Journalist Kate Demolder reflects on why your twenties may not be the best years of your life.
The twenties are when we turn what Frank O’Hara called "sharp corners." Passionately celebrated in fiction and memoirs, not to mention in minds soaked with nostalgia––what is it about our second decade that causes such revelatory consideration? And what about when it all goes wrong?
At some point, it was decided, with the eloquent noncommunication of twentysomething-year-olds, that these would be the best years of our lives.
My life, at that time, was full of passing relationships: ones with me, ones without me, ones about me, and ones not really involving me at all, with people I knew for days, hours even minutes, that exist now only in memory.
These recollections are, however, cropped and jagged due to chronic anxiety – the reality of a mind vibrating with the presence of 'shoulds' rather than 'cans', burdened with self-contained storm systems and clouds of controlled chaos that the late-capitalist horror show of the twenty-first century conducts from somewhere far above my head.
It focuses inward, reminding me of the times that haven’t gone right; the breakups, the vomits, the tears, the deaths, and the bad haircuts, leading one to believe that maybe everyone else is doing it correctly. Meanwhile, you don’t know how to scan a document, what the Iowa caucus is, or how to get a degree symbol on a laptop.
Recently, a number of books, lyrics, and films have created stylised accounts about the root cause of feeling when it comes to people in their twenties, and the question that tends to crop up in them, explicitly or not, is: whose twenties do you mean?
Few decades of experience command such frenzied interest (quite regularly, teenage years are written up in a rose-tinted veil of damage control, while the literary pursuits of sexagenarians is a miserable résumé of inclement gatherings), and yet few comprise such motley kinds of life.
Twentysomethings today, often burdened by choice and struck down by inadequacy, spend their days so variedly – from rearing children to 80-hour-weeks to living hand to mouth to being popstars – that a single, unifying statement on how one must spend it, moved by dreams of adult happiness, feels cruel and lacking in focus.
Reports on young adults moving in with their parents at record rates are spun as a moral failure, rather than a drip-down economic side effect or a cultural or family choice. Intellectual debates about young people being too lazy to work ignore how few jobs are available and the barriers that restrict them.
Quips about students needing to work overlook how many are working – and how many are still experiencing basic-needs insecurity. Moans about 20-somethings not having kids rarely mention the child-care crisis, the housing crisis and climate change.
It feels deceitful because it is, allowing for a selective, basically narrow frame of reference because much of what we know about the twentysomething years comes down to selective, basically narrow frames of reference.
Since the 1960s, the sociological markers of adulthood included completing secondary school, entering the workforce, moving away from home, getting married, and having children. Now, according to a 2011 study by Trinity College, young Irish people consider education, their career, and financial stability vastly more important milestones, something that's shot in a similar direction in the 12 years since publication.
The narrative of the wild-and-free twenty-something, thus, is far from reality for many. Work, social and personal maintenance takes its toll. Not to mention the uneven starting point – someone who is white in their twenties already boasts more privilege than someone who is of colour, meaning they likely have more social mobility and more of an opportunity to accumulate generational wealth.
The same can be said about someone who grows up in Direct Provision, and someone who grows up on Vico Road.
"I was 20," French philosopher and inseparable peer of Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Nizan wrote in his 1931 book Aden, Arabie. "I won't let anyone say those are the best years of your life."
For him, this was because he was at war with capitalism, much like the 20-year-olds today––most notably as the ability of young adults to enter adulthood has always been tied to how well the economy is doing. And that in itself is drip-fed from the past.
Nearly every twentysomething generation of the past six decades has created a new nonconformist aspirational model. The 1960s generation liberated women, minds, bodies, and domesticity; late boomers exposited eighties wealth culture and Generation X gentrified the entire working model, giving us a fresh new perspective of the rags to riches mogul.
Today’s twentysomethings, too, have reinvented the (digital) wheel somewhat, contributing a lot to the structure of online culture. Two-thirds (64%) of young adults surveyed in a 2011 study said they’d prefer an internet connection to a car, suggesting a new social order.
They also have upended the plight of nepotism, calling out systemic inadequacies when present, a total 180° (I had to copy and paste the symbol from Google) from the decade before when heiresses ruled.
Offline, however, their dreams, like themselves, are often underutilised.
When one looks back at their twenties, they can see, retrospectively, that they were all leading somewhere. The relationships, exam failures, chance happenings, second choices, and weight gain or loss.
As a story, they make sense. But at the time, as Hannah Horvath––Lena Dunham’s starring role in HBO’s GIRLS––says, it didn’t feel like very much was happening.
Decisions were made, at random and in face-smacking reality. As Joan Didion wrote in Goodbye to All That: "That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it."
Only when it’s finished that you note its importance. Because, for all of its dazzling intensity, one can only really look back and romanticise one’s twenties after they’ve collected the breadcrumbs left by the person one was before it.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ.
