Somewhere between planning weekend trips and checking how many pages I still have left to read for class, I realized something mildly alarming: my exchange year is more than halfway over. When I first arrived, the months ahead felt endless in the way only the beginning of something can. There was always another place to visit, another café to try, another vague sense that the future was still comfortably far away. Life existed in a kind of suspended reality where the biggest decisions were about travel plans, rather than long-term ones. But lately, the calendar has started moving a little too quickly, and the future I’ve been politely ignoring is beginning to catch up.
This strange stage of life can theoretically be defined as funemployment. Your early twenties are constantly advertised as the years when you’re supposed to experiment, travel while you can, and “figure yourself out.” It’s the time for spontaneity, self-discovery, and saying ‘yes’ to things that probably won’t make sense on a résumé later. Yet somehow, at the exact same time, you’re also supposed to be building a career, gaining experience, collecting internships, networking, and laying the foundation for the rest of your life.
The messaging is slightly confusing. On the one hand: relax, enjoy your youth, nothing is permanent yet. On the other, if you haven’t strategically planned your future by the time you graduate, you may already be behind. The result is a very specific kind of early-twenties paradox where you’re meant to embrace uncertainty while also having a five-year plan quietly brewing in the background. It’s freedom, technically, just… with a surprising amount of pressure attached.
To top it off, the contradiction feels slightly more intense for our generation. It’s hard to ignore the background noise of a job market that seems increasingly competitive, living costs that rise faster than student budgets, and constant reminders that industries are changing faster than we can keep up with them. Add AI into the mix, and suddenly it feels like even the careers we’re planning for might look completely different in ten years. At the same time, social media doesn’t help the sense that everyone else is somehow already succeeding, launching startups, landing dream jobs, or at the very least appearing suspiciously productive on LinkedIn. It creates a quiet pressure to not only enjoy your twenties, but to make sure you’re using them “correctly,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.
Maybe that’s why the end of my exchange year suddenly feels a little more significant than it did before. For months, life here has existed in a kind of bubble where the biggest priorities are planning weekend trips, meeting new people, and figuring out which city to visit next. It’s the kind of freedom everyone says your twenties are supposed to be about, where you can explore, experiment and say yes to things simply because you can. But, the closer the semester gets to ending, the more that quiet background pressure starts to creep back in. Eventually the trips will stop, the routine will change, and the question of what comes next becomes harder to ignore.
I think the real problem isn’t that we’re wasting our twenties, but that we’re trying too hard to use them correctly. Somewhere along the way, this decade became something to optimize: travel enough, work enough, succeed enough, all while supposedly enjoying every minute of it. But, maybe that’s an impossible balance to achieve. Maybe your twenties aren’t meant to be efficient or perfectly planned. Maybe they’re supposed to feel a little uncertain, a little chaotic, and occasionally like you’re doing everything and nothing at the same time. If that’s the case, then perhaps this phase of funemployment isn’t something to panic about after all. It might just be part of the experience.