THE PRESSURE TO HAVE YOUR LIFE FIGURED OUT IN YOUR 20s
THE PRESSURE TO HAVE YOUR LIFE FIGURED OUT IN YOUR 20s
I remember the first time I seriously started wondering whether I was falling behind. It wasn't because something terrible had happened. In fact, everything around me looked perfectly normal. I was simply scrolling through my phone when I came across someone around my age celebrating a major achievement. Then another person announced a new job, someone else had started a business, and another had moved to a different country. I kept scrolling, but the feeling stayed with me. For a moment, I stopped thinking about their achievements and started thinking about my own life. What exactly am I doing? Should I be further ahead by now? What if I am wasting time? Maybe you have had a similar moment. Maybe you've looked at people your age and quietly wondered why your own life doesn't seem to be moving at the same speed.
That is one of the strange things about being in your twenties. You are constantly reminded that you are young, yet you are also expected to make decisions that can determine the rest of your life. You are supposed to know what career you want, how you intend to make money, where you want to live, whether you want marriage and children, and what kind of person you want to become. Sometimes it feels as though everyone is waiting for you to present a complete five-year plan, even when you are still trying to understand yourself. And because there is no obvious point at which you can say, “I have finally figured everything out,” the uncertainty can become exhausting.
I once thought growing up meant eventually reaching a stage where you became completely certain about everything. I imagined that there would be a particular age when the confusion would disappear and I would suddenly understand exactly what I wanted from life. The older I get, the more unrealistic that idea seems. People change. Circumstances change. Priorities change. The career you wanted at eighteen may not be the career you want at twenty-four. The person you thought you would spend your life with may no longer be part of your story. The business you were convinced would succeed may fail. Even the definition of success you once chased may stop making sense to you. None of that necessarily means you have made the wrong choices. Sometimes, it simply means you have learned enough to make different ones.
The difficult part is that we rarely see this side of other people's lives. We see the announcement, not the uncertainty that came before it. We see the graduation photograph, but not the nights that person spent wondering whether they would make it through school. We see the new business, but not the money they lost before it became profitable. We see the engagement, but not the conversations and struggles that existed before the proposal. Social media makes this especially easy to forget because it gives us access to thousands of people's biggest moments while we are sitting with the ordinary parts of our own lives. After seeing enough of those moments, it becomes tempting to believe that everybody is progressing except us.
But what if you stopped for a moment and asked yourself a different question: What if I am not actually behind? What if I am simply living a different timeline?
Consider two people who are both twenty-three. One graduated at twenty-one, found a job almost immediately and is already building a career. The other spent several years trying to get through school, had financial difficulties and is only now beginning to understand what direction they want to take. On paper, the first person appears to be ahead. But life is not a competition with a universal scoreboard. The second person may discover a career at twenty-five that completely changes their circumstances. The first person may realise at twenty-seven that they have spent years pursuing something they never truly wanted. Neither person can know exactly what the next ten years will look like.
This is particularly important when it comes to money. There is nothing wrong with wanting financial independence in your twenties. In fact, wanting to support yourself and create a better future is a good thing. The problem begins when financial success becomes another source of shame. You see someone making money online, buying expensive things or building a successful business, and suddenly your own progress feels embarrassing. You forget that every financial journey begins somewhere. There is a first job, a first client, a first failed business idea, a first small payment and a first attempt that does not work. Those beginnings may not look impressive, but they are still beginnings.
There is also a quieter form of pressure that does not come from social media at all. It comes from family, friends and ordinary conversations. Someone asks what you plan to do after graduation. A relative wants to know when you are getting married. A friend talks about their five-year plan, and suddenly you feel as though you should have one too. Sometimes the questions are not even meant to hurt you. People ask because they care, because they are curious or because they grew up believing that adulthood follows a particular order. But when you hear those questions repeatedly while you are still uncertain about your own direction, they can make uncertainty feel like failure.
Perhaps the better approach is not to abandon ambition but to stop attaching your entire sense of worth to how quickly you achieve your goals. You can want a successful career and still be unsure which path to take. You can want financial stability and still be struggling financially today. You can want a healthy relationship and still be single. You can have big dreams and still have absolutely no idea how you are going to accomplish all of them. These things can exist at the same time.
I think we sometimes put too much pressure on ourselves to arrive at a destination when we should be paying more attention to the person we are becoming along the way. Maybe this year is not the year you become financially independent. Maybe it is the year you learn a skill that eventually helps you earn more. Maybe you don't find your dream career yet, but you discover what you definitely don't want to do. Maybe you don't meet the person you will marry, but you finally learn what you should and should not accept in a relationship. Those things may not look like major achievements when compared with someone else's announcement online, but they can completely change the direction of your life.
So if you are in your twenties and you sometimes feel as though everybody else has received a map that you somehow missed, you are not alone. You may be uncertain. You may have made mistakes. You may have changed your plans more times than you can count. You may even look at where you are today and feel disappointed because it is not where you thought you would be. But before you decide that you are failing, take an honest look at how much you have learned, how much you have survived and how much you still have time to build.
Your twenties are not a deadline. They are a period of becoming. There will be things you get right, things you get wrong and things you will eventually realise were never meant for you in the first place. You do not need to have your entire life mapped out before you are allowed to feel proud of yourself. You just need enough courage to keep moving, enough honesty to change direction when necessary, and enough patience to understand that someone else's chapter 10 does not make your chapter 3 a failure.
Maybe the real question isn't, “Why am I not where everyone else is?” Maybe it is, “What kind of life am I actually trying to build?” And once you can answer that honestly, the pressure to keep up with everyone else starts to lose some of its power.
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