no, you aren't crazy: why our early 20s are the hardest years of our lives

a 6-second TikTok sent me down a spiral of figuring out why our early 20s are so downright terrible!

I’ll be honest, I didn’t foresee a TikTok inspiring me to write a think-piece about the experience of our early 20s, but as I’m sitting here listening to Underworld’s 2001 album “A Hundred Days Off” (great album, you should take a listen), feeling the kind of deep nostalgia that only transpires on Sunday evenings, I find myself unable to do anything else.

@trashonista on tiktok

25: the world is your oyster again.

I find that media only ever knacks a cord inside us when it feels instinctually true— when we relate so fiercely to it that we almost want to wear it as a badge of honour. We want to pick it up and wave it around as proof that someone else understands us, that our feelings aren’t in our lonesome. This is just a fancy way of saying that I resonated so heavily with this short 6-second clip that it sent me down a rabbit hole of reflection because it so accurately describes the experiences I’ve had as a 20-something.

In February I turned 25, surviving what I can only describe as a turbulent year. However, I walk into this age feeling as though the world is yet again my oyster. It feels fun, unknown, brimming with potential, as if the storm has finally passed and sunny days are on the horizon. I’m hungry for purpose again.

Looking back I remember how I felt at 21, so terrified of growing up, of getting older and having nothing to show for it. Birthdays, although celebrated, felt like an additional strike on the wall, a countdown toward death: another year down the drain. Since I was 15 I’ve spent every day carrying around the heavy weight of existential dread. A decade later and only now can I confidently say I’m putting it down— taking it off my shoulder and stowing it away in the back of my closet.

My early 20s were a roller coaster of disappointment, heartbreak, and loneliness. As I left University and walked into what’s known as “the rest of my life”, I couldn’t shake the insatiable desire transpiring inside me to grip onto my fleeting youth. I spent the first half of my 20s sick with the thought of getting old, running away to foreign cities to try and escape any responsibilities or commitments, leaving pieces of myself scattered across an entire continent an ocean away from my home.

The early 20s are some of the most difficult years of our lives to navigate— the pain and suffering brought forth during this time is a collective experience among young adults, and there are real reasons for it.

Real reasons which have plenty of scientific data to back them up.

Jeffrey Jensen Arnett calls this stage of life “Emerging Adulthood”, which we experience, roughly, from the ages of 18-25. It is recognised as a distinct period separate from adolescence and older adulthood. This stage of our lives is riddled with new demands and challenges, all of which arise during the dramatic societal and economic pressures we feel as we discover our new life roles. Faced with a sudden increase in responsibilities, financial burdens, and the pressure to form one’s identity (coupled with decreased familial support), many find this period to be particularly challenging. Unfortunately, these pressures can easily manifest into experimenting with unhealthy behaviours, as we seek to find comfort in “socially acceptable” vices like binge drinking, recreational cannabis use, nicotine, gambling, etc.

The divide between emerging adulthood and older adulthood is bridged only when we achieve full autonomy: both emotional and behavioural. Emotional autonomy refers to becoming free from one’s previous childish dependence on adults and requires a balance of support, and independence, from parents. Behavioural autonomy is the process of learning self-governing skills to make independent decisions, preferably decisions that aid us in creating the type of life we desire and push us toward the type of person we ideally want to be. Simultaneously, as we’re developing these skills, our brains are still undergoing the significant changes that started in puberty, with different regions developing at varying rates: the limbic system, associated with reward and emotional regulation, and the prefrontal cortex, linked to cognitive control, are the most crucial during this time.

AKA, our brains are literally still loading.

However, the challenges that we face during this period offer unique growth opportunities, as our neural networks are reshaped by each experience, which is why it is so important throughout these years to take risks as a means of gaining essential life skills.

During this time it can be difficult to feel like we’re succeeding, mainly because there’s no one-size-fits-all definition for success. Even if we’re doing everything we feel like we are supposed to, it never feels like enough. It can be hard to shake the feeling that everyone around us is “adulting” better than we are.

Additionally, we’re among the first generation to grow up in the digital age, where we’re constantly plugged in, seeing highlight reels of everyone’s lives flashing before us. It’s difficult to not sit there all day comparing ourselves to their accomplishments. We quickly forget that everyone is on a unique path and that everyone has invisible hurdles and obstacles we’ll never know about.

Between social media, societal pressure, and the sudden independence that we’re thrust into as a young adult, it’s pretty impossible to not feel like we’re drowning under the weight of imperceptible expectations and comparisons. Take a quick scroll through our Instagram feed and we’ll be bombarded by photos of our friends getting married, buying houses, moving up the corporate ladder. How can we not compare ourselves? How can we not feel like we’re lagging behind everyone else? Comparison is the thief of joy, and often, as a result of the over-exposure of everyone’s lives, we can minimise our accomplishments and struggle to see the mountains we’ve already scaled, leading to self-doubt and self-esteem issues.

