If You Have It All by 30, You’ll Be Bored by the Time You’re 31
My boomer-tinged goals brought me nothing but tedium and discontent
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If you have everything you thought you’d ever want by the time you hit your third decade, what happens to the next 50 or 60 years of your life? Do you think what you want when you’re 30 will be exactly the same when you’re 80?
Of course not. Because life is long and what we want changes.
Millennials are told to chase after fixed goals. Pots of money, the fancy house, success.
But we are not fixed beings, and neither is the world around us. Our plans can easily be derailed by something out of our hands or even by ourselves.
So why do we still insist on chasing down these big old life ambitions?
Because we’ve been sold a lie
Our boomer parents had it better than our grandparents. We saw this and we thought hey, our lives will be even better! Our careers will be more fulfilling. We’ll live in bigger and better houses than they did. And we’ll have it sorted by the time we hit the big 3–0.
Our parents thought we’d have it better too. Except, of course, it didn’t happen thanks to a seemingly never-ending stream of recessions, stagnating wages, increasing house costs, and pandemics.
It took Millennials a long time to get the message. We are still intent on focusing on concrete goals like buying houses we can barely afford to buy, let alone maintain. Like having a career Mark Zuckerberg would be jealous of before we get a single wrinkle.
Add the pressure of an uber-connected life, 10,000 adverts a day blasting in our faces and you’ve got one hell of a shit storm on your hands.
Does this sound like your twenties?
My second decade was a neverending conveyor belt of goals…
- If I get the college diploma, then I’ll get a good job and that will make me happy.
- If I find the love of my life, then I can get married, then I’m golden forever.
- If I can get that promotion, I can buy that house, and I’ll never want for anything else.
They used to sound like my childhood prayers; selfishly bargaining with God for stuff I want.
Except I wasn’t praying to a Christian God, I was praying to the holy trinity of the modern age; success, money, and a healthy Instagram follower count. Please look kindly on me, you wily-threesome.
It made for a miserable decade filled with broken career dreams and debt as I tried to not only reach my goals but live the life I felt I was entitled to.
I achieved a lot of my goals. Now what?
By my late twenties, things started to look up for my boomer-influenced life ambitions.
I started a business that did rather well. I was married, happily so. In my early thirties, I bought a house, I got a cat.
By 34, I was bored out of my fucking mind.
I was also burning out, I was grappling with intense anxiety and depression and I couldn’t sleep without gallons of wine tipped down my throat. The business was successful but to the detriment of my freedom and mental health. The house was nice and all, but I was stuck in suburban hell.
Classic life goals achieved: 8/10
Quality of life achieved: 2 /10
Life is a picture, but you live in a pixel
I wish I could take credit for this line but it’s actually the title of an excellent Tim Urban post where he describes his pixel theory:
Jack sees his life as a rich picture depicting an epic story and assumes that the key to his happiness lies in the broad components of the image.
But this is a mistake, because Jack doesn’t live in the picture’s broad strokes, he lives at all times in a single pixel of the image — a single Today.
So while thousands of Jack’s Todays will, to an outsider from far away, begin to look like a complete picture, Jack spends each moment of his actual reality in one unremarkable Today pixel or another. Jack’s error is brushing off his mundane Wednesday and focusing entirely on the big picture, when in fact the mundane Wednesday is the experience of his actual life.
I’ve been living this theory since I sold my business and house and hit the road last year. Instead of seeing my future happiness as being in these big societal approved success markers, like a house, a big career, and whatnot, I am focusing on ensuring that every day is meaningful:
- Instead of saying I will be happy once I am a bigshot writer, I say I will take pleasure in the everyday task of sitting down to write.
- Instead of saying my happiness rides on my ‘forever home,’ I take pleasure in whatever apartment I am living in at this very moment.
- Instead of saying I have to have a huge circle of friends in order to be happy, I am grateful for the single one that is meeting me for coffee today.
- Instead of concentrating on fixed financial goals, I say I want to structure my finances so they can support me in whatever endeavors I chose to indulge in over the next 50 or so years.
Instead of saying I can only call myself a success once I have all the things society tells me I need to have, I call myself a success if a single day has gone the way I want it to.
All my goals can fit into today’s single pixel which means every day feels meaningful and alive.
Society wants you to chase after the trophies, not the meaning
We’re taught to chase trinkets of ‘success’ that prove to the world that we have it together. My friend has a bigger house than me, therefore he must be more successful and therefore happier than I am.
Bullshit.
There’s plenty of evidence to suggest happiness and contentment come naturally when your life aligns with your personal values. So if you’ve managed to hit a big promotion by the time you’re 30, but if you hate the company and all it stands for, then of course you’re going to be unfulfilled.
As Tim Denning rightfully says in his recent story:
After your basic needs are met no amount of luxury items will magically make you love yourself and those around you.
Rejecting society’s pressure to constantly fight tooth and nail for the next big trophy is intensely liberating. It frees you up to figure out what really brings meaning to your life.
The reason I am no longer bored is because my goals are in service to my values. I see the result of that every time I sit down to write or meet a single friend for a drink.
You can hit all the big society-approved goals you like, but if there is no real meaning behind them, you’ll just be chasing the next one, and the next, and the next.
It’s time to stop looking for the happiness crab under the wrong rock.
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