassed a great store of wisdom and understanding. Safely sheltered from the outer realm, your inner-self is protected from the impulsive pursuit of gratification that rules your external being.

Your inner-self doesn’t speak often, but when it does, it always has something good to say. When it speaks, it speaks in the language between your sleeping and waking dreams, in the details that are meant to define you.

Mute the noise and listen to your mind.

If your mind tells you video games, play video games. Review video games, develop video games, find friends and colleagues and a partner who play video games. If your mind tells you fitness, go to the gym. Prepare a month’s portion of vacuum sealed macronutrients and eat them after every meticulous workout. Find fit friends and get more fit together. Take pictures of your shredded biceps and share your oily glory with the world. If your mind tells you to climb mountains, climb mountains. Climb ten mountains. Find a mountain in some unnamed corner of the earth and name it after yourself.

And when you’re on the other end, lurking the Facebook profiles of your video game playing, dumbbell curling, mountain climbing friends, don’t you dare feel obligated to do any of these things. Because you are you and they are them. The only concern you need to have with their lives is that they are happy with what they are doing. Your twenties are a time to find your own mountains, not to slip and scuttle through the debris of everybody else’s.

Twenty-somethings have become obsessed with telling twenty-somethings how to be twenty-somethings, and frankly, I’m over it. The next time you see one of those articles, “20 things you need to do in your 20s”, close your computer, write your own list of 20 things, and go do them. Do what makes you happy, and forget everybody else.

You be you and I’ll be me. Comfortably separated, our lives will exist in perfect harmony.

Originally published by Thought Catalog at thoughtcatalog.com