Episode #31: For People Feeling Behind In Life In Their 20's

For The People Who Are Feeling Behind In Life In Their 20’s

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how so many of us struggle with the feeling of being lost through our 20’s.  There’s this disconnect that so many of us around this age are living right now, between the traditional life approach that we’re still taught, and the often very different realities of the world we then step out into.  We’re taught this framework of ‘finish school, get a degree, get a long term job with a good company, get married and start a family, get a house, and so on, but in many cases are met with a world where some of this is barely possible anymore.  In so many ways it’s so exciting, because instead we’re stepping out into this world of possibilities that the generations who came before us never had before, we don’t have to follow that framework to a T if that’s not what we want with our lives.  There’s this swirling chaos of opportunities and choices spread out in front of us as we step out into adulthood, which is wonderful, but also can be so overwhelming.  And often results in an intense feeling of being lost in our 20’s, and feeling left behind when we compare ourselves to peers who appear to have ‘found’ themselves already in some area or another of their lives.

So many of us struggle with this feeling of being lost, and this fear of being left behind, and yet somehow, in the age of constant connection, we’re all still islands with these feelings.  Not realizing that almost everyone else around us is feeling that same thing, in some way or another.

I’m nearing the end of my 20’s. I turned 29 this year, and looking back on the past decade I’m happy with how it went.  I checked a lot of boxes, forged a lot of my own paths, and while I absolutely had periods of feeling lost, still do, and fears of being behind in some way or another, when I reflect I realize there are three distinct choices I made over and over again that really helped manage these feelings, and that, could I send a note back in time, I would tell my 20 year old self to be consciously aware of these decisions, and to make them over and over again.  Daily, weekly, yearly, to help myself through the rough patches, choose happiness, and lose less time to feeling unsure if I’m headed in the right direction, and that I think might just be helpful to some of you as well if you’re navigating your 20’s and trying to choose the right path for yourself.  I hope you find these three lessons valuable if you’re in this season of life yourself, and make sure you stick around until the end for my favourite one. 

Lesson #1:  This is an opportunity to try as many new things as possible

You may not know what you want to do yet, and that’s okay.  Whether that’s with your career, your relationships, or your personal hobbies and skills it’s all completely okay.  This is the perfect time to stretch yourself out of your comfort zone, try as many new things as possible, connect with new people in new ways, and even try the things you’ve always said you’d never do.  Sometimes, those are just the things that you in fact need to do to grow and discover new things about yourself.  In my 20’s I said yes.  Over and over again, and I wish I’d said yes to even more still.  I tried things that I enjoyed, things I didn’t enjoy, and things that I thought I would hate or did hate at the start but then learned so much from them.  I lived in different places, tried 3 different degrees and only finished with one of them, ran more than one business, traveled alone, traveled with friends and family, learned new skills I’d always wanted to learn like diving, learned new skills I thought I would hate but then loved like pole fitness, and pushed myself and my resilience to the limit by doing things that terrified me like going on solo back-country camping trips, starting businesses, forcing myself to speak at group events and meetings, and heading out to do as many things ‘alone’ as possible trusting that I could rely on myself and meet new people along the way.  This past decade I have done and tried so many different things and haven’t regretted a single one of them.  I wish there had been time to try more.  And the reason I recommend doing this, the reason I recommend throwing yourself at as many new opportunities as possible with single minded abandon and a yes person attitude, is because it helps with that feeling of being lost.  Somewhere along the way, I realized that feeling lost coincided with feeling static or stuck.  Whenever I felt stagnant, and like I wasn’t learning and growing and adding new experiences and stories to my life, then the fear of being left behind would start to creep in, and I would start to find myself paralyzed by feelings of directionlessness, and not being sure which direction to go.  What if I picked the wrong one?  And what I learned to do, is to keep moving and learning and growing, working hard to not to go static.  An object in motion stays in motion, and the best way to get out of the doldrums of feeling lost is to take action.  And the best part of this is that I mean any action.  You can not choose the wrong direction, because the very act of taking action on something will start to propel you forward again and that lost feeling will fade.  Not permanently, when you start to go stagnant again it’s like a mist that starts to creep back in, but in my experience the best way to get rid of it again, to outrun that risk is to take action and do the thing.  Any thing.  Say yes to the job, sign up for something you want to learn, agree to taking a class with a friend even if it’s something you never want to learn, do something yourself alone where you don’t rely on other people, identify something that scares the living daylights out of you, and go do it.  

Lesson #2: Every choice is a sacrifice, learn to be okay with that

I want you to sit with the fact that every choice you make is going to be a sacrifice in some other area of your life.  You cannot have it all.  Sit with that fact until you learn to be okay with it, and don’t let regret for the things you’ve sacrificed along the way shape you more than your appreciation for the things you’ve chosen to say yes to.  The more common word for this today is FOMO.  And people’s experience of FOMO must be at the highest it’s ever been because there are so many options in our lives.  But the thing is, we will always experience fomo if we let ourselves, because every choice we make to say yes to something will also say no to something else, and you can’t let that rule you.  In my opinion, the most important thing is that you don’t let fomo keep you from making a choice and moving ahead with something just because you’re worried about missing out on that other thing.  You are going to have to make choices and those choices will also be sacrifices.  Full stop.  

