Hey everyone!
It was exactly four Sundays ago that I was supposed to write this Insight. And that’s how we know it is primarily about things like Adulting or a failed attempt at it because let’s face it: which adult doesn’t procrastinate what they truly want to do, until it becomes embarrassingly heavy to deal with and then eventually, when they have exhausted all resources of procrastination, that they compile all their mortal will and power to bring themselves to do what they were supposed to do four Sundays ago.
And this could be anything: buying your best friend’s birthday gift, writing a blog-post, doing an assignment, meeting a deadline, cleaning your room, dishes, clothes, emotional shit, etc. Lately I’ve been thinking that adulting is all about collecting your shit and stopping it from spilling over in the wrong places, like dinner tables and work-place conversations or just in the middle of a shopping mall, looking at price tags of cute shoes and bags, to name a few.
Let’s for the sake of this article pretend that COVID never happened, okay. Because life is going on, nonetheless, isn’t it? Most things are moving forward like a skeleton, albeit stripped of the flesh and skin of extravagant celebrations, company and all the unnecessary buzz that characterizes the charm of normal. Never has an entire generation ever craved for things to be normal? Isn’t it strange?
And this is the idea we’re going to devour today: the cravings of the generation of 21 year-olds in 21st century. The context is common across all people in their late teens and early twenties, but since I’m 21 and it made a pretty alliteration, I went with that figure.
There are a lot of things that we’ve experienced differently as compared to our parents, or even millennials, the most common ones being – the digital age of information, social media, knowledge economy, COVID and just the rapidity in the pace of our lives. But what I’m going to pick on today is a small piece in this puzzle – the craving for an individual identity and the pressing desire to have it, as soon as possible.
From middle class families of third world countries to trust fund babies of venture capitalists, our generation is characterized by the need to make a place for themselves in this wide world, on their own. Earlier kids followed the footsteps of their parents, walked a path already paved for them. Not to discredit our predecessors, but they were part of an agricultural or industrial economy, where establishment preceded eminence, and that is what worked. But here in the knowledge economy, knowledge and skill is what drives growth; eminence and establishment is something, we’re moving against. While we’re busy chasing disruptions, we’re all heading in a direction where we can find our individual identities.
And a large factor to ensure this independent identity is financial stability, which means we’re chasing jobs, sources of income, skills, education, degrees, fame – literally anything that ensures a livelihood to match our increasing lifestyle expectations. And saying that this search isn’t easy, is an understatement.
From the fields of medicine, law, technology and engineering, to the creative fields of art, drama, music or comedy, everywhere, the access to resource is cheap and so the competition is fierce. In some traditional forms of education, the established modes of proving merit is driving sixteen year-olds to part-time jobs, freelance gigs and internships – all in parallel with the continuous upskilling and learning requirements of their respective fields. This is sucking the life out of many, to say the least.
And yet it comes with the baggage of managing returns on investment - another concept of adulting - saving money for the time you’d have actual responsibilities. Like what is that even supposed to mean?
The cost of living is at an all time high in most urban, sub-urban cities of the world and once you move out of your parent’s house, this cost of living is an actual responsibility. From paying rent to bills – gas, electric, water, milk, groceries, or medicine - nobody teaches this to us, ever. I think those who get to study Home Economics in high school are some of the luckiest of young adults. And talking to money, let me introduce two very heavy words in front of you, which if you lie in the target age group of this article, I’m sure you would have no idea about, unless of-course you’re an economics or business major – Mortgage and Insurance.
Our parents will tell us about Gods, festivals, rituals, their ancestors, what to eat, what to wear, where to go, whom to befriend, even whom to date – but they won’t teach us this- how to do taxes, how to apply for loans, how to make money work for us. It is now that I regret all those times I went inside my room when the financial agents came to talk premiums and taxes. What were we thinking that we’d never grow up!