A longitudinal study reported in Nature Communications found that excessive social media use has been associated with drops in well-being, particularly those around the ages of 19-21. The emerging adulthood period is a critical time for the development of our self-esteem and confidence, especially due to the major life transitions and the establishment of adult roles that we are taking on. By constantly comparing ourselves to what we see online we do ourselves a disservice and may end up engaging in harmful behaviours to either a) try to catch up in this imaginary race, or b) drown out the discomfort these feelings arise within us, typically with substances.

The sudden freedom that we’re given in young adulthood can come as a shock and force us to consider what we want to do, where we want to live, and how we want to spend our free time. As young adults, we face pressure to meet societal and parental expectations, both in terms of career success and personal life, and the clash between modern career aspirations and traditional parental views can lead to feelings of anxiety and inadequacy, which only further exacerbates the challenges of this life stage.

Sometimes it’s easier to shut out these existential ponderings by retreating inwards— shutting out the world, our friends, our family, and even our partners. A lot of times this is how we find ourselves in the dreaded “grind-set”, where we dedicate the majority of our time to work because it feels like the only thing we can control. I personally spent a couple of years addicted to the pursuit of external success. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t apply ourselves and put effort into our jobs, as I think there’s a lot of internal satisfaction we can find from our work. I am saying, however, that when we mould our entire identities around our jobs, it can be difficult to know who we are outside of them. Additionally, this mindset will typically leave us experiencing burnout, depression, and/or anxiety.

This is exactly why taking risks is so important during this time. Although scary and uncomfortable, the risks we take during this developmental phase of our lives help us form our identity. Making mistakes allows us to figure out what we like to do, the person we want to be, and the kind of relationships we want to find ourselves in. Nothing good comes easy, and most of the time, we have to force ourselves to do things we really don’t want to do for the betterment of ourselves and our future. We grow when we confront the unknown.

Taking risks also involves learning to be okay with failure. Not every job, decision, or even relationship will pan out the way we imagined or hoped for. Mistakes are essential in forming our identity; they teach us resilience, when to push back, and most of all, the importance of believing in ourselves.

I spent my early 20s taking a plethora of risks, many of which yielded less-than-ideal results but taught me important lessons, arming me with unprecedented knowledge that I’ve used to guide myself through future difficulties. The pain and suffering of my early 20s have since paid off—I apply the wisdom I’ve learned through my failures to make difficult, but rewarding, decisions in my daily life.

As I enter my 25th year, I suddenly have the same levels of optimism and energy I did at 19, but with a much better head resting on my shoulders; despite not knowing how my life will pan out, I don’t feel as lost as I once did. At the very least, I feel much more confident in my ability to navigate through the obstacles that life is sure to present. It seems that I’ve officially transitioned from the emerging adulthood phase into full-blown adulthood (that was a scary sentence to write), leaving my early 20s behind.

As I nestle into my mid-20s, I want to encourage those in the emerging adulthood stage to make as many mistakes as they can. To fail and try again and fail and try again—as many times as it takes. The more risks you take, the more confident you become in your ability to handle the future and the more you learn about yourself: your wants, needs, desires. It takes years of practice to show up for yourself in the ways you want, which is why our early 20s feel like such a battlefield—it’s a crash course intro into adulthood, except the teacher is you and you have no idea what you’re doing.

I don’t enter this stage of my life with everything figured out, I still feel like a baby fawn standing on trembling legs most of the time, but the risks and mistakes I took in my early 20s have provided me with a strong sense of self that’s riddled with unmatched levels of perseverance; I’m confident that when the going gets tough I won’t be afraid to stand on my own, I won’t waver in my beliefs to please others or cater to societal “norms”.

Only recently have we, as a society, started talking about how isolating, emotionally demanding, and downright lonely our early 20s are, even when it feels like we’re doing everything we’re supposed to.

Our early 20s are an uphill battle, one that has more setbacks than anyone can ever anticipate. It can be easy to drown under the pressure of it all. During the tough moments, the most alluring thing can be to just surrender to it, to drown alongside it all, and trust me, I indulged in that mindset for many years. It may feel good in the moment to shove everything as far down inside ourselves as possible, but we can’t escape ourselves forever, and eventually, the floodgates will open—they always do.

I’m not saying it’s easy, and I’m not suggesting that doing the right thing will always feel like it’s the right thing in the moment. Take it from someone who tried to take the easy way out time and time again—temporary discomfort is much easier to grapple with than years of running away. I look back at some of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made and feel eternally grateful to myself for making them, despite the emotional turmoil it pushed me into at the time.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 100 times: the journey of life is nothing more than finding a way back to ourselves, and during the emerging adulthood phase, that’s exactly what we should be doing.

We should be finding ourselves, we should be laying the groundwork for the path we want to follow, we should be taking the risks that scare the shit out of us. By taking risks and making the hard decisions, we set ourselves up to figure out not what we want to spend the rest of our lives doing, but who we want to spend the rest of our lives being. Once we have a better grasp of ourselves and our identity, the rest falls into place—maybe not right away, but it will, I promise (I pinky promise, and I never break a pinky promise).

So, take that risk, do something that scares the shit out of you, and when it feels like the rest of the world is against you, know that the only person who really has to believe in you is yourself.