THOUGHTS
We consume all these stories when we’re young-er, like school-young, that tell us to dream big. They do this by explicitly, Hollywood-style saying “dream big.” They also do it by showing us characters who dream big, then face some hardship or a lot of hardships, or barely any, and then come out the other side happy and healthy and in love.
A lot of the books I’ve been reading lately (that’s the magic of algorithmic recommendations) seem to be about the characters who came out of the twenties tunnel only to find that The Dream wasn’t on the other side. Maybe it got caught on the tunnel wall, maybe we dropped it in one of the dark bits, maybe we were going too fast for it to keep up, or too slow, and it just sped ahead.
Who knows?
Suddenly, these characters, not me — never first person — these characters are thirty (and then some), and it’s supposed to feel significant and incite some sort of revelation. It’s supposed to feel BIG, like a checkpoint or a marathon mile-marker: collect ribbon and retinol cream here.
Thirty, apparently, is like a lap flag in F1. So you look at it, and you take stock. The tires are tired but working. You have fuel, and your vision is clear (maybe a little myopic, yet nothing hipster glasses can’t fix). But the guy is just a guy, or lo and behold: there is no guy. Friends are not sit-com co-dependent, or they’re too dependent, or maybe they’re all living abroad — ‘cos that happens.
Your job is just a job, or it’s a shitty job or a regular job with a shitty boss, or it’s a great job with no pay, or it’s a good job, but you’re still wondering if you should be doing something else, something more because it feels like everyone else is.
You have your own place, or you don’t, and maybe it looks like you thought it would, and maybe it doesn’t. You’re living with your parents and saving a load of money, or have a love-hate relationship with your roommates, or you have to put up with your significant other’s cat, or you live by yourself in a tiny place you love but had to kill the cockroach yourself and can sometimes feel lonely at the end of the day.
You are one app away from tracking your expenses like a grown-up. You are a grown-up, but you have no idea what that means. You are not like your parents were at this age. You’ve got no frame of reference.
We don’t really know how to be ‘grown-up millennials.’ If our generation’s mandate was “find your bliss”, then there is no map. There is no golden compass. And as exciting as that can feel sometimes, it can also feel scary or frustrating or all of the above. It can be a lot of pressure. There isn’t a participation ribbon for getting here, whatever that would look like. And because we’re all going at it a different way, it’s easy to forget that we’re all trudging along. We’re all just figuring it out.
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