Is 30 the new 20?

One of my friends from high school shared this video to facebook the other day and I'm glad that, for once, I bothered to open the link. My post will make more sense if you take the time to do the same.

In this video Meg Jay articulates a lot of the things that have been bothering me lately. 

I am 22 years old. 

To the gymnasts I coach, 22 sounds so grown up. The other day I was asked by a 7 year old whether I was "married yet". To my primary school aged gymnasts, I have lived and experienced every part of life that they can imagine right now. I have finished primary school, I have finished secondary school and I even have one university degree. 

Children are very literal at this age, and until I told them otherwise, most of my primary school aged gymnasts assumed that all I must be a full-time gymnastics coach, because that is the only thing they have seen me do. Their beautiful little brains don't have a very well formed idea (yet) about what comes next in life after education. The thing lots of these kids see as the next step in life is marriage and children, I suspect because that is what just about all the adults they know (their parents, their friends' parents) are doing. 

From my side of the fence, this assumption is an interesting one. Once upon a time, these little girls would basically have been correct. However, nowadays, the time between finishing education and marrying for the first time is, for most people, getting much longer. 

In previous generations this was not the norm. According to the ABS, in 1974 the average age when getting married for the first time was 23.3 for men and 20.9 for women. We can draw from this that a man who went to university for 3 or 4 years would have roughly 1-3 years as an unmarried adult post-tertiary education, or 5 years if he completed high school and went straight into work. Women marrying for the first time in 1974 would probably have been still in their final years of uni or have had 2-3 years working as an unmarried adult post-high school. 

The most recent data has Australian men getting married for the first time, on average, at 31.4 and women at 29.2, with rates of pre-marital cohabitation approaching 80%. Once tertiary educated women had about 1-3 years of freedom post tertiary education, they now have 8-9 years. 

Whilst the time between education and "settling down" approaches an entire decade in duration, I don't feel like I have very much quality information about what I should be doing with this time. 

Should I still be studying at undergrad level? Should I have started my career already? Should I be in a serious relationship? Am I going to die alone if I don't start one soon? Do I want marriage and children in my future? Am I letting some of my strengths and abilities waste away?

I have a lot of questions and I lot of worries.

Meg Jay thinks that the twenties is a "developmental sweet spot" for adulthood, the time to lay the foundations for the type of adult life you want to lead. She encourages "twenty somethings" to reclaim their twenties and make purposeful decisions about career, love and happiness. 

"You are so young!" I keep being told and I guess I am. But here's the thing, I'm not going to be 22 forever and I don't feel like I'm building a happy future for myself. I don't feel like what I'm doing now is "setting myself up" for the kind of real life adulthood I once envisioned for myself. I don't feel like I'm building anything, I'm just going through the motions. 

Sure, I'm studying, but am I really gaining any of this valuable "identity capital" here and now in my twenties? I have a degree but I have a hard time accepting that my arts degree could be considered an achievement. I also have a solid part-time employment history, however, I am still very unsure about what kind of career I want. I am drifting in a direction, but I'm lacking in conviction.

As for love and happiness... The long term status on both of those things can be illustrated with the image below:

Both love and happiness are something that are filed snugly in the "too hard" basket. This has been a conscious choice made firstly out of a knowledge of my limitations, but remains out of anxiety and fear. I can know see that fear and anxiety is increasingly the rationale behind most of my choices. 

Happiness is something that is difficult to define. It is more of a by-product of a healthy, well functioning life than a "thing" in its own right. Happiness to me does not mean walking around in a bliss like state. Life will always have ups and downs. My definition of happiness is when, more often than not, you wake up in the morning looking forward to or excited about something you are going to do that day. An active desire to partake in one's own existence, if you like. 

Now I'm not saying that I'm miserable, I'm not. But it has been a long time since I felt generally positive about going about my daily life. 

I am anxious about the fact that I don't have a clear picture of what I want. What I know for sure is that I don't want to find myself sitting alone in a caravan on the edge of a forest, surrounded by cats and undergraduate degrees, wondering, "what happened?" At the moment, that's where I feel like I'm headed. 

That being said, I know it's not all doom and gloom. I think that Jay is right about most "twenty somethings" being only a few well considered choices away from a much happier life and I hope that I am no exception. Part of my problem is I am well aware of how important the decision I make now are, I know they count and will have a dramatic impact of the rest of my life. 

I know that, as a woman, I would be foolish not to give any thought to my reproductive options. Whilst I don't know if I want a family, I don't want to get to 35 or 40 and find out that I do out of discovering that I can't. I know that if I want certain career options to be available to me, there is study I need to complete and that it is easier to do that now than later. I know that if I don't want to end up alone in a forest, surrounded by cats, I will probably have to put myself "out there" eventually.

However, this knowledge, instead of helping me, makes me very anxious and fearful that I'm messing up my life. 

http://www.gifday.com/cat-chasing-tail/

I'm chasing my tail. I'm trying hard to solve this conundrum by myself, but I'm not getting very far. You can't keep doing the same things you've always done and expect a different outcome. 

To use Jay's analogy, I am a 22 year old aeroplane just leaving Melbourne International Airport, gaining speed toward the end of the runway, still unsure whether I want to end up in Los Angeles or Greenland. What is become apparent is that, after spending so much time mulling this over in my own head, I need to employ an air traffic controller, of sorts, to help to me make the choice.