Looking Back on My Twenties & Where They Took Me

I’ve always been someone with one foot in the past, drawn irresistibly by the pull of expired possibilities. No matter how enticing the present, I can never give myself to it wholly. One foot is planted there, the other lingers behind—haunted by the paths I didn’t tread. If I’m in a bad moment, I think back to happier times (more often than not, when I was in America). If I’m in a good moment, I mourn its passing before it’s even relegated to memory, instead of just sitting in it and enjoying it.

                I’ve had plenty of good moments in 2024 so far. Generally speaking, life has been treating me well. I might not feel happy a lot of the time, but when I take stock of the facts, I can’t deny that my circumstances now are better than they were before. Not just better, but the best they’ve ever been. I’ve lasted a full year at my current job, which is easily the best job I’ve ever had. It pays well for what I do, the commute is pretty short, and it’s got a generous benefits package. I have a good amount of close friends here in London. I’m better than I used to be at making small talk and being myself with people I don’t know very well. I’ve got a great living situation—wonderful roommates I feel comfortable with, every amenity I could ever need within short walking distance, a house with plenty of space and good utilities. Between all of that—my job, my friends, and my house—I feel like I’ve got more control over my life than I’ve ever had before, which is a nice feeling.

                That sense of self-possession feels really nice, and it’s something I never had during my twenties. But I wouldn’t say I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. I’m not even sure I’d say I’m happy. It makes me wonder—what’s missing? What would it take to genuinely love my life? Or is unhappiness just the default setting?

                I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in relation to my twenties and all the roads I didn’t take. I’ve been thinking about the past, present, and future. And through my conversations with friends, I’ve also been thinking about the post-education journeys of other people in my generation. I know so many people, myself included, that entered adulthood with only a vague plan or simply no plan at all. It seems like most people I have met down the years aren’t following a blueprint. Like me, they’ve found themselves in places they hadn’t expected be in. Like me, they’re unsure what’s the best option for them long-term, and are trying their best to figure things out. The further into your twenties you get, the less able you feel to choose the path ahead of you. You start to think: I’ll just take whatever I can get.

                I’m now older than my parents were when they had me. I was thinking about how I’m finally at a point where I can say: I knew my parents when they were my age. It’s a strange feeling, because I remember looking at my parents growing up as representing complete stability. They never appeared lost, out of control, or like they were winging it. They seemed to know everything and understood the way forward. It seemed impossible to imagine them as anything other than parents. Even when I looked at photo evidence of them in their younger years with oversized square glasses and dodgy barnets, it was like looking at photos of Eleanor Roosevelt or David Ben-Gurion. You knew on a rational level that they were real, but they didn’t feel real. It was like looking into a different reality, with no resemblance to my own. Even their teenage smiles seemed somehow more refined, speaking to an innate maturity that stood in contrast to my own long-standing image of myself as something crude, erratic, and incomplete.

                I’m turning 32 tomorrow. Fuck me. When I was a kid, 32 seemed so far away that I couldn’t imagine myself actually getting there. All of a sudden I’m here. And I still don’t really know myself. I hardly understand the world or my place in it. As a kid, I would have looked at a 32-year-old as a complete person—someone that had basically finished their character development and lived their life with a sense of clarity. People that age were teachers, police officers, doctors, hairdressers, and shopkeepers. They were homeowners and parents. It seemed like they played distinct roles in society with a sense of permanence. You were Billy the Milkman or Debbie the Butcher.

                Obviously, it was never that simple—but that’s how I saw things as a kid. And I’d always assumed that that would be the same for me when I eventually reached that age. It felt so far away that it seemed pointless to plan for in any great detail, but I took it as a given that by 30 I’d be married, have children, and work a career job that defined me somehow. That I’d be just like Herman the Janitor or Carol the Special Forces Combat Marine. But as I said earlier, I have a career job now—one I really like, in fact—but I wouldn’t say it defines me in any way. I don’t think of myself as Michael the Copywriter, and I doubt anyone else does either.

                Even though I intend to be a copywriter for the foreseeable future, copywriting still feels like simply something I’m currently doing. Just something I’ve found that works. I see my friends the same way—their jobs don’t feel tied to their sense of identity, and maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t like the idea of my job being my life. It’s been said that we live in a post-career world, that nowadays a job is just a means to pay the bills. And it’s an observation that certainly rings true for me when I look at myself and others of my generation. The expectations we had for the world of work growing up feel more and more like a fiction.

                When I see my own post-education journey reflected in the journeys of my friends and peers, I wonder what the underlying factor is. We’re all completely different people, with different interests, abilities, upbringings, and values. And yet there seems to be the same sense of impermanence, that same feeling of disenfranchisement, the notion that we’re each searching for something that will make us somehow complete.

                My take on it is that we all came of age in the context of the Global Financial Crisis and (in the UK at least) the housing crisis. The abject failure of neoliberalism and trickle-down economics resulted in a shrinking middle class and a decline in social mobility. For millennials this created a world of impermanence. People didn’t own things. They rented, they leased, they waited. They made debt repayments instead of paying off mortgages or building capital. University degrees held less professional value yet cost substantially more. The world of work offered little except zero-hour contracts, unpaid internships, and long hours carrying out tasks above your paygrade.

