I sometimes find myself in the middle of an ordinary day – working at my laptop, budgeting money on a spreadsheet, walking for the sake of walking – and a memory from my 20s will resurface. It’s never useful and thankfully it’s not usually accompanied by excessive heavy nostalgia.
I remember begging my way into that private members’ club with my friend to see Courtney Love do a surprise DJ set where she played “Wonderwall”. Or the drunken dance competition in another friend’s top-floor flat next to a bus stop, seeing – every time the bus pulled in – how many people we could make laugh with our escalating performance. Or the road trip out of LA, when a giant pair of shears fell off the back of the truck in front of us. We drove over them. Later, when the rental car started failing, we found the huge blades punched up through the floor, stopping a centimetre from the passenger seat. I was sitting there.
And that’s before the hot strangers from dating apps and borrowed mattresses after strange parties. Colleagues getting sick of commentary on my month-long limerence over some barista who just wore good trousers. Each week, in my 20s, came with it a dumb situation that required a mental break of the fourth wall: Where am I? Who are these people? Where are my belongings? What does this all mean?
It meant very little. Or, it meant this: that the collection of such ridiculous experiences was the point of that entire decade.
It interests me (and makes me a little sad, but maybe that’s condescending) that the prevailing advice now offered to people in their 20s is to avoid exactly this type of life. They are instructed to stay at home, to focus hypnotically on themselves, to invest not spend, to treat pleasure as frivolity and relationships as a distraction. Relaxation is okay, if it’s scheduled and raises their market value. Better yet, if they can relax while filming themselves on an iPhone. They are advised to act like people in their 40s and 50s as early as possible, to “lock in” like entrepreneurial monks all in order to secure specific outcomes, to behave as if time were already perilously scarce, to build, build, build.
By these standards, my 20s were wasted. I was careless, stupid. I put myself in precarious situations. Sometimes, I really didn’t have much regard for my physical or emotional safety. But I was also extremely entertained. Maybe this way of living isn’t “right” either, but I can’t imagine not spending your 20s in the mess of life, whatever that looks like for you. It’s not that I didn’t work hard, because I did, and I extracted most of my self-worth from temporary career-related highs – but every hour outside of that was about perusing thrill, intrigue and mystery. Which is how I think it should be.
The overarching message from the current deluge of advice content is that your 20s are for “getting ahead” and “working on yourself”. But how much can you work on yourself when there’s nothing to work on yet? A person hasn’t consolidated enough data and material to work with. The creators of these advice reels are mostly 20-somethings themselves. In my early-30s, I understand that the point was never solidifying into something you think could or should be you, but to accumulate enough experiences to be able to sift through it all and consider who you are, and what you want to live for.
Astrologers have a Saturn Return to explain this. You don’t graduate into adulthood until after that spicy transit which typically ends around age 30 or 31. Neuroscientists point to the slow development of the frontal lobe, not complete until a person is in their mid-to-late twenties. Researchers at the University of Cambridge recently found that there are five distinct brain phases that someone goes through in the human life, with the “adolescent” stage not finishing until age 32.
I wonder, when I think about this new way to spend your youth, if it will put a generation ahead. Whether it will all be worth it. Or if it’s a recipe for a premature mid-life crisis when they realise they’ve trapped themselves inside a cathedral of restraint.
People often complain about feeling lost in their 20s – because they are. They don’t know where they’re going by design. The mistake is trying to decide on the story too early, then hustling and forcing it to happen. If I could offer advice to the person I was then, it would not be about caution or strategy. It’d be to experiment more. Sleep with more people, take up real hobbies, quit your day job sooner. The real shape to life will come later, and if you get disembowelled by a pair of shears, at least you had fun.
