Our twenties

On my birthday this year, a friend observed that every new age in her twenties has seemed like a significantly “older” age than the year before. I immediately understood what she meant. I will be the first to say I had a hard time turning 20, due to the fact that it officially marked the end of my teenage years. The ever-so-popular age of 21 is a huge milestone for most Americans, proving a dramatic jump from age 20. We celebrate our “quarter century” birthday at the age of 25 and 26 begins the official upswing to 30.

We learn a lot in our twenties, and “a lot” can mean anything from dating to traveling to learning how to match clothes to figuring out our career paths to realizing that rent and taxes take a lot out of money from our paychecks each month. Somewhere in the mix of that, we will probably have a quarter-life crisis and countless other lingering thoughts circling around the never-ending question: “What am I doing with my life?”

I wonder if all generations were as confused as ours. I do have a handful of friends who landed in a more “traditional” path of graduating college, finding a soulmate, stabalizing a good job and happily settling into the next phase of their young lives. For the most part, though, I have noticed a common theme of unbalance among the twenty somethings of today. Those lucky enough to figure out even one of the above details tend to be swimming upstream to understand and establish another.

Somewhere between society’s standards and our own unfamiliarities with how life happens “before we get older”, many of us find ourselves naturally living the method of trial and error. We search for the right career, the right person to spend forever with, the right city to live in and the right way to save money. It is no wonder why we grow so much during this decade.

Few of these decisions are concluded without the error of at least one trial, and in this case “error” is less of a mistake than a sign to simply change direction. It is certainly a test of patience when our searches do not immediately lead us to what we are looking for, but eventually we will end up where we want to be (at least for a while).

Until then, in between the moments of worrying that the rest of the world has it more figured out than we do, we are left to embrace the places in life we have reached and accept the places we have not. As Lao Tzu so accurately put, “By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.”

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Photo by Ph B on Unsplash