I’ve spent forty years working with people in their late teens or early twenties, and then watching them navigate their twenties. And, for an awful lot of people, your twenties suck. Not as much as high school, but more than college. They suck for a bunch of reasons, and one of them is how much nostalgia people have about their twenties. Because, also, your twenties have some great things about them, and so nostalgia is easy. The problem is that far too many people in their forties and fifties (or older) only remember the good things, and so, in movies, memories, fiction, TV, they’re a carefree time. When you’re in them, they are not carefree.
As a culture, we memorialize people in their twenties as being free, with no responsibilities, able to do all sorts of impulsive things, with a world that has no commitments, including no romantic ones. We think of people in their twenties as people who can move anywhere, have folks over to a messy place and serve them cheap booze and bad weed, have a “dinner” party that is your best ramen recipe, drift in and out of hookups, spend a day in bed reading earnest literature or listening to angsty music or just playing a game, get a tat, wear nothing but a t-shirt and ripped jeans for months end.
And that’s sort of true, for some people with a particular background. And even for those people, the whole reason you could serve guests shitty alcohol and cheap food was that’s all any of you could afford. You could move anywhere and have drifty hookups because you had no responsibilities. But you had no responsibilities because you didn’t have a career, a stable enough living situation to get a dog, no particular connection to any one place, and often not a stable relationship. Another way to describe the twenties is not free of responsibilities, but unmoored.
I have seen people whom I knew in their twenties reminisce as though that time was wild and carefree. I remember what they were like. They were not carefree. They were at moments, but at other moments they were incredibly anxious about whether they’d find a career, make enough money to get a stable living situation, figure out where to live, be able to get a dog, find someone… How we look back on our lives, and how we lived it, don’t always match up. We think about those times differently because we know how that story ended, and so we forget how anxious we were about where the story would go. And it’s fine and great if we look back on our twenties with affection and nostalgia, but I think it’s harmful if, as people giving advice, or as a culture, we deny the angst and difficulties inherent to that age.
The twenties are really hard for a bunch of reasons. People’s brain chemistry changes, and so people suddenly start having issues they’ve never had before. Many people didn’t go to college, and they’ve spent the years since high school trying to figure out how to navigate a world that doesn’t have a path of upward mobility or decent benefits for skilled artisans. Many people go to college, and end up with a degree that has no clear career path. They don’t know what they want to do, they find that they are having trouble getting a foothold in a career, they’re expected to have a career plan without any information. They also find that jobs won’t hire them without experience, and they have no way to get experience. It’s rough. Many people finish college in order to go to grad school, and grad school sucks. Some people take a path or have a personality that means they never have to manage the changes presented by the twenties, and good for them, but they aren’t the norm.
In addition, for many people (including some who go on to grad school), all the signs that gave us confidence are gone—good grades, praise from teachers, getting to be Eagle Scout, winning a sports championship—and so we don’t know how to assess our performance. Are we failing to get jobs (dates, second dates, that apartment, raises, publications, the same level of success in grad school that we got in undergrad, and so on) because we’re bad, we’re good but not a good fit, good but with bad materials, it’s a rough market, looking in the wrong places, looking in the wrong ways, we aren’t capable of achieving our goals, we aren’t making the changes we need to make in order to achieve those goals, those are goals no one achieves?
Because we have lost the ground for our confidence, some people resort to arrogance, deciding that we are entitled to all the good things, exactly as we are, and doing exactly what we’re doing, and we should be enraged if we don’t get what we believe we’re entitled to get. We have been the best, and so we are entitled to be the best. I don’t think that’s a great choice, but I get that it’s attractive.
I think there are other ways that things change for people in their twenties that we don’t always remember when we look back on that era. For an awful lot of people, the behaviors and mindsets that got them to their twenties (or didn’t stop them from getting there) stop working as well and sometimes at all. All-nighters, relying on panic and shame to get things done, letting friendship come to you, random self-care, no self-care—for many people those behaviors start having costs they didn’t have before.
Some people just pay those costs, some people get lost, some people wander and are not lost, some people do the hard work of trying to figure out how to manage a new world, some people postpone the difficulty, and, well, so many other options. There are lots of ways to get through the twenties that will turn out fine, and lots of ways that aren’t so great.
I rather like Erik Erickson, and I find persuasive the notion that there are moments in our lives when we’ve got a lot of crap from the past and mixed messages from the present. And we have to figure out what we’re going to do about the fact that living life as we’ve lived it has put us into a crisis about who we are and what we want.
There are moments when we look in our closet, and it’s stuffed full. It’s full of things we thought we’d use, things we used to use, things we’d like to use, things that we use, things we will use if life plays out a certain way, things we’ve been told we should value, things we value we’ve been told we shouldn’t, things we’ll never use but like to think of ourselves as the sort of person who would use them, and so on.
I think the twenties are one of those moments of looking at that closet. (There are others.)
We might decide to keep shoving stuff in there and just not look. That’s always a choice.
If we pull it all out and try to figure out what to do with it, there will be a moment (or more) that is absolutely awful. We will look at all that shit, all over the fucking place, and just wish we’d never started. We have to make so many decisions when we don’t have the information to know what we’ll need and what we won’t. We can, of course, shove it back in. We can give it all away. We can do the hard work of thinking about it all, and deciding what to keep, what to store, what to give away, what to burn ritually, what to give away.
Later, when we’ve shoved everything back in, burned it all, gone through it thoughtfully, or whatever we did, it doesn’t seem so bad, and that’s when the nostalgia kicks in. I don’t think people need to remember the pain of our twenties on a regular basis, but I do think it’s helpful, if we’re talking to people in their twenties, not to present our nostalgic version as though that was all that happened. It happened, but it isn’t all that happened.