Monday, April 1, 2013

Brilliant People


For the past few years I’ve been watching my friends and myself go through our quarter life crisis. Why? Because, we all want something. Problem is, we don’t know what that something is. You see, late teens and early twenties are there to have fun, make mistakes, to be reckless. It was our time to figure it out. Now that we’re in our mid to late 20’s, this is when the life we were preparing for actually starts happening. We were told the we had plenty of time to figure it out and now we still have no idea what we’re doing but have to make some uneducated decisions anyway.

But we were young and the life we started then may not work for us now and now we have it live with it because we worked so hard and it was all for nothing if we change it all now but we’re still young and this is our chance, if ever we will have one, to get it right and what will people think and maybe it’s all a big mistake. But we still don’t know.

So what now?

 Most of us are on a path. A career, not just a job. A relationship, not just dating. We have a little savings or getting to the end of paying off our debt (thanks early 20’s). So should we follow our parents lead? Get married and have kids? No, that would be silly. We’re not ready for that. We’ve only just figured out how to spew without smudging our lipstick.  Let’s not complicate things.

Some of our friends have bought a house, a dog and a baby. I know it seems horrible but it feels like they have admitted defeat. A job that pays the bills and a ho-hum house that has “a big garden”. Remember when we avoided houses with gardens because that meant we had to mow the lawn? No one wants to do that on a Sunday morning with a hangover.

But these people don’t have hang overs anymore. They have 2 glasses of wine rather than two bottles and get home at a reasonable hour. Are we really ready for that? Is that what our life will become or are we just being childish by trying to hold onto our last shards of youth? Are we just Peter Pan when it’s time to become Wendy?

 

Maybe we are truly brilliant people who want more from life than to be a banker. What if we are THOSE people that do it all wrong but get it all right because we did what felt good and not the sensible thing. Not the thing that everyone else is doing. You know THAT thing., that’s not us. We’re special and we know this because we are much wittier than our banker friends. We don’t fit in with them so we must be the other type.

But here we are at the axis between young adulthood and a real grown up. Having no idea what we want but just wanting more than everyone else is settling for.