Life as a twenty something year old can feel like you’re on a never ending train ride, slowly chugging towards the great unknown, with no idea where you’re going to end up or who’s going to get on board.
We have no idea what the future holds, so naturally, all that we have to rely on is our past experiences. We try to envision future scenarios by trying to replicate or avoid things we’ve already experienced. According to Best Selling author Brianna Wiest in her book, “101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think”, we spend so much time imagining what our futures will look like in terms of our memories of the past. We tell ourselves the best versions of our futures are going to look like the moments we’ve already experienced that have brought us happiness, assuming that the same things will make us happy in the future.
But the (scary and exciting) reality is that everything the future will bring is going to be a completely new and unique experience of its own. That is because the things that make us happy now are not going to be the exact things that make us happy in the future.
According to Wiest, we tend to think in terms of the past because we’re trying to “recreate a solution or ideal” from what we’ve already experienced. We’re afraid of experiencing anything completely new, so we try to plan the future by fitting it into a mold of what we already know.
The reality is that your twenties are a time to embrace the unknown for all it has to offer. We can spend time trying to recreate the situations we felt were desirable or trying to avoid ones that caused stress, but doing so will always lead you feeling unsatisfied simply because every experience you have will be different and new.
Our brains try to convince us we’ve done something wrong when things don’t go the way we’ve planned, but it’s time to stop confusing the unexpected with failure. We’re actually creating something better because we’re finding new moments in our lives that will bring experiences and emotions of their own.
It’s tempting to spend your life with your toes dipped in the shallow end of the pool. But from what I’ve found, it is humanly impossible to predict what’s going to happen in the future and how we’re going to respond to it.
Use your twenties as a chance to look towards the future with a sense of eagerness and excitement for the endless possibilities. Nothing you are going to experience will feel exactly like the past, which is exactly what adds beauty to living. It’s true that we all already have plenty of memories stored in our inventory, but there’s still room for many more.
This new era of life that we’ve now entered is a chance to grow and learn. Don’t let yourself define the future by your past. Make it new and make it yours.