Twenty-Something

My life's not that interesting, but what I do think is interesting is this "post-collegiate twenty-something haze" in which so many of my friends and I currently find ourselves. Is this a new phenomenon? Scores of directionless quarter-lifers drifting in the real world: well educated, young, able-bodied, totally terrified and comically confused? Why in an age of endless possibility does it seem like slowly, but surely, everyone is getting married, going to grad school, leaving the country or going on meds? Those aren’t the only options, but how do we accept and cope with the idea that maybe there’s no formula for the happy lives we all (I’m assuming) want?

Was there ever a formula? According to my grandparents and my parents in their idealistic youth, that formula was: job stability + marriage + babies= life fulfillment. Times have undoubtedly changed. Maybe the advancements human beings have made in the last half-century or so have made life too long, too leisurely and too complicated for such a simple equation to hold up anymore.

Whatever the reasons for this breakdown, our grandparents seem to be the product of this equation. Our parents’ generation seems to have followed in their footsteps to become the product of this equation’s increasing failure to compute. Amidst the baggage of their mid-life crisis’s, divorces, career changes, regrets, remorse, and ‘reinvention at 50,’ our generation is cast into the 20-something oblivion, cautious and weary of committing to anything while we’re too young, but also staring ahead blankly at the path that our elders have burnt down behind them.

Quelle surprise, right? Blame the parents? That’s exactly what one would expect from a twenty-something who is young enough to be the product of today’s overindulgent, ‘everybody’s a rock star’ method of raising children, right? No. If I wanted to go on and on about how my parents ‘fucked me up,’ I’d get a therapist. We are human and a product of our time- so are they.

Although times may have changed, people seem to be pretty similar in terms of what they need. For the past year, I’ve been pursuing my quarter-life crisis whole-heartedly, living off my savings and out of a backpack, traveling all over Europe, and now America. Total freedom. Little, if any, responsibility or direction besides that of life on the road. After two post-collegiate years of moving from one job to the next, planning one career path after another, weighing every decision against how it could affect the entire rest of my life(!!!) I decided to own my aimlessness, flaunt the transience of my life right now, pick up and just go.

In the last year, partially because my primary mode of transportation has been hitchhiking, I have met hundreds of people of all different nationalities, ages, occupations, backgrounds, etc. One clear common denominator among them all and, I think, everyone in general, is they all have something, or are looking for something to create a framework that ascribes meaning to their life and they are usually eager to tell you about whatever it is within the first ten minutes of meeting them. Whether it’s family, career, religion, the quest for enlightenment, addiction, ambition or training carrier pigeons towards Belgian stardom (no, I’m not kidding), everyone seems to need something that steers the navigation of their existence.

Whether you’re a twenty-something that is blatant about the lack of this singular purpose, like me, or you think you’ve found it, or you’re awaiting your next existentialistic crisis, I hope this blog, which has yet to take shape (sort of like my life…), will at least serve as a place for the amusing anecdotes and observations that can be found in twenty-something-stories.