Money, Career and Relationships in Your Twenties

Television and music producers around the world have conspired to create this myth of what it is like to be a twenty-something university graduate. If you listen, read or watch these media you would think as many of us did, that being twenty-something was going to be your time. It was going to be the prime of your life when, armed with a degree, the world would open up to you. Young bright and reasonably attractive, your social life would be hectic and money would be no problem. After all you were supposed to be a young and upwardly mobile, not yet bogged down by the debt of mortgages and the emotional and physical weight of children. Yes, the twenties are supposed to be the carefree years of freedom, happiness, success and love.

Yeah right.

While it seems that most people are trying to find the answers to life's questions, at twenty-something, you'd just be happy to figure out for sure, what the questions are.

This is the time of your life when you begin to understand yourself and you realize that maybe you don't like yourself that much. You look at your friends and realize you don't like some of them that much either.

If you went to university and lived on-campus, you come back to the real world where people don't stay up until 3 a.m. having spontaneous room parties or seriously contemplating deep philosophical ideologies over a bonfire or stale pizza. You miss all the camaraderie of dorm life. You even miss those official and unofficial roommates who continuously intruded on your already limited space, but whose place in your life was important to keep you sane. You feel like oyu don't quite fit anywhere -you've outgrown college but you don't yet have your place in the community outside.

Relationships? Well that's a joke if ever there was one. You start to really believe that Mr. Right or Mrs. Right was that person you locked the door and threw away the key on. You're between deciding to launch a frantic search for that key or trying another door. Unfortunately, by now the whole singles scene is starting to get really old or maybe it's you that's getting old, because your couch, a good re-run of Friends and some buttered popcorn will win hands down over a dinner at a fine restaurant or a night at a club - that is if you could find that Mr. Right or Mrs. Right to do it with. The thing is, at the relatively young age of twenty-something you feel like this quest for a real relationship is a huge burden; since you can barely carry your own baggage you shudder at the thought of carrying someone else's.

When it comes to money and career, for all the doors that a degree is supposed to open for you, the only one you want opened is that of a bank's vault. For some reason, though you have neither house, nor land, nor children you are drowning in debt. You long for the day when you make that final payment on your student loan and you can actually buy something for yourself without having a lengthy negotiation what on what to give up this month.

In career you think you should be at least halfway up the mountain, but instead you're still trudging through the foothills. As a matter of fact, you discover that paying your dues may mean having to re-start the journey to get the career you really want.

For many of us, being twenty-something just isn't all it's cracked up to be and often you feel like you are a freak of nature, because you wonder, how it is possible, that your life could be so far from what you thought it would be - or what you were led to think it should be? You feel like someone dropped you in the middle of the Amazon and as smart as you thought you were you don't even know which direction to begin walking in.

So all the authors and directors who continue to portray this twenty-something life as the prime of energy, happiness, carefree frivolity and financial success should be locked up, or better yet, made to relive their twenty-something years.