I "agree", but draw the exact opposite conclusions.
You should take your 20's seriously... because it's the only time in your life that you aren't encumbered by building a career, having kids, etc.
So you should take your 20's to do the things that you won't be able to do later. Work as a bartender, play in a band, travel the world on the cheap, teach English abroad, date the kind of people you wouldn't marry. You don't have serious responsibilities, so take advantage of that while you can.
Don't waste your 20's "building a career". You've got your 30's and 40's and 50's to do that. Don't be in a rush to have kids too soon.
Obviously, don't throw your 20's away. But spend them doing life-experience-focused things, not career- or family-focused.
And this gets at the author's third point: "Your brain finishes forming in your 20′s". If that's even true (although I doubt it), then you'd better get in all those varied life experiences sooner rather than later. Learn a second language, learn to cook, learn to play music.
Don't waste your 20's on grinding away at traditionally career-oriented stuff. That part of your brain is probably already fine. Your 20's is the time to look for diversity in your life, not to focus narrowly on any particular part. You've got all the decades afterward to work on narrow refinement and career progression...
I'm a 29-year old male who spent his 20s building a career I love and now has a 6-month old daughter, so this quote:
> Don't waste your 20's "building a career". You've got your 30's and 40's and 50's to do that. Don't be in a rush to have kids too soon.
Doesn't really make sense to me. If you don't build a career and finances in your 20s, you either can't afford to have a kid in your early 30s or you have one and can't provide the life and opportunities they should have. And it seems you skipped over the part about women having extreme difficulties having children later than their mid-30s, or the children they have are at a higher risk of birth defects and miscarriages. Typically, a guy by himself cannot create a child without a woman, so if you're going to party in your 20s and not think about finances and a career until your 30s, and kids later than that, you should know going in that your partner will be need to be much younger than you to accomplish this.
I don't mean to ask personal questions here, but it seems apropos considering your guidance: how old are you? do you have a spouse? a son or daughter? Does your guidance match up with how you've lived your life, and are you now successfully balancing a budding career and family in your older years after living your 20s in various countries like China, France, Brazil and others?
In my late twenties I spent three full years smoking weed everyday. I didn't build a career in my 20s, I just fucked around because I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I smoked weed and partied. I had a long-term relationship in my 20s, but we broke up and at 30 I was single again. I was thoroughly lost. I slept on a friends couch for 5 months in a row. All in all, not a very bright future, right? Wrong!
I'm 35 now, I quit my job & moved abroad, became an independent web developer, met a wonderful woman who's 5 months pregnant with our firstborn, I've been asked (!) to lead the development team of a highly rated startup and have been making more money than any of my peers for the last few years... So you know: things can change. It's not a strict requirement to spend your 20s all serious - even if you don't, you can still be successful.
One of Britain's wealthiest men had a similar experience in his 20s. He didn't get started or even have a bank account until he was 30: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Bannatyne
From everything I have read, the risk doubles. That may sound like a big deal, but quoting from memory, it doubles from a 0.5% chance to a 1% chance, which is still exceedingly low odds. I'm not sure that risk alone is enough to warrant holding back on having children later in life.
I know two couples who waited till their mid-30s to have children and after various miscarriages they both delivered boys with Down Syndrome, so was that worth partying in their 20s? No.
Not everyone who has kids in their mid-30s gets a kid with Down syndrome, and not everyone who has kids in their mid-30s does so because they were partying.
In whose opinion? It may shock you to learn that parents of children with down-syndrome frequently do not view it as the life-ruining event you make it out to be.
Pretty much. People need to start thinking about their career the moment they get their first job. This means planning out what kinds of skills they need to pick up to advance, opening a retirement account and putting as much money they can into it (compound interest), and never take anything for granted. Those who don't do these things in their 20s are basically going to be 10 years behind everyone who did.
Compound interest at < 1% isn't going to make much difference over a decade. At > 1% risks losing principal, and inflation is probably > 1% now anyway, so that you lose money on savings. Money spent (rather than invested) in one's 20s offers greater opportunity for enjoyment than when in your 60s, when your choices are more limited, if you even reach your 60s. A balanced approach is best.
>>Compound interest at < 1% isn't going to make much difference over a decade.
Huh? I'm not talking about a savings account here brother. I'm talking about retirement investment accounts like 401k and IRAs. In their 20s, the majority of those investments should be in stocks, which on average gain 9-10% per year. The compound interest on that is humongous.
Stocks don't average 9-10% per year, not anymore. Since the Dow was at 10K in 1999, the Dow has averaged 2.1% per year, with great volatility (ups/downs). Including dividends, maybe 4%. The gov't has fueled that relatively anemic growth with massive unsustainable borrowing and raping of the environment, so the past is definitely not an indicator of future performance.
