There tends to be a bit of a scramble, I’ve observed, for young adults to “figure things out.” People start feeling “behind” if by, say, age 30 they don’t have the good job, the significant other, the stability in place.
Why?
It’s not that I don’t empathize with this desire. As I get older, I find myself more impatient with my Hollywood-driven financial instability and more worn out by my lack of a set schedule. I can see wanting to achieve some life success, some life milestones, within the first ten years of adulthood.
But here’s the thing: Adulthood is really, really, really long. (Well, at least we hope so.)
If you’re set by age 30, and you’ve found your permanent groove in life by then, that means you end up doing the same thing for forty years. Unless you love what you do—and in some cases, even if you do—it’s very possible for that to get excessively boring!
So what’s so wrong with not knowing what one is going to be doing five or ten years down the road? What’s so wrong with saying, “I’ll do this for now, I’ll gain some life experiences, and when it no longer suits me I’ll move on?”
Do people want to feel “set” because change is frightening and difficult? Is it more about feeling stable, so that if one decides to move on down the road it feels like a choice rather than a forced reaction? Is it that family—which is very important to many—is such a long-term commitment that it’s necessary to stay “in one place” (financially and geographically) for several decades? I’m genuinely curious about this. Because why do we have such an emphasis on hitting some set level of stability by age 25 or 30 or 35 or 40 when adulthood is so many decades long, with so much time to do new and wonderful and exciting things?
