The Pain of Your 20s
⌠25-40 is your most valuable, imaginative, intelligent and bold time of life, where your powers are at their peak, your life constraints are at their weakest, and your energy at its most boundless.
Growing up, I was made to believe that people in their 20s were having the best time of their lives. Fresh out of college and working a full time job with the freedom to do whatever they want. Boy, was I deceived. Anyone who tells you that your 20s will be the best time of your life either comes from a place of privilege or they were just very fortunate. Most people will tell you that your 20s are NOT fun and there will be times where you will go through the dark night of the soul. As mentioned by Jon Acuff:
Your 20s are lonelier than you expect. Theyâre glamorized in culture as the time of your life. The truth is, when you leave college, you leave the tightest, largest concentration of people your age. Youâll have to fight for community. Seek it out. Be deliberate.
Many of us have grown up with an incredibly outdated script: grow up, get good grades, get a job, find a spouse, and then die. The problem lies not in growing up and getting good grades, or even getting a job, or finding a spouse. The problem lies in how when every step is a means to an end, and the end does not justify the means taken to get there. And sometimes, the means have truly no end.
Most of the older generation have had everything lined up for them. Working the 9-5 back then brought more value and income compared to our present day economy. The post-war economic boom was an anomaly. In some sense, boomers had the collective economical privilege that todayâs Millennials and Gen Zâs donât.
One of the worrying things about being in your 20s is how Murphyâs Law can be as real as it gets: âAnything that can go wrong, will go wrong.â Your 20s are the years that will eventually define who you are. How scary can it be when one misstep can mess up the rest of the trajectory of oneâs life?
Your 20s will be one of the times when you hit the fork in the road. Many of us in our 20s, while still a little wide-eyed and eager to please, have gradually come to the realisation that while modern education may have been ill-equipped in helping us grow up, the responsibility no longer lies in their hands but ours.
Even when surrounded by many others, your journey is solitary, for the life your are to choose is your life, not someone elseâs.
The question is, with all the fumbling along in our 20s, can we reach a point in life where weâll look back with gratitude instead of regret?
⌠ten years from now, you need to be able to say that this is the life you chose, not one you settled for.â A future that is created intentionally is more pleasant than one that is scrapped together by avoidance-driven choices.
The fear many have in their 20s is not irrational. Many of us in our 20s have seen the previous generation and do not wish to repeat their mistakes. Your 20s are where youâll start to see peopleâs lives crumble and where the cracks become more and more visible.
My dad said once youâre in your late twenties/early 30s you really start to see a separation in peopleâs lives visibly
— Josh (@JoshuaOgundu)
May 28, 2023
Your 20s Come With a Lot of Loss
Your 20s come with a lot of loss and no one really talks about that.
With that separation comes loss. One of the key moments in your 20s will be when your friend groups slowly start to fade away. For me, it happened very early on in my early 20s, so it wasnât a huge shock for me. For some of us, that foreshadowing happens in our late teens and early 20s, which can lighten the shock of reality as an adult.
That loss doesnât just pertain to friendships.
Studies have shown that most people quit their first job around the age of 18-25. Besides the fact of how the majority who quit their jobs are in the brackets of the Millennial and Gen Z generation, reality starts to set in at the age of 25. This is when your prefrontal cortex has just developed. Youâre no longer the 23 year old employee whom your senior colleagues would find adorable or endearing. Youâre reaching that point in life where your life starts to take its own form and this is the point when many quit when they donât like what they are seeing.
Most individuals who are in their 20s donât realise that they are not alone. A quick search on Youtube with the keywords âlostâ and â20sâ shows the slow descend into the chaotic drag of being in oneâs 20s. One of the most unhelpful advice given to those in their 20s is to âhave funâ, but what fun is there when youâre going through multiple transitions? With individuals in their 20s trying to figure out their purpose in life, having real fun seems almost impossible.
But, by now youâve probably wondered if that is all there is to this. Is our 20s all just doom and gloom?
The truth is, it is normal for people in their 20s to worry about how theyâre messing up their lives. In The Pathless Path, Paul Millerd states: âMany young people assume that they need to have everything figured out before the age of 25.â Think about it, for years youâve been told by everyone how you should behave, how you should speak, and how you need to ask for permission before doing anything. How on earth would someone have their life direction figured out by the age of 25?
The âmidlife crisisâ is happening at younger ages. Generations were raised with an obsessive focus on achievement and a lack of self connection. The result is 30 year olds who donât know who they are, living unfulfilled lives. Older generations tend to mock a desire for âŚ
— Dr. Nicole LePera (@Theholisticpsyc)
May 9, 2023
Young people (especially Asians) today are increasingly restless as they were never given the chance to explore what they truly want. Gen X and Boomers look at the younger generation and frown with disgust, but what they truly lack is the capacity to understand why the younger generation would rather float around listlessly, than grasp on to something. When youâve been given a script for the first quarter of your life, only to realise how wrong it really is, this is where the scepticism and distrust comes in.
In general, âlife sucks in your late 20s and early 30sâ and it will get better after that stage. Yes, you will probably mess up. Yes, your 20s can be hell on earth. But, things will get better in time. That is if you are intentional and conscious of your choices, as mentioned by Pat Stedman:
⌠if you spend your 20s consciously exploring and maturing, your 30s will be a golden decade.
In her own words, Penelope Trunk writes on her 20s:
I did not have friends. I did not have money. I did not have the things I expected to have. But all that would have been fine if I had only had self-confidence.
I was a woman who needed space and time alone and loved routine. I was a woman getting to know myself. I wish I had felt strong and proud while I was doing that."
The Bright Side of Loss
Saturday is the day of Saturn â.
— Somya Desai (@philosopreneurr)
Saturn is associated with the Greek mythic figure Cronos, the god of time.
The image of Saturn is that of the old, stern, but wise man.
pic.twitter.com/fVnnrmjGnu
August 5, 2023
To put things into perspective, many of us in our 20s are probably going through Saturn transits. In astrology, Saturn is also known as Father Time. Saturn doesnât just symbolise time, Saturn also symbolises limitations and restrictions. There is a saying âSaturn delays but never denies". Saturn transits are responsible for the delays, struggles, and depression that we go through. But Saturn transits arenât just there to make things difficult. Saturn transits are there to help us understand that through our limitations and constraints that we face, we can start to shed the things and people who are not meant to be in our lives.
Many of us who are in our 20s sometimes feel like failures when things just donât work out. We compare ourselves to our peers and wonder why we are behind time (or Saturn). We wonder if we could have done things differently or if we messed up. But Saturn transits are there to help us understand that the delays are there to force us to acknowledge what we really want; the things that are in line with who we really are. It is easy to follow the script of the masses. But while it may look attractive on the outside, we must ask ourselves: is that what we really want? Because like how some animals shed their skins, we too need to shed the things that are unaligned with who we are. And that can be painful.
It would be a waste of time and opportunity to not treasure that opportunity to learn about ourselves. You may ask God why do you need to go through something so stupid in order to learn and grow, but as David Perell said:
The irony of struggle is it seems pointless at the time, but over the long run, it makes you useful because nobody wants to learn from somebody who hasnât endured hardship.