How to move forward from your 20s and stop letting them define you?

18 comments

1. Make some plans and get to work. Making friends and building a career aren’t going to be any easier in your 30s. It will be much harder, but not impossible. The time to get serious is now. Good luck.

2. Become a joiner and emulate successful people or people you admire. Baby steps.

3. Do you live at home with your family or in your own apartment?

4. > I have not dated, made friends or travelled because I have been so busy with school and work, not made any money substantial enough to plan retirement, not started writing a novel (my biggest goal), not experienced the joy of having a child

   Good news! Sounds like you already have your TODO list for the next decade figured out. Get started on it. 🙂

5. Getting a CS degree is a great accomplishment. Your past never defines you. Everyone I know is a different person from who they were ten years ago.

6. I didn’t do any of the stuff you listed until I was in my early 30s and now in my late 30s I’ve done all of them (excluding novel).

   Just pick 1 thing at a time and focus. Why can’t you find a new job for 2 years? Apply at a new company.

7. Well for starters, you haven’t been working or planning a life for the last 30 years. Honestly just think about it for a minute. The first 18 years of your life you were still a kid, so realistically you are only looking at the last 12 years of accomplishments. Of the last 12 years, 7 of which was putting your head down and working while also working towards your degree which is fantastic. So now you are only looking at the last 5 years of choices made. Over the last 5 years 2-3 of those years, depending on where you are located, we’re locked down and really bad for new jobs, starting a new career path, relationships and just daily life in general. The covid years messed everyone up unless they already had a solid career that was not affected, a solid relationship and a place of their own.

   As far as I’m concerned, the “serious” part of life starts around 28-30 years old regardless. By 28-30 you have an idea of what you want to do with your life, your career path, relationships, etc. If you don’t like your current job, start looking for something new. You feel stuck because of debt, buckle down and come up with a plan to pay it off faster. No relationships, make time to go out, get out of your comfort zone. Feel stuck for the next 2 years, don’t sit on your ass and wait, set goals for what you want to achieve now, THEN plan out how to achieve said goals and stick to your plan.

   Never sit and wait if you feel stuck, you’ll only sink deeper.

8. You think in 5 years you will care?

9. Honestly dude I’m 33 and just feel like I’m starting out. Just got my debt cleared out a month ago (was over 40k at one point) have built some savings ( not much but a few thousand is a start)

   Didn’t even start getting serious until last year. I got second job on top of my regular job put in long hours because I knew I had to get this debt and get some savings.

   30s just isn’t that old anymore. Not to say you can keep screwing around and that things are still easy because it’s not easy. It’s going to be hard. I know it’s going to be hard.

   Just start and put in effort.

   Edit :majority of people who turned there live around in the 30s aren’t on reddit. My cousin couch surfed and was broke until his late 30s now he’s a general manager and owns a house and has a truck, camper, and a bunch of toys, a friend of mine was flight attendant her whole life and didnt make much now she is a teacher and she started school at 37.

10. > how do I not let all of that define me?

    You don’t ruminate on the past or future. You live in the present.

    > How can I just ignore 30 years of my life before now and say it will be different now?

    You take action every moment towards something you want in life. Take 30 minutes a day to write your novel. Take 30 minutes to try some type of dating app or go out somewhere more social.

    Saying you can’t change anything is a fixed mindset. If you keep that mindset, you’ll never change and you’ll write this same post in 10 years when you’re 40. You need very little to start doing great things.

11. I was divorced by 29, so I think not dating is a lot better then that. I don’t have friends either, I don’t think I want any aside from my spouse. I’m 34, I don’t have anything but myself and those I love – the rest is all secondary. As we are all happy, I don’t think I need anything else. There is a lot I want, but I mean wouldn’t being a bit older just make your novel more versed and thought out? Frank Herbert didn’t finish Dune until he was 38, and JRR Tolkien was well into his 40s when things came together for him.

    My honest opinion, coming from a man who has worried about a lot of trivial stuff for the last few years, is to find life in your everyday living. Try some new food, go for a walk and see some new things, read a new book, talk to some different people, and try to learn something new every day. Collections are also a good hobby and I know a lot of people that have expanded their interests and found a lot of joy and kinship through them. Thats the best advice I can give. Maybe everyone won’t agree, but it should help you make those two years more bearable at least.

12. The best way to do this is to define the goals you have for your future and then tweak them to best fit your circumstances and abilities. Figure out what it is that you want to do, weigh your options, and find out if you can achieve that. If not quite attainable, find what the next best thing is that can get you at least close to it and still be happy.

13. It sounds to me as if you have not been prioritizing yourself and your own goals, and instead have allowed the expectations of others to define you — or rather, what you assume those expectations to be. How do you know what their looks mean? All my friends and family want from me is to be happy. Maybe people can see how unhappy you are, and that is what is behind the way they look at you. And if your happiness is not important to them, I really don’t see why their opinions should be important to you.

    If work is taking up all your attention then you are paying far too much attention to work. We do not live to work, we work to live. How have you become so absorbed in work that you can’t even allow yourself to do the sort of things that nearly everyone does in their spare time, when they do them at all? You say you want to write a novel. So write a novel. There is nothing to stop you but you.

14. If you’re immediate instinct to something is no, do it anyway. Obviously within reason, don’t kill someone or jump off a building, but get out of your comfort zone. Go up and talk to the cute girl at the store, go on that bike ride, go take a chance at that job opportunity. You can’t take anything with you when you die, and you’re not guaranteed tomorrow. Take some risks.

15. Dude! At you age I was recovering from spending the better part of the 90’s off my face on drugs. I was earning f**k all money, still living with my parents, no education – I was a complete mess.
    You have LOADS of time to do all those things you want to do.
    Your timeline is your own, who says you have to have done all those things by 30?

    Don’t stress, if you want to travel go do that now. It’s, certainly a lot easier now than it will be once you have kids.

    I like to imagine what future me would think of my current situation and attitude sometimes. Because when l look back at how I used to think in my 20 I wish I could go back and tell myself to just get on with it.
    So ask yourself, what do you think you in ten years time make of your current situation and attitude?
    What do you think of worries you had in your late teens and early twenties, a lot of them properly seem fairly trivial right?

16. Life is not a race. Mid to late 30s here and I’m just getting my life on track with all that stuff. There’s no wet timeline and no set way you’re “supposed” to do things.

17. Same thing that you did to transition from your teens to your twenties.

    Set new goals and things you want to accomplish.

    Look for ways to get there.

    Do it.

18. From just your first paragraph I can see most of your problem. You have a toxic family.

    I didn’t have a toxic family, but otherwise we share some circumstances. My breakthrough came right around age 29-30, when I really accepted that although I was far from perfect, there was nothing fundamentally “wrong” with me. I didn’t need to figure out what my fucking problem was first, and then proceed with my life. I could just skip the first step, which really only existed as an excuse for not doing the second

    My advice is to disengage with family (and anyone else) at the moment they hit you with a single word of negativity. Don’t argue, don’t explain: just put your weight on your left heel, pull a 180, and stride away calmly, taking deep breaths (but don’t hyperventilate).

    Then pick a goal: girlfriend, lotta women, novel, wife & kids—whichever. Apply those analytical skills you surely excel at (use excel, even) to plan and execute your way to the goal. But don’t lose your grounding in your gut feelings. Ignore the ones that say you lack (because you’ve been overindulging those). But listen to the ones that tell you what you really want for your own peace of mind