NO MORE SELF-REFLECTION: A Soon-To-Be 25 Year Old's Unsolicited Commentary About The Entire Age Group
Alright. Enough of the self-reflection.
I went into a pandemic at the age of 22, just two weeks away from turning 23. Now, mask mandates around the country are being lifted as I sit here, 24, two weeks away from turning 25 (quarter-life crisis, coupled by the fact that there is no WAY I look as good as Lori Harvey did on her 25th!).
Do you see how many numbers are in those sentences? A lot has happened.
Well, both a lot and very little.
A lot obviously happened. We have seen everything from a pandemic, killer bees, natural disasters, and widespread protests, all leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. To say that nothing has happened in the last few years would be a complete and total lie. Everything has happened.
BUT,
In the same sense, for those of us who found ourselves fresh out of - or coming out of - college during the pandemic, a weird kind of nothing happened.
The world had programmed us to know that those are the first years that you are really, truly, an adult. They are the years that you try and you fail and you make idiotic decisions, and you find ways to deal with that, and you explore and you meet people, and you grow because of the interactions that you have with the world.
Instead, we, along with the rest of the world, were inside. We missed the mistakes and the meeting new people. We were sitting home, responsibly by ourselves, left to kick-start early on the intense, meaningful contemplations of the world, who we are, what energies we put out, how we can become our best selves, what we have done right, what we have done wrong...
It's been two years. The list goes on and on.
Hot take, we have had more conversations with ourselves like these than any early-to-mid twenty-something ever should. Life became one endless therapy session with ourselves, broken up by zoom calls with friends about how much self reflecting we did that day.
Of course, there is a plus side to this. In a lot of ways I think we managed to emotionally mature a bit earlier than those in previous generations.
Normally, fresh out of college, when you are hunting for a job or trying to find new friends, you are too busy to really assess yourself emotionally. That comes farther down the line, when you are settled and established.
Instead, due to a lack of social life, we had time to think, combing out every emotional thread we have in our bodies. We are more emotionally aware than people who were our age ten years ago simply because we LITERALLY had nothing else to do.
This, of course, comes at a price. Sure, we may be more emotionally aware, but a lot was sacrificed to become that way.
People in their twenties, especially their early twenties, are inherently selfish. It's simply what we do. We have to be. It's the first time in your life that you are actually and completely on your own, no academic structure necessarily holding you, no parents setting rules, where you can be fully in charge of you.
To the defensive person who immediately said, "I'm not selfish!" right away: I'm not saying you don't think about others or put others before yourself or actively try to take things for yourself. It's more to say that, to stereotype the decades of ages we go through as humans, people in their 20s are not typically responsible for anyone other than ourselves. If we want to go out, we can. If we want to sleep in the middle of the day, sure. If we want to walk across the country with our leg tied to our best friend, literally no one is stopping us.
HOWEVER, for a group of people that are supposed to be self-involved, all of this time of self-reflection isn't really great. On TOP of that, no one in their 20s is fully cooked. No one is done growing up. We are grown ups, but if you're reading this at the ripe age of 22 and you're like, "nah, this is it," you should prepare yourself, because your brain literally isn't done.
That means, when you do all of your self reflection, you will undoubtedly hit a wall: An anxiety wall where your life experience simply ends and you find yourself plum out of answers. We sit and grapple with ourselves, wondering why we are so sad and anxious and just can't seem to figure everything out, but REALLY that's just the human body's way of saying YOU WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO GET HERE YET! I DIDN'T WRITE THIS PART! We jumped ahead.
Now, however, our minds have gotten addicted to the high of solving the puzzle of who we are as people - a puzzle that is ever re-tangling itself because, again, our brains are still cooking. We sit with the unfinished fears and anxieties, day in and day out, trying to figure out something that literally isn't even there yet. It's like we are each stuck at the bottom of our own individual generational wells, and you know what?
IT'S REALLY HARD TO MAKE FRIENDS FROM THE BOTTOM OF A WELL.
Those of us around the age of twenty five are coming out of this pandemic with the emotional awareness of a forty year old and the social awareness of a Kindergartner who needs to learn how to make friends.
Globally, our social skill set has gotten a little rusty, but what is particularly curious to me is the specific effect that it had on people around my age (because I am in my 20s, and we are selfish).
Furthermore, our social stunting was very niche compared to other generations of people.
First of all, a lot of us have never had to make friends outside of a school or organization setting. The years where you are out, finding a job and exploring straight up did not happen for us. We have only ever been in situations where some higher being (not like God, I mean like an admissions director) said, "These are the people you will spend the majority of your time with," and we said, "Okay."
Now, those of us who graduated just before or during the pandemic are YEARS removed from that AND we still haven't tried out our social skills anywhere else. We talked to people we've known for years in Zoom calls, which were lovely, magical moments that kept us sane, but the idea of walking into an ACTUAL room and making "adult friends?" Wild.
On the exact OPPOSITE side, while we definitely did not have the time or opportunity to meet anyone in person, we are also part of the most connected generation ever. Through social media, dating apps, and Zoom (Zoom really came out on top of the pandemic, didn't it?), we became experts at meeting and talking to people through the internet.
In the past, that ratio of interpersonal interactions to electronic interactions fluctuated, but probably stayed around even. Over the past few years, this has swung fully out of proportion, majorly erring on the side of electronics. While everyone was obviously doing most of their communicating over the computer, our downfall is that we were GOOD at it.
We as an age group - Zillenials - have always been impressively quick with technology. We sat in elementary school computer classes, rolling our eyes because we had taught ourselves what the teachers were trying to teach us back when we were in kindergarten. So, when the world went online, our technologically inclined brains said, "Okay!" and we trained our fresh out of college social lives to operate from a screen to screen basis.
So, now, as we come out from inside, we are rejoining the world having grown comfortable snuggling up inside our little self-reflective wells and communicating through a two-screen distance. Honestly, Regency Era couples did not even have this much distance between them. We've all seen Bridgerton.
Let me be clear: This is not a woe-is-me piece. This is not a we-are-so-sad-article. Honestly, this is a we-need-to-get-over-ourselves article. We need to shake off the over-thinking, self-analysis based parts of ourselves and just go back to living, because we're not ready for that part yet. It will be a slow climb, but we have to meet people, connect, and go on adventures. Not every action and decision can be done or made to make sure we are protecting the sense of self of the person we want to be.
You grow by connecting with others and, at an INCREDIBLY socially formative time, we seemed to have missed that. People joke and say that you need to make mistakes in your twenties. The thing is: it's not a joke. You absolutely do. You can search through your brain as much as you want, trying to create the perfect, immovable statue of yourself, but if that statue breaks the second it goes to interact with the world, then it was never real to begin with.
So honestly, 20-somethings...I'm going to say something to all of you (all of us), that I don't think any generation of 20-somethings has been advised to do:
Chill out, get drunk, and make new friends. In this way, we shall save the world.
