I turned 21 over the summer. It was bittersweet: The luxury of being able to buy beer was offset by a deluge of anxieties about my future. Was I doing the right thing? What should I have been doing? Was I where I was supposed to be at 21?
It’s normal for people my age to worry about the future, especially those on the precipice of leaving the bosom of college and entering the "real world." Deciding where you’d like to be in life and how you want to get there is a constructive albeit stressful process we must all undergo. However, in thinking about these things, we are often inclined to use our numerical age as an indicator for where we "should be." This practice, while subtle, is incredibly pervasive and can lead to a great deal of unnecessary anxiety.
Age often functions as a quantitative measure of one’s progress on a prescribed, socially acceptable timeline. Pick a career around 22, find your future spouse around 26, get married and have kids at 30 — this was the general life template my peers and I were taught to follow. It benefited me because it got me thinking about my career options early on, but it also caused me to think about them in the wrong way. By being too concerned about my adherence to this template, I briefly considered pursuing careers I knew, deep down, I was fundamentally wrong for. I felt, in order to be financially stable enough to have a family by 30, I’d have to pick a practical, well-paying job — and quickly. I was so preoccupied with the need to do everything at the right time and at the right age that I temporarily lost sight of what I actually wanted to do.
Fortunately, all that came of this was a short-lived stint in the accounting department before I ran back to economics. However, I still felt periodically overcome with worries about whether or not I was "on track" for my age. It wasn’t until my birthday that I understood how flawed this concept really is.
At the time of my birthday, I was interning in London at an economics think tank. One of my fellow interns was a girl from Mali who attended college in the United Kingdom. Similarly to me, she was entering her last year of college. I asked her how old she was, partially out of curiosity, but mostly because a small, insecure part of me wanted another person by which to gauge my perceived life progress. She wasn’t sure, because her home village didn’t have a set measurement for age. While I am sure she had some notion of her relative age, I loved how she didn’t concern herself with exact numbers. By removing age as a milestone, the concept of where she "should" be in life was also effectively removed.
It was then I realized what age really means to most of us. In your youth, it’s a means of comparison, of validating you are indeed doing the right things for your stage in life. Later on, it’s a measurement of your relative vitality, of how far you’ve come and how much time you have left. It’s the reason I have friends who feel they’re doomed to a life of loneliness because they’re single at 26, and the reason why my mother keeps hinting at the desire to be a grandmother before she gets "too old." For the most part, it is an arbitrary number serving to remind us where we are on a certain path.
At this point, I wish to emphasize that disregarding age as a milestone should not function as an excuse to move back in with your parents for 10 years while you "figure it out." Instead, it should serve to make your passions and goals the driving force in your life as opposed to anxieties about whether you’re doing what you’re supposed to when you’re supposed to do it. Ultimately, we will all lead different lives, with different experiences happening at different times.
But what do I know? I’m only 21.
Namwan Leavell is a UF economics senior. Her column appears on Fridays.
