I’m turning 26 in a few days which marks the second quarter of a century. Getting older can seem a bit scary to me. It seems like there is a big divide within my peers of people knowing what they want out of life (which can be a steady job, a family and a house) and others that can’t answer that question just yet. I’m part of that second category. Considering myself an ambitious young women who doesn’t like to sit still, I can feel myself torn between discovering the world and staying put to work on my career. Call it a battle between the heart and the head or just plain old quarter life crisis (but don’t say that out loud).
This made me turn to my friends and I noticed I’m not the only one who couldn’t answer this question. I have friends that are quitting their jobs to go back to school or go traveling for a year and almost all of them have changed jobs at least once (FYI we’re about 3 years into the working life). As exemplary generation Y kids, we believe that a great career is a career in which we truly love our jobs. “If you love you’re job, you won’t have to work a day in your life” and that kind of thing. A lot has been written about generation Y and our expectations of life – more often negative than positive-. And yes, it is true, we do have very high expectations of life but we’re also prepared to work hard to get where we want to go.
26, that’s getting quite close to the big Tree O. Because we’re all working towards our version of the perfect life, it can sometimes feel like a race against the clock. You have certain expectations of life (personal and professional) and 30 seems like the age upon which you should have achieved most of them. Having hopped over the 25 threshold, I decided the time had come to grab the bull by its horns and started to devise a plan. When reading the wonderful article called “The Business Of A Successful Lifestyle and How To Create Your Own” and seeing how far the guys of The Buried Life have come with their list, it’s clear that creating the perfect life for yourself is all in our own hands: decisions, goals and achievements. Because I don’t want the traditional lifestyle of a 9-5 job and a white picket fence, I want to create my own lifestyle, that for me would -in the long run- fits my desire to travel ànd a successful career. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there is anything wrong with any type of lifestyle, everyone chooses what they want to do and that’s all fine.
