What Age Do You Get Your Shit Together?

Everyone always references "getting your shit together". We talk about this as if it's a destination that we'll get to one day but I honestly don't think anyone ever actually gets it together. People may get aspects of their lives in order, they may have a fully functional loving relationship, they may have a successful career, but I don't think anyone can say they have everything 100% figured out. They may have a lot figured out but do you ever actually get to a point where you feel like your life is together? Surely that's what life is about; you figure things out and learn as you go. You make bad decisions and mess up a lot so you don't repeat the same mistakes again in the future and eventually, you learn to make good decisions and work towards things and end up with all your shit "together" (but maybe not).

I've always kind of thought of life in a timeline sort of sense, that I have to have a career in mind by 25, kids by 30, and if I get to 30 and don't have my own place or even have a boyfriend then I'll definitely go into panic mode. But that's pretty ridiculous really because there's no quota or deadline of when you need to achieve things, everyone is different and you just never know whats going to come along or who's going to come along for that matter. Everyone is on a different journey and it's absolutely FINE to go at your own pace. In my head 30 seems so far away, yet it's less than a decade away and you'd be surprised how quickly they fly by. Whilst its good to have goals and ambitions, I think at 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 and even 25, it's OK to just enjoy yourself, live in the moment and have fun (maybe when you get to like 26 you should start panicking a bit...).

Whilst you're young though- who cares! You don't need a plan or set out routine of how to get your ideal life by 30. You can do whatever you want and just live each day how you want to live it. There's no rush in my most humble opinion! You have plenty of time in life to figure all that stuff out and if you want to figure it out and start working towards it at 20, then you go for it. If you find something or someone that makes you happy then chase it and don't let it go until it stops.

As a kid, I always looked at 20 something year olds and thought of them as adults, thus that they were people who had it all figured out and had their lives together. Now that I'm one of those 20 somethings however, I realise what an absolute joke that is and that we're literally just a bunch of kids stumbling round in the adult world, pretending we know whats going on and what we're doing. Whats scary is, I'm not sure that anything changes when you hit 30, or 40, or even 50. I think the adults are just as clueless as us really, and they kind of had kids and had to pretend that they knew how to adult AND how to parent. I guess you don't just wake up at 30 like BAM here's all your problems all ironed out in this nice little pile for you to deal with, congratulations you now have your shit together.

The problem is, there are a lot of expectations on you as a "20 something". I've always thought that rather than teach kids about navigation, poetry or how to find the bloody angles in triangles, maybe teach them how to pay a fine, cook a decent meal, how to vote, or actual useful adult things, so that we're not all so clueless once we finish school and are practically shoved out into the big bad world of adulthood. They don't really prepare us much at all and yet they expect us to do really well in school, go on to university and get impressive degrees and then find jobs that make us lots of money, find a partner that we can then procreate more clueless mini humans that will go on to continue the cycle...

I may be going off on a bit of tangent rant now, but the point is, I don't think its fair to expect young people to finish school and to jump into a career and get their lives in order straight away. We have to have a few years or even a decade if needed, to just have a bit of fun, and figure out what we like and what the worlds like. At the end of the day, adults aren't even proper adults. No one figures their life out easily, it takes a lot of pretending before you get anywhere close and there's no race to get to "success" or getting your shit together.

I know a 30 year old who still parties like an 18 year old every weekend, but is nearly married, has a successful career and a house. I know plenty of 24-26 year olds who still work in retail, live with their parents and go out drinking every weekend. I know a 35 year old who still has no clue what he wants to do with his life and is still travelling and loving every minute of it. I have plenty of friends who have no idea about their future but are travelling, partying, moving cities every other month and just having a ball. Friends that have graduated uni, have full time jobs/careers and are happy, those friends are rare, in fact I don't think any one comes to mind. So although that's what may be excepted, it's not overly realistic. I love the fact that our generation are a lot more open minded and have been given opportunities to be able to have these options and not to have to rush into serious life things.

I've always been a planner and wanted to have a plan for my life, but equally, I'm such a changeable, indecisive person, it always stresses me out to have to make big decisions like what career I want to do, as it seems so permanent. Even if someone drew me out a detailed life plan, I would without a doubt tear it up and do the complete opposite. A rough outline wouldn't go amiss, but I guess at the end of the day you just have to play it by ear and take each day as it comes. You really never know whats going to happen, who you're going to meet or what you're going to discover, so although you're "shit" might seem to be a bit all over the place, some day you will feel like it is together and you'll stop stressing about what might happen once you've found something that just makes sense and of course, makes you happy.