What’s the rush?
For someone with no parental supervision, I was remarkably well-behaved.”
I had this thought while sitting in a circle with two friends, playing Catan on a Friday night instead of being at a bar, a party, or doing whatever people in their twenties are supposedly meant to do.
As an international student, I have very little supervision. For the most part, I’m in charge of what I do, where I go, how late I stay out.
And yet, there I was, halfway through our third round of Catan.
After the game, I already knew exactly how the rest of my night would go up until the next day. I’d head back to my room, lay out my gym clothes for the next morning, get my eight hours of sleep, wake up and continue with the routine I’d carefully built for myself.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with that. In fact, it feels good to have your life together. But I started to realize I had made my life so planned and controlled, that it was becoming almost impossible for anything unexpected to happen.
It was hard to make a mistake. And strangely, that started to bother me.
Because isn’t part of being in your twenties getting messy, making mistakes and realizing you can get back up again? Isn’t there something almost luxurious about being young enough to stay out too late, drink too much, wake up feeling horrible and somehow still drag yourself to a 9 a.m. lecture?
If there was ever a time in my life not to have everything figured out, surely this is it.
There has always been a certain amount of chaos that comes with being young.
That doesn’t mean everyone before us spent their twenties stumbling out of clubs at four in the morning or making catastrophically bad decisions. But there did seem to be a little more permission to be unfinished.
To stay out too late. Waste a weekend. Date the wrong person. Pick something and realize you hate it. Change your mind. Embarrass yourself. Do something stupid and have it remain exactly that: something stupid you did when you were young.
Now we have a harder time giving ourselves that same permission.
It’s not that Gen Z has completely stopped going out. Despite years of headlines declaring us the sober generation, more recent research suggests drinking among young adults is beginning to rise again. We still party. We still date people we shouldn’t. We still stay out too late and spend money we probably should have saved.
When did being young get so serious — and why are we so afraid to get it wrong?
But as we do these things, we are more aware of moderation. The pattern isn’t really about alcohol. It’s about control. There is a broader obsession with getting our lives together. We have Sunday resets, morning routines, gym splits, step counts, sleep scores, and even five-year goals.
And honestly, it makes sense. Gen Z isn’t exactly entering adulthood under relaxing circumstances.
Life can feel like a series of checkpoints, where one thing determines the next. Get the grades so you can get into the right university. Get into the right university so you can land the internship. Get the internship so you can get the graduate job.
Before you’ve even really figured out what you want your life to look like—or sometimes who you even are—you’re already being asked to make decisions that seem as though they might determine it.
There is pressure to get things right very early, paired with the uneasy awareness that doing everything “right” might not even guarantee the stability we’re working towards. Then there is the fact that making mistakes has become expensive. Rent is expensive. Moving out is expensive. Starting over in a new city is expensive.
It all makes it a lot harder to take risks and leave room to “figure it out.” Jumping into the unknown now feels less like harmless youthful stupidity and more like falling behind, which leads us to optimize and control everything we can.
But at what point does being careful about your future become being afraid actually to live in the present? We become so focused on becoming the person we want to be that we forget to pay attention to the person we already are, standing right in the middle of it all.
Not every decision has to lead somewhere. There should be room to change your mind without feeling like you have failed. Room to try something and hate it. Room to meet people who do not stay forever. Room to take the long way around and discover that it still got you somewhere.
And this “messiness” doesn’t have to mean self-destruction.
It can mean saying yes when you normally would have said no. Going somewhere alone. Trying something you might be terrible at. More than anything, it means putting yourself in situations where something unexpected can find you.
These don’t need to be grand gestures. It can be as small as taking a different route home, going somewhere without a plan, or slightly breaking from the routine you know by heart. Just enough to let something new in, but not so much that everything falls apart.
We have to remember that being young is not about having all the answers. It is about collecting enough wrong ones to know the difference eventually.
We have the rest of our lives to figure things out. So give yourself the grace to be a little unfinished. Leave a little space in your life unplanned, unguarded, and open enough for something unexpected to find you.