Money spent (rather than invested) in one's 20s offers greater opportunity for enjoyment than when in your 60s, when your choices are more limited
Would you care to elaborate on this? I don't (yet) have first-hand experience with being in my 60's, but I did watch my parents spend money to their great enjoyment after they retired in their 60's.
Good for them. There's still more opportunity for enjoyment for younger folk, though. Even if a 60-something manages to do the same activity, like snowboarding, it's going to be done in a less youthful body. It's a big waste for 20-somethings to overly focus on their career in that decade, unless work is what they most enjoy.
I more or less just came into my 30s and I spent my 20s pretty much exclusively on computers, studying and working and playing. Computer were pretty much 95% of my life. Last time I changed job, I more than doubled my after-tax salary and I have not once had to go through the process of really applying; whenever I showed up to HR things were pretty much decided already in advance, they just had to keep up appearances. I have always been the guy everyone goes to for help, I have more than once fundamentally changed the way people work, think and approach problems for the better. Where I have worked for the last 5 to 7 years, I am pretty much the last line "of defense", so to speak... because every time something stopped working and I could not figure it out, it would go on taking the support team of one of the biggest names in IT literally a year trying to pinpoint the issue only to not being able to come up with a solution in the end. This is not meant to boast, I am working towards a point:
So I would say my "career" is there... yet my personal life and emotional happiness is in complete ruins; while my age and point in career match at "30", emotionally and as a person, a human being, I feel like I am 12. I feel like I have completely wasted my 20s, I have never had a chance to actually grow up, I just worked on "career" which is what everyone told me to; the rest of the time I sedated myself with video games and food and otherwise spending the money I had made to numb down any and all bad feelings. I don't think I could ever get these 10 years back and grow into a strong minded, healthy human being now that the time is gone. Everyone at my age now is lightyears ahead of me both emotionally and in terms of experience and other skills.
That is why from my own experience, I cannot imagine having the opposite "20s" to be ANY worse because at least if you "wasted" your 20s, at least then you had fun and had good moments to think back on and you matured as a human being but you got something out of those 10 years and your 30s are early enough to be working on "career" with all the skills and the strength you gathered by the experiences you made in your 20s.
For me, now, I feel completely stuck and wasted, at a complete emotional and existential low point of no return. I have to try and use what little energy I have left to battle against all sorts of addictive behaviour and means of escape that I developed in those lonely, hard working 10 years. Whatever money I am making does not matter because I don't really get anything valuable and truly good from it. And even if I desperately tried to change now, I would have to invest all that energy while everyone else is free to use the same energy to lead a happy and fulfilled, enjoyable life. I just cannot win anymore.
If I could do it over again, I would do nothing but drink, party, meet people, be BOLD and strong, teach myself more about computers and do all that in a foreign country and develop a personality before anything else. Go play in your 20s, everyone else is pushing you towards "career" anyway so at least you yourself need to take very good care of yourself as a human being and develop that side and make sure you get enough "play".
Speaking from the other side here, I started programming at eight and abandoned that in my late teens for partying, sex and adventure through my twenties. Despite landing a scholarship at a respectable school, I walked out the door two months later to go chase a girl.
It's only been now in my thirties that I've taken programming and such seriously, because it's suddenly far more fun to me than social games. There's this vague sense of regret much like you're describing, except inverted -- I could have probably accomplished a LOT had I stayed on point. Despite that, I'm still successful by standards I set out for myself in my early twenties and I've got some rather ambitious plans for my forties, yet.
At the end of the day: I've been here since Usenet was a thing, dotcoms are still as hilarious as they were in the 90s and I honestly think it's just the media fixation on the notion of precocious children that perpetuates this culture obsessed with how we're all supposedly dead at thirty -- when really, that's when many creative individuals begin to hit their stride as many artists discover their talents later in life.
Really, people should stop worrying about any of this shit, as most of it is just talk from people trying to sandbag you.
>There's this vague sense of regret much like you're describing, except inverted...
Let me tell you a little joke, it is a running joke in our family. A young man goes to his father for advice: "Should I get married to my girlfriend Jenny or stay single?" Father replies "Son...My dear, dear son... whatever you do, you'll end up regretting it."
But when we are not joking, the advice we give each other is usually "well... whatever you do, things should turn out okay". And that is in fact how it has been.
So, IMHO:
>Really, people should stop worrying about any of this shit
Your post somewhat strikes a chord with me in a way.
Where I come from, most guys at around 20(after junior college) would have to serve the army for 2.5 years. I felt that, that part of my life was seriously wasted since many of my friends who didn't have to serve were doing so many different and interesting things with their life. I felt kinda robbed. Robbed of the prime time of my life. After serving time there, I decided to find a job and started working.
I spent most of my waking hours on computers(programming) and not much on developing personal relationships. At that time, I thought that was the right thing to do, going by social norms.
Had a career so to speak and a girlfriend and I was ready to settle down. But things fell apart and in hindsight, I'm glad that it happened. Like you, I feel that I have not grown emotionally and I'm saying this as someone who just reached 30.