The thing is if this individual identity was just tied to a financial security, then it would be one kind of problem to deal with. But this identity is multi-fold, it has so many aspects, that we spend a decade or so, just exploring all the facets of our identities that are quite possibly still by the end of it, only under construction.
We want to find a passion, incorporate that passion as a part of our life – either as a side hustle, or as a hobby, as a source of income or as a social identity. We want to build or belong to communities around it. We want to find a cause and work for that cause because we’re self-actualized like that. And there’s nothing wrong with it, in-fact it’s probably the most noble of pursuits there ever could be. But I can’t help noticing a shade of overhype here.
The way rom-coms have spoilt love for us, so have coming-of-age films spoilt passion, by showing us the too good to be real stories. Like the idea of love isn’t wrong but its mainstream portrayal is deceptive, so is the case with passion. And we’re all under its influence. We forget how much it takes for one person to make a mark in one field, and that how much of it isn’t just hard-work or focus or sacrifice; but also luck, fate, will-power, grit and talent. And there are many untold stories of a passion misplaced or unexplored and most often, these stories are in the shelf along with stories that eat dust, but they’re far from being stories of failure.
This parallel between romance and passion just brings me to another aspect of unravelling our life as new adults, which is dating – and you can be at any point in the whole spectrum – un-interested, ready to mingle, committed, engaged or married, but it’s such a big part of our life now, that we can’t not talk about it, when we’re discussing the struggles of adulting. For many people, it’s a process of hit and miss, trials and errors until there’s a perfect match, or family obligation or anything in between; but some are lucky to find it early and they manage to hold onto it. In either case, the dynamic forces of life that play our circumstances make things only worse, for most people.
And when it comes to juggling priorities between family, friends, career and love, we can almost ever have it all. This is to the say the least without digging into depths of the emotional work and effort it takes to keep things together when so much is changing and you’re changing with it.
We over-ambitious youngsters who come from humble families, grow up hiding our romantic life from our parents, fighting for the right to choose our own life-partners and yet in reality, simply struggle with that whole process. This isn’t to say that we don’t want the right, we sure do, but it’s just another extra task on the to-do list now, isn’t it?
And if you’ve self-evaluated yourself against these parameters and successfully aced the test of adulting, then I have a bouncer coming your way called a functioning social life. This could manifest in different forms for different people, whether you go clubbing every Saturday or on weekend trips every month, depending on the balance in your account, the remainder of your friends and any last cell of energy after battling all the above, you should ideally make a social life event possible from it. And let’s just say, we’re barely hanging by the straw.
Meeting new people amidst all this is a far-fetch even for the most outgoing of souls, but if you do manage to meet new people outside of the usual clusters, there’s a plethora of ground to cover before you can strike a casual conversation beyond the weather and traffic. You’ve to keep up with so many TV series, movies, albums, elections, controversies and scandals, and not just be aware of them, but also have well thought of opinions to ensure a stimulating conversation.
Good-luck putting up with all the shit, we just talked about. But I didn’t write a 1700 word essay just to depress you. The actual reason I sat down to articulate our pressure points is because, we don’t give ourselves enough credit for who we are. Whether we’ve got all things sorted or none, we’re all trying hard to create a place for ourselves in this wide world. And there’s no way it’s going to get easier. But in time, you’ll learn, I’ll learn and we’ll all grow strong enough to hold our line to the end of it.
It might seem at 20, that life is too short and all our time stops being our own once we hit “thirty” or “marriage” or “actual responsibility” but I’m pretty sure it’s a general phenomenon: this feeling that life is too short. I’ve heard one too many wise people say, the older you get, the longer you feel you have to live.
So take it easy my dear friend. You don’t have to spend all your energy just yet. Work hard, hustle, do every excessive adulting thing you can imagine, but also breakdown, take a day off, slow the pace from time to time and re-evaluate how much of a progress you’ve made. And then you’ll be back to feeling motivated sooner than you thought!
Happy Adulting!
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