In 2022 I will be turning 25 and as much as I resist the thought, I’m feeling like this is meant to be a significant milestone in my life. From what I’ve seen among my friends, I (we) need to either visibly struggle with a quarter-life crisis or otherwise transform into a fully functioning adult that ticks off every single checkbox society has shoved in my (our) face. Just either of these modes, nothing in between. Quite frankly I’m at a point in my life where I have come to terms with a lot of what I’d previously considered my shortcomings, my marks of inadequacy, my failures. I don’t find myself in any kind of crisis, but I’m also far from that mold of what an adult is meant to have achieved by this age. And I get it, more and more often I hear the notion that our generation is no longer bearing the burden of doing the exact some things our parents and grandparents had done in their twenties. They have complained about young people being lost and confused at best, and lazy at worst. But gradually we slip in their minds (and ours) a different consensus that thirties are the new twenties, and the job-car-home-family combo (if it exists at all) can take on a due date well into our late thirties. Still, a sense of urgency somehow still manages to emerge in the back of our minds, getting us instinctively conscious of the passage of time and of our own entanglement in it. On the one hand I’m convinced that all this pressure to “get somewhere” by a certain age is only a construct that has very little impact on our actual enjoyment of life. On the other hand, that days and months and years pass by while I remain afloat in the midst of an indefinite existence with no anchor in any concrete, tangible end-points somehow deprives me of a sense of meaning and purpose. This also speaks for the amount of privilege that I have been granted, to be able to yearn for the likes of “purpose” and “passion” and not for day-to-day survival. In the end, I don’t want to get caught up in the race to accomplish some targets prescribed to me by society, but I still wish to make a good use of the time and opportunities I have been given to head off in a socially constructive path and arrive at a self-determined destination in my own time. I thus resolve to learn to be at peace with this in-between state, as long as I can make sure I’m heading in a direction that is internally set, and not rooted in the toxic perfectionism that society seems to endorse. I have to admit my idealism can be disturbing to some, especially those around me who are genuinely concerned for my inability to cope with “real life” and who find my ideas painfully naive. But in the very acts of living and expressing such idealism, I am not a helpless victim of my own delusions about reality, but an active protestor against the single-minded obsession with homogenizing society that will inevitably lead the world down a selfish, entitled, and messed-up future. Beyond the wellbeing and security of ourselves and our loved ones, material wealth, power, and other objectives carry little meaning if getting to these only involves more personal struggle and stress, not to mention the possibility of gaining them at others’ expenses (the worst tbh). Perhaps we should be given the chance to resist any template for adulthood that ties individuals down to a set of selfish and unnecessary aspirations. What I wish for isn’t necessarily a world in which we simply turn our values around to something different and pursue a modified checklist, but to dismiss the idea of having a checklist altogether. Or if one has to exist, I’d much rather it reflect the individual’s choices and principles. Any standardized template that demands us all to conform and forfeit our own judgment doesn’t help us “grow up” into better adults but only limits our psychological wellbeing and intellectual capacity. I might as well remain a little lost but capable of setting my own untrodden paths.