What’s This Obsession with Doing Everything in Your Twenties? Everyone Needs to Chill Out
Why are we trying to cram all our lives into a 10-year time slot?
Your twenties, it’s a weird time of your life. Should I be in a full-time job? Should I have a family of four? Should I be sleeping on my parent’s sofa? Does any of that actually matter?
I don’t have the most experience of my twenties, but in my limited time I have noticed the expectations from others rise exponentially. This pressure of being successful so early on is overwhelming. I have friends in a full-time 9–5 office job, friends who are pregnant with their second child, I also have friends that are unemployed and just simply doing their best. And to be honest, I’m immensely proud of all of them.
It’s easy for me to look at my life and see a super stressed out 21-year-old with 40k of debt and nothing to actually show for it, well not yet anyway, when in reality there is no timeline or definition of success (or there shouldn’t be, in my opinion). There was a time not too long ago when my biggest achievement in day-to-day life would be to simply get out of bed and brush my hair, and even this would be the greatest of efforts. Your timeline is different to mine, but they’re both as valid as one another.
And that’s okay.
I see these girls that are my age on Instagram who are jetting off across the world, in fancy hotels and the most amazing clothes, and all they had to do to pay for it was post a picture with a box of green tea, claim it changed their life and then make 5k on the back of it. You can now see why the impostor syndrome starts to set in and I begin doubting my life choices; why am I not one of these girls? Why do they get to live this life whilst I’m paying nine grand to be inundated with deadlines and academic strain? This is only made worse by the constant exposure of unhealthy standards on social media, but we’ll get to that another time.
The truth is, this idea of finding your dream job, meeting the love of your life, settling down all whilst finding yourself and remaining happy by the time you’re 30 is completely redundant and unrealistic. If you do manage that, that’s incredible and you should be very proud, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. But these burdens can be soul-destroying, it is entirely acceptable to have absolutely no clue what you want to do or who you want to be. The way I see it, focus on being happy and you’ll get there in the end. The term ‘yolo’ comes to mind, but if I used that seriously I know that 14-year-old me would be truly, truly ashamed.
As a generation, we should associate this demon-like word ‘success’ with happiness, who cares if you’re the CEO of Google or whatever because if you hate it, what’s the point? Life’s too short to be doing something you resent all for the sake of a fancy car and the newest iPhone. Your idea of happiness might be to travel the world in a tiny caravan — and if that’s right, just go and do it. Basically, what I’m trying to say is: find what makes you happy and THEN build your life around it. That’s what I’d call success, and anything or anyone you find along the way is just an added bonus.
But also, we’re all literally living through a pandemic, so next time you feel stressed out about that dreaded ‘what’s next for you?’ question — just cut yourself some slack.
