When I open up Instagram nowadays there’s a 30% chance I’ll see a picture of someone’s newly birthed child – bald and wide-eyed, staring at the iPhone camera. I always need to double check when I see a baby on my feed, to confirm that it is in fact the offspring of my Instagram friend and not just a niece or a prank. Sending the photo the obligatory like, I tap to the next story to see a video taken in a nightclub with bottle service girls holding up a sign that reads “CONGRATS ON THE MARATHON.”
It’s in these moments I find myself wondering – when did we get so disjointed?
The collective we I’m talking about refers to the millions of individuals that are my age, meandering through their mid to late twenties and early thirties, trying to define themselves as official adults. The answer seems obvious at first, school dictated our lives from the ages of five to twenty-two. We grew up learning the same things at the same time, we were all influenced by the same cultural and political environments at roughly the same ages. It was predictable to lose a tooth at the same time as your classmate in first grade. There was a comfort in knowing we were enduring the collective experience of growing up together.
But now we’re all strangely free.
The level of freedom that is granted to us in our twenties is daunting, not because the decade is necessarily the most difficult part of life, but because we have our first taste of the soon-to-be familiar feeling of the passage of our youth. The stakes are higher and actions have heavier consequences. Marriage, divorce, children, prison, these far-away concepts suddenly become real possibilities. Our elders tell us we’re young and that time is abundant, yet we can’t help but feel somewhat claustrophobic once we hit twenty-five.1
It’s scary to fall behind the American Dream. What if you don’t get a good job, find a spouse, have some kids, get rich, pass the money onto future generations, and die somewhere in Florida for tax purposes? Will you still be fulfilled?
As someone off the beaten path, it’s hard not to compare sometimes. I’m a 27-year-old graduate student trying to become a writer after quitting two jobs (womp womp). I don’t have a desire for a child and no prospects or interests in marriage. Of course I make fun of alien-looking newborns and tacky proposal set ups, it’s a way easier coping mechanism than to address the gnawing insecurity surrounding my life choices that’s brewing in my gut.
Social media doesn’t help with this sense of detachment from former peers. While the job → marriage → kids → death pipeline isn’t new, the ability and encouragement for everyone to update their progress on said pipeline is. Of course you immediately post your engagement ring, baby’s name, job promotion and wedding on social media. That’s the good stuff.
But I’m often left playing a strange version of connect the dots when I see the kid who blacked out consistently in college become a doctor at a nearby hospital, or the girl who shaved her head in seventh grade join the Mormon Church.
Falling off the job → Florida pipeline in real life is one thing, but posting about it is another. No matter how media-literate my generation claims to be, we still lose sight of the fact that we’re all equally afraid to shatter the sought-after aesthetic of stability.
I seldom posted candidly about moments that defined me over the past couple of years – breakups, new therapies, job rejections, etc. because why would I? Why would anyone?
In a world full of happy announcements and filtered photoshoots, the things that keep me the most similar to my peers lie in the unposted realities of your late twenties. Things like renting a car for the first time or finding a health insurance plan that makes sense.
Even if I wanted to, it’s impossible to capture the essence of the moment you realize that you’re no longer the youngest person at the bar, or the coffee shop, or the AA meeting in a photo.
Therefore, I find comfort in these stupid instances. Married, single, children, divorced, childless, employed, unemployed – we all experience the annoyance at having to scroll a little extra to get to your birth year in a drop-down menu.
These changes are not glamorous, but silently unifying nonetheless, churning our innermost emotions regardless of marital status or salary.
Milestones in adulthood happen unceremoniously, quietly, and unacknowledged by everyone but ourselves, unless you post about it. Shoutout to all the unposted milestones.