I am in love with the idea of just leaving everything now and try to fix whatever damage I have mentally. Take some time off to travel by myself. I have the time and the resources but I just couldn't bring myself to do it(mental block, fear and uncertainty of travelling alone).
If I could do it all over again, I would have moved somewhere else(if it means being apart from family) and try to find out what I really wanted to do in life and basically just having fun while at it and not worry about having a 'proper career'.
Sorry about going off on a tangent, I didn't think it would be this many lines when I first started typing this.
As a fellow Singaporean I feel the same way about NS, and also regret not investing in personal relationships as much as I should have. I'm trying to fix that now, but it doesn't come naturally to me.
I actually kept away from programming and tech for many years because I felt it wasn't "practical" - instead I went towards business and finance because that was where the well-paying jobs were. I regret that choice now, because I always really enjoyed the times I dabbled in coding.
You can still leave everything to discover yourself, even at 30. But I think if you really like tech, you'll come back to it soon enough - whether in a town in Vietnam, or a hostel in Europe. Good luck.
The upside of having a good career is you can use the extra money to pay for therapy. I've done it off and on for the last 15 years and have really gotten a lot out of it.
"Don't waste your 20's "building a career". You've got your 30's and 40's and 50's to do that."
It's hard to try to pivot in your 30s if you don't have a resume with at least some points to match your future career.
If you haven't used anything from your post-secondary degree 8 years after getting it... employers are going to notice that and assume that your degree is worthless.
I say this having seen far too many friends get stuck in the waitress/bartending life only to find out that you plateau in your 30s unless you go into the high end fine dining, sommelier, running your own place, etc.
Same thing has happened to friends in retail after they reached manager or assistant manager at a store that was supposed to be their part time job.
Yes, this is absolutely true in my case (similar though slightly reversed from what you describe).
I did the military thing and later college, but switched directions a couple years in college to pick up programming. Even if I reach master skill levels, I'm afraid that my career is stunted because of a short military stint and several years in warehouse/factory jobs before heading off to college.
People see that I'm in my mid-30s with less than 3 years experience in my field and automatically shuffle me out of the candidate pool (so it seems to me anyway).
You might be looking in the wrong town. Consider moving to a town with a greater demand/supply factor. 3 years experience, if you can show your work (e.g. a website) should be plenty in many places.
Yeah, moving out of state right now is not really an option. We are 2 years into our mortgage and have one of those "you gotta live there 5 years or pay penalties" situations, have a new son (six months old now, so complications with that) and parents getting ready to move 2,200 miles here to help watch and experience their first grandchild.
Granted, all "excuses" but while I have meager pay and bad benefits, my wife makes enough that we don't have any financial problems (just ego ones on my part, lol - she makes 2x my income).
Anyway, we live in the Seattle Metro area, and I'm willing to commute some distance so my opportunities aren't severely limited (I think).
This third point is, by the way, completely wrong. Not only does he blow a minor thing completely out of proportion by applying it to the whole brain and intelligence, there hardly is any real evidence to back up that you cannot learn new things later in life - on the contrary, check out "Guitar Zero", Gary Marcus does a great job of debunking the "not worth it to try anymore" myth.
Its not an argument, its true physiologically, or so its been reported. Certain types of reasoning peak (in terms of horse-power or raw CPU type performance) in your 20's, similar to raw athleticism. But there are a whole host of factors, around plasticity, memory management, and actual memory (ie, empirical data) that allow more real-world performance at a later age/stage. To continue the computer analogy, the fastest chip doesnt always win, if you have GPU, L1/L2 cach, improved bus-speed, SSD storage, and better written software....etc. Similary, in certain sports world-class athletes improve well beyond their peak physiology. Himilayan mountain climbing is the classic example of peak perfomance <not> being in your 20's.
You should take your 20's seriously... because it's the only time in your life that you aren't encumbered by building a career, having kids, etc.
So you should take your 20's to do the things that you won't be able to do later. Work as a bartender, play in a band, travel the world on the cheap, teach English abroad, date the kind of people you wouldn't marry. You don't have serious responsibilities, so take advantage of that while you can.
Don't waste your 20's "building a career". You've got your 30's and 40's and 50's to do that. Don't be in a rush to have kids too soon.
Obviously, don't throw your 20's away. But spend them doing life-experience-focused things, not career- or family-focused.
And this gets at the author's third point: "Your brain finishes forming in your 20′s". If that's even true (although I doubt it), then you'd better get in all those varied life experiences sooner rather than later. Learn a second language, learn to cook, learn to play music.
Don't waste your 20's on grinding away at traditionally career-oriented stuff. That part of your brain is probably already fine. Your 20's is the time to look for diversity in your life, not to focus narrowly on any particular part. You've got all the decades afterward to work on narrow refinement and career progression...