20 Dec 20s are not for the week

Twenties, the years to dream big, to have aspirations, to travel, to commit to life and for some who actually believe it, to live unapologetically, freely. It’s becoming almost redundant how often we hear these days, statements like “just be yourself”, “don’t let anybody stop you”, “you can do anything you want”, “these are your best years” and yet most of the time I find so hard to even engage with life. Every-day is a race against time, to do more, to be more alive, as we live in an increasingly fragmented society where the aspiration to achieve perfection has led to identity crises. Who am I? what is my purpose? What am I supposed to do with life? We expect our education system, social media, strangers to answer these questions for us, and we turn against them when they fail to answer.

Every year we set new goals, putting ourselves under intense pressure with a series of resolutions, most of which are futile, which then lead us to blame ourselves if we fail to achieve them. The constant need for validation and reassurance is something many young people today have in common. What we watch and listen to — from music, movies, TV, podcasts, and social media — gives us a vision of the world of a specific person or group of people, which often traps us in a box, an ideology, shaping our minds and leading us into becoming something different, something we would never have otherwise identified with. Adults are grown children, who retain this need to learn and expose themselves to new information and people. If this choice is not carefully considered, it can derail our lives, our path toward something negative. The more we expose ourselves to something, the more we, as human beings, are conditioned on an unconscious level, we absorb that specific language, that mentality, that type of clothing, that way of doing things, etc.

A generation addicted to social media, which inhibits our way of seeing reality — from the countless video challenges we see online to the advice of self-proclaimed feminists and mentors — we have become the product of social expectations that dictate our way of life, how we dress, how we treat our bodies, how much we spend, how we treat those around us and online, what career path we pursue, etc.

Our twenties represent a significant transition period in our lives: current or future studies, jobs, future aspirations, and life plans are all subject to the constant scrutiny of social media, which has often become a vehicle for mass exploitation.

Your twenties are about so much more than being inexperienced in life, young, and having fun. They’re the years of desperation, insecurity, overthinking, over-planning, and doing little — at least for most of us, or at least for me. Finding your calling, entering adulthood, and trying to find your place. Finding a job, buying a house, most likely renting it because buying one is almost like daydreaming these days, and so on.

So, to the few of you who have cracked the system, created the life of your dreams very early on, I applaud you for your perseverance, hard work, and luck, while I try to figure out mine.