“Where are you in life?” Exactly where I should be

So, when are you having children?

I’m not sure yet.

I see. How old are you exactly?

I’m 27.

Hm… Shouldn’t you be seriously thinking about having children by now?

This almost word-by-word exchange happened a couple of years ago. With someone I bumped into at a Christmas party. Someone who was a friend of a friend and we talked maybe 4 times before.

I replayed this conversation many times in my head since then. Every time I came up with an even better and smarter answer than my previous imagined retort. It ranged from a condescending smile and a shrug to an angry oh, fuck off.

The problem is, my original response was – total and utter silence. I was so dumbfounded by the fact that a complete stranger took the nerves to ask me this in an off-handed way that I couldn’t come up with anything on the spot.

It wasn’t the first or the last instance something similar happened.

It wasn’t always about babies. Sometimes it was about marriage (“you’ve been together for 10 years, why are you not married yet?“), sometimes it was work-related (“so, what’s your exact, step-by-step career plan for the next 10 years?“).

Sometimes I was able to shrug them off, but they often remained with me in the form of an annoying, tiny voice in my head.

Sometimes, I was the one asking these questions.

I kept repeating my age, like a mantra and obsessing over where I was at life and where I should be. Where others were and how I measured up to that. At what age do people usually move up on the career ladder? Move in together? Get married? Buy a flat? Buy a house? Or just figure out their whole life?

Where am I in this race? Do I meet or fail these invisible expectations? Are these even my expectations or someone else’s that I internalized without even realizing?

It wasn’t my best life period, to say the least. Then I started to talk about them with friends and realized that most of them were dealing with the same issues and having the same questions. Usually it happened a couple of years after university, when the first excitement of working and real life started to fade, when we were not the newbies in the office anymore who were happy to try anything, when the dating gave way to long-term relationships, and when there wasn’t a protective shield (provided by teachers or parents) around us anymore.

I realized the quarter-life crisis was not a fancy term for lazy people who refuse to work hard or put in the effort and delay adult decisions, but a real thing.

I think it’s normal for people to go through similar phases of anxiety and self-doubt. What may not be normal is the amount of negative external pressures that can deepen or prolong this state.

Maybe this is due to the duality of the times we live in. On one hand, we have so many more opportunities than our parents, grandparents, or ancestors. On the other, competition increased as well. We can choose many paths, but those paths can also become outdated very fast. Most of us are definitely not bound by that many rules (legal, social, or family) than the previous generations. But maybe the invisible expectations are harder to eliminate (this is especially true for women and their family/career choices).

We are more connected than ever as one digital mass, but this also means we do not only measure ourselves to the neighborhood kids and our school peers anymore but to people living at other countries or even continents. Every day we hear the stories of people rising like comets, the wiz kids, the startup stars, the influencers.

How do you measure your achievements when Mark Zuckerberg has already created Facebook by the age of 22? How can you enjoy your life as it is when you feel (or told) you need to be somewhere else all the time?

The answer is, of course, simple in theory, more difficult in practice. You just do you.

One of the most important things my parents tried to teach me was the ability to become a person who is directed from within (It’s probably a very bad translation from Hungarian, but I cannot find the exact match). It basically means looking inward, trusting our own skills and abilities, making decisions based on what we want or think is right. Not letting outside forces determine our behavior, actions, or feelings. To take control over and responsibility for our lives. And most importantly, to know our own worth, trust our own path, and not let external things determine it.

It took me some time, but slowly I’m starting to find my way back towards this mentality. I learned how to determine my own success. I’m mostly aware of my strengths and good skills and realized how important it is to accept and celebrate my achievements and even my failures (OK, maybe not celebrate, but definitely accept).

I know what my values are – in life and in work. I know what my dreams are. And I know that I’m making my own choices, and at the end, this is all that counts. I may never be a CEO at a multinational firm, but it’s OK because it’s not MY dream. I may not have figured out my next 10 years, but I don’t even want to. As I said previously, in my Sure, follow your passion. But how do you find it? post, I’m not the same person as I was at 18, and probably (hopefully) will be different when I’m 40. Why would I want to do the same thing? I want to evolve, gather different experiences, and take as much out of this life as I can.

I try to find inspiration from others’ success, but also remind myself that we have different lives and journeys. If I experience self-doubt or even jealousy (I’m sure we all do), I try to use it as a positive motivational tool instead. And I definitely do not let others, especially random strangers question my path. Because it is definitely my life, and my only regret at the end would be having lived it to please others.

I’m trying, so that next time someone tells me I should be at a different stage of my life I could say confidently that I’m exactly where I should be.

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