                The millennial experience is one of waiting for your turn and gradually realizing year by year that it’s not going to come. Everything that the world promised you growing up was a lie. Your parents bought their first house for the street value equivalent of a McChicken sandwich and a back-alley handjob. Meanwhile you’re living with your parents at 30 years old and getting turned down for entry-level admin jobs because of a lack of experience.

                It’s this environment, in my opinion, that has led so many people of my generation to feel anchorless and adrift, lacking in secure foundations or a distinct sense of identity. It’s no wonder that, with a lack of long-term options, people turned to short-term pursuits. In a world that seemingly held no place for them, millennials went traveling, they dabbled in get-rich-quick schemes, they tried to turn hobbies into remote jobs, they became perpetual students, or they did nothing at all. With so many digital media distractions, they became addicted to the 24/7 dopamine-rush escapism offered by social media, TV shows, video games, and pornography. They stayed with their parents because the cost of living was so high, and maybe that meant they held onto their youth longer than previous generations. Maybe that’s why I don’t resemble my parents when they were my age. My dad looking like Helmut Kohl in all my mom’s polaroids.

                This was my twenties, and the twenties of my friends. For some of us, myself included, extending a vaguely adolescent lifestyle was a conscious choice. Few people knew what they wanted to be when they were 18, but they suddenly had to make important decisions that would determine their future. For many people, that meant university—not as a conduit to a specific career, but because it was the thing to do. Many of us tried not to think about what would actually happen once we graduated university in a few years. I for one felt quite paralyzed after I finished my undergrad degree at the University of Winchester. I didn’t feel like I’d been given the tools or the knowledge to navigate the professional world. For the first time in my life, there wasn’t a roadmap laid out for me telling me where to go, what to do, who to be. Time passed by and I stood still. Every year felt like a blank slate that I didn’t know how to fill. Michael the Unready! Watching his twenties slip through his fingers.

                Even if you couldn’t get a job, you needed a thing. My thing became traveling to the USA in the summers. I’d save up by working as a cleaner, warehouse laborer, or dishwasher for most of the year, then I’d visit my friends Aaron and Anne-Marie for a few months. I don’t regret it, but obviously it delayed my entry into “adulthood” in the sense of having a career or my own living place. I was living in a series of short-term pursuits, because I didn’t think a future was possible. I was also depressed to the point that I didn’t care about helping myself or what happened to me down the line. In my mind, I wasn’t something worth investing in.

But if I hadn’t gone on those trips to America, I think my twenties would have been quite bleak. The benefit of having more savings would have come at the expense of my personal growth. I think I would have been more isolated, more infantile, and less empathetic. America was a form of escapism, but it was still the real world. Without it, I think I’d probably have sought my escape in the digital one. Eventually, I think I’d have strongly considered clocking out.

                Those American summers were a lot more than tubing down the Chippewa River, going to ball games, or eating barbecue spare ribs. I’ve never felt less alone than when I was there. I wasn’t happy with myself, but I was happy. It saw my highest highs—and it came with a lot of personal growth. I wouldn’t have gone through the same self-reflection if I was sat in my childhood bedroom playing video games. I’m a big believer that it’s best to be out there in the real world, miscommunicating with people, transgressing their boundaries, learning from their otherness. And in a more pragmatic sense, if I hadn’t traveled to the USA, then I’d never have started this blog—and it was this blog that landed me my first copywriting job, which then enabled me to build a career. The very thing I didn’t know how to get when I graduated from Winchester in 2014.

                So you can see how copywriting wasn’t really the plan, but something that I ended up with. And I feel like many people of my generation can relate to that. Not every millennial’s story is the same of course. There are plenty of people who were able to make better use of their time, who had a clear idea of what to do and how to do it. I think the key differentiator is having a plan—or having a feasible plan, at least. The more I look back on my Creative Writing degree, the more I start to think that arts degrees are a scam. But in many ways, it didn’t feel like I had too much of a choice when I was 18. I was never any good at science, math, or technology. While I did pick Creative Writing because I enjoyed it, I also picked it because writing was frankly the only thing I was good at. If it hadn’t been Creative Writing, I would have gone with Film Studies—and my job prospects after graduation would have been about the same. So I don’t regret my undergrad degree, but I do think the education system, in conjunction with the macroeconomic factors of the 21^st century, led to a lot of people in my generation feeling alienated, hopeless, and disenfranchised. Not every millennial’s post-education fortunes have been the same, but I do feel that there is a phenomenon of feeling lost that is unique to my generation.

                I was initially going to title this post “Regrets of the Past & Hopes for the Future”, but I don’t think that really fits what I’m trying to write about. While I do have plenty of regrets, I like where I’ve ended up. All of the decisions I made throughout my twenties brought me to where I am now. What I’m less clear on is where I go from here. I like my present circumstances, but I don’t know how to make the best of them. I definitely want to use my time better in my thirties than I did in my twenties, where it felt like I was idle for so long. It’s some comfort that the strange journey I’ve been on since the summer of 2014 has led to a more solid foundation. I feel like I’ve got something to build on—and the lesson I think I should take from my twenties is to plan more and to plan well.