The World's Greatest Blog

I’ve just had a birthday.

As Saturday dawned, I awoke to the slightly strange feeling that I was, as my friend Charlie so unnervingly puts it, “a quarter of a Century old”. I had turned 25.

The trouble with being 25 is that it places you in a very much in-between bracket: you’re still younger than everyone who is older than you, and so, are easily dismissed as a young upstart with no life experience; yet, on the flipside, you’re too far away from the pop-culture chat of the playground; most of your friends are starting to buy houses, get pets or begining to raise children. In short, you ain’t cool anymore.

However, the main problem I find is this: being in your twenties isn’t what it was cracked up to be. Or, more to the point, things don’t quite go how you imagined they would have done ten years ago.

I remember, with absolute clarity, the feeling in my mid-teens that life would be so much better when I was finally old enough to be listened to, as opposed to simply humoured. I remember thinking that it would be great to be financially independent. Most of all, I expected my twenties to be one long party that largely consisted of making money, having fun and beginning on the path to a lifetime of peacefully enjoying all of that in varying degrees until my dying days. The reality, for me, and many of my friends, is fairly well off that mark: I never expected things to be such a struggle; life wasn’t supposed to be this difficult.

The overriding feeling of those in their twenties right now, in 2008, is one of uncertainty: uncertainty about career choices; uncertainty about finances; uncertainty about lifestyle choices. Just general uncertainty.

Certainly financially almost all of my friends expected to be better off than they are right now, those with careers are still relatively crippled with professional and student loans and start-out wages in jobs which expect far more than they had anticipated. Many of these people are on notice for redundancy as this financial crisis begins to bite, too, as the last one in is the first one out. Plus most of them are being managed by people who were in their shoes fewer than 18 months ago.

While I have made different choices, I, too, have found that the independence of spending my twenties starting a business empire comes at a price: starting a business means you inevitably sacrifice almost all leisure time for what is a relative pittance.

Another uncertainty is where to live. In Britain, once University is over, it seems that half of your world is sucked away, to London. Of the other half, roughly half go travelling while the rest drift away in dribs and drabs as work and life choices begin to move them away from wherever you are based.

I thought I’d still have some friends in my mid-twenties!

Obviously, you stay in touch with people – what could be easier in the age of Facebook. I mean, we get to see everyone’s lives in photos, status notes and little bits and pieces that bring a smile to our faces. Only the friends parties in the pictures now largely consist of people we don’t know. Or they are people we know doing things or going to places where we aren’t.

Essentially, it would seem, that once you’ve weathered the storm of being in your twenties, you’ll be left with a handful of really good friends and a collection of loose acquaintances or ‘People You Once Knew’. Eventually, these people will stop using Facebook – presumably when they are too busy running around after children (who you won’t recognise) – and you’ll gradually fall out of touch.

But maybe I’m still hungover from my teens, and haven’t got over self-pittying adolescence. Or maybe my mollycoddled liberal upbringing by a Government which told me I could have everything I wanted has left me unprepared for a life of struggling, muddling uncertainty. I know that’s what the older folks’ll say. Get Over It. Deal With It. That’s Life. We always had to struggle.

That’s life, but not as I imagined it.

You see that’s what no-one ever says. They never complete the sentence – “Your childhood: best years of your life…” they trail off. They forget to add the all-important final prepratory statement: “because the rest of your life will be an eyes-out battle, during which you won’t ever know if you’re making the right decision.”

I’m only 25, though, its not time to write off this ‘being in your twenties’ thing just yet. Its a game of two halves. Now that I’ve enjoyed my oranges, I’m coming back out. Only this time, I’m prepared for it.