There are so many things that we all want to do, and be, and see, and experience, especially with social media showing us all the things other people are doing and being and seeing and experiencing in a way that makes it all look so great.  But, if you’ve made a choice for your life that has sacrificed another area, you need to learn to either be okay with that, or change course and try another decision, instead of letting yourself feel lost or behind in an area of your life that you haven’t actively chosen to pursue.  We all do this sometimes, and when I really sit back and look at it, it’s ridiculous, and it’s a perfect example of how we have to choose to have control over our own perspectives.  We can choose to focus on the opportunities we missed, or be grateful for the things we said yes to and how they’ve shaped our lives.  For example, when I graduated university I knew a lot of people who were going backpacking for a year or more, and who wanted to travel as wide and far as their dime could take them.  And I absolutely wanted to travel, BUT I also knew that I wanted to start my own business and start to build some semblance of security for myself early on.  I knew I would have an advantage by starting a business while I was young.  I knew that I had almost no responsibility at all in my life yet, and that this was my chance to take a risk and bet on myself.  So, I still clearly remember saying no to a good friend of mine who wanted me to travel with her for a year, and that was SO hard to do.  Instead, I moved home and dedicated the next few years to building and scaling my first business.  And, honestly I don’t regret it for the world, but I could.  I could choose instead to regret not getting to see 50 different countries by the time I turn 30.  On days when I felt like the business was going nowhere and I was seeing all these amazing photos of friends traveling, I absolutely could have felt huge fomo, BUT I would check in and see if I wanted to change my decision, if I wanted to stop what I was doing and go move to Australia instead, and I always centered back on the decision that I wanted more than anything, a head start on running my own business while I was young.  That business within just a couple of years gave me the freedom to take great trips every year, and gave me the ability to choose my own length and time of vacation, to travel without feeling absolutely strapped for cash all the time, and to travel while I was still doing things like saving for bigger goals in life like my future house, and saving for retirement, and THIS is the choice that I made and the sacrifice that also came along with it, and gratitude for the life it has so far allowed me to create for myself far outweighs the overall fomo of all the other things I sacrificed for it along the way, even if it didn’t feel that way every single day.

Lesson #3: Learn hard life skills from real teachers and resources.

Over time, I came to realize that a lot of the things I felt ‘lost’ about were rooted in hard life skills that I didn’t have a good foundation in.  I think that’s the case for a lot of other people too, and that’s actually what compelled me to start my most recent business ‘the how to adult school’ in the first place.  We go through this long education process with this shining light at the end of the tunnel of ‘graduation’ and ‘adult life’ leading us onward.  And we’re constantly being told that our school years are preparing us for our work and our lives as adults, but then many of us graduate, step out into the adult world, and realize that we have absolutely no idea what we’re doing.  In school we don’t actually learn a lot of the hard life skills that we need to thrive out in the adult world, but it’s juxtaposed by this idea we’ve been taught throughout school that it’s there to prepare us, and this misdirection leaves a lot of us thinking that maybe we just missed something.  I’ve noticed that people have a lot of embarrassment around not knowing some basic life skills, like managing money, or taking good care of your health, because they feel like somehow everyone else all knows these things and they just missed the memo somehow, but the truth is most of us are never actually taught things like money management skills.  Instead the system exists such that we’re sort of left to figure it all out ourselves, and there’s this overarching sentiment of everyone having to learn things through the school of hard knocks.  And people say horribly damaging things like, ‘we shouldn’t need to teach this, ‘if you’re smart you’ll figure it out’ but that’s insane.  We’re not born inherently understanding how to file taxes, just like we’re not born understanding how to calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle.  We’re taught one of these skills in school, but not the other. And over the past decade, the more that I thought about it the more that I realized it’s actually mental that we spend over 20 years attending school, but no one ever teaches us these vital life skills along the way.  So, the final piece of advice that I would give 20 year old me would be to save soooo much time and money and energy figuring things out the hard way, and just to seek out actual qualified teachers and learning resources early to learn this stuff.  Instead of making up my own accounting system for my business through trial and error I should have gone out and got a mentor to teach me how to manage my books right from the start, or spent the money on an accountant or even just audited an accounting course to learn how to do this really important life skill.  I wasted so much time and money learning things through trial and error that could have simply been taught, and it took me a few years to realize that I could pay just a little bit of money and learn how to do things right from the start.  Aside from my example, this could look like hiring a personal trainer to teach you how to build strength properly, or investing in a personal finance course to learn the basics of managing your finances before you screw something up and say ‘I wish I’d learned that earlier’.  There are so many instances I can look back on where I felt completely lost in an area of my life, and often times it was directly tied to a skill that I was missing.  And honestly if I’d figured this out when I was 20, as opposed to 25, I could have saved myself a lot of unnecessary tough lessons.  And this might actually be the most important thing I would tell the younger version of myself, that there’s no shame in not knowing something, and chances are if I have a question then 100 other people in the vicinity have the same question, and that the formal learning process doesn’t finish when you get that graduation certificate, and that this is something we should all embrace, and enjoy, and continue to invest in ourselves and our educations, because chances are if we’re feeling lost, there’s someone we can turn to, or something we can do to help us move past that feeling. 

Linked Resources

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