I didn’t know that when I was smaller. For some reasons, I thought I would never make it that far. I couldn’t see life after my 20s.
Being 25, I realized one thing. It was not only me.
The world is obsessed with the idea of being in their 20s
I remember how worried I was, accepting my first full-time job. I questioned myself: what if this is not what I wanted to do in this life?
It wasn’t. And I got even more stressed trying to find the next thing to work on. I was terrified thinking I need to know what to do with my life before turning 30.
While that made living through my 20s a race, it made my 30s, 40s, 50s, seem boring as sh*t.
I have always liked learning new things, seeing new people. To stick with one thing and one thing only feels like the end of the world.
Looking around now, I realized it wasn’t just me who thinks like that.
The beauty industry revolves around up-keeping the look you got in your 20s. Social media talk all about living your 20s to the fullest.
Sure, this might be the algorithm working. But find me another era that people are as obsessed with as we are now with our 20s.
That could only be the early 2000s when the whole entertainment industry was obsessed with mid-life crisis. Eat Pray Love. Sex in the City.
But why is that the case?
I’d say it’s capitalism knowing its game best. People at this age are the most gullible to overspend and to overwork — the 2 things capitalism run on.
The years of your 20s is the beginning of financial independence and end of emotional immaturity.
Before that, we could almost never spend more than 200 without looking at our bank account twice or asking for permission from parents.
In our mid-20s, we start having jobs: paying off our debts and having the resources to indulge ourselves — even just a little.
Yet at the same time, we have had too little experience being adults. Dealing with our own money. Trying to find what we really want.
All the voices came in at the perfect time. As we need that external validation to replace that from our parents, social media keep on thriving.
Knowing we are confused how a normal body should look like, they market the unattainable ones so we we feel bad about ourselves.
Clothes, make-up, workout plans — we keep buying things to help us “cover up” and “fix” the thing we should be proud of the most.
It’s a mechanism that operates on one sole condition — us being extremely confused.
The truth is
This will pass. Not for all of us, but I think the majority.
As we accumulate more experiences, we figure out what we don’t like, and eventually, what we do like.
And the most important truth we get to discern is:
Life doesn’t end at your 20s.
If anything, after our 20s, we have the potential to live it much fuller than how we already have.
We have money, self-awareness, and time.
20 is a quarter of a life we could live, assuming the average death age to be 80. 25 is a more than a third of that. 30 is a little bit less than a third.
For me, I get to more than 2 times of what I have until now. Not to mention, we spent the first half of our first 20 years learning the basics.
To speak, walk, then to live under our parents’ care.
Technically, we have only truly lived life on our own for the last 5 years. That means the time ahead is much longer than we think it is.
We have money, now that we paid off debts, learned to save, and got higher than the fresh graduates’ salary.
We have network, now that we joined communities, studied at different schools, worked at different places, lived in different cities.
We have support, from our childhood friends who have grown to become adults like us, from our siblings who are now someone else’s parents.
Last but not least, maybe we would not know the exact answer yet, but we know it’s okay to experiment and find out as we go.
We get to know what we want, not what they tell us that we should want. That’s just perfect, because we have all the resources to make it come true.
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