I recently turned 28 which means my 20s are almost done, and damn and it feels like extreme relief, but taught me a lot and that’s what this is going to be about: seven things I wish I knew at 20. The most powerful lessons that I’ve personally learned over the past decade. Enjoy!
Number One: Your twenties won’t be the time of your life!
Don’t get me wrong, they’re gonna be cool, they’ll be fine. But according to most of the people I know who are older than me and myself now that I’ve finished my twenties, they’re a little bit overhyped. I think that where this comes from is how your 20s are portrayed in advertising and TV and movies. You know, we’re shown this whirlwind of cocktails and cool romances and interesting jobs. So before we get to our 20s, we’ve had like an entire childhood of this expectation of this, “Wow, I’ll have five friends and one of them’s called Chandler and you’ll be a writer like Carrie Bradshaw. You’ll be young, you’ll be beautiful, and all your self-discovery will be charming and marketable.” But then you get to your twenties and you’re like, “Ah, that was only one side of the story.” What we see a bit less of is the fact that you’re inexperienced, you’re broke, you’re scared, you have a whole slew of mental health issues and a childhood back catalogue of drama that you have to work through. Instead of the Heineken ad type 20s, what I’d say that your 20s really look like is a combination of the two. Yeah, you’ve got the fun times, the times where you party, when you take wild risks, when you fall in love, all the cool stuff. But for the most of it, you feel like a naive child in the adult world and you’re finding it hard to be taken seriously. You’re broke, you’re lost, and you’re emotionally volatile. It’s, uh, I don’t know, it’s a cool thing to have in my past put it that way.
Two: You don’t do things for you, you do things for the future!
This is a lesson that I learned in my later 20s and it was a pretty simple lesson. Every time I have a decision, I ask myself, “What does future me want?” So for example, when I wanted to quit drugs and alcohol, I’d say, “What does tomorrow me want? Does tomorrow me want to feel shame and sad?” And the first time that I answered no, the days ticked over. Tomorrow me was inevitable because it always is. And I felt, instead of shame, this tremendous amount of self-respect and I was like, “Oh, oh, I get it now. Our decisions create our future.” I have no idea how that lesson just bypassed me, but it made me think about it in a more long-term sense. I was like, “All right, if I make decisions to make tomorrow me happy and that makes my life better, surely if I make decisions to make me three years from now happy, that will make my life amazing.” So I started doing that. I was like, “All right, what does me three years from now want?” And the cool thing about that is three years passing is inevitable. You will become that person and you’ll thank yourself three years ago and be like, “Oh man, you really have my back. Thanks for working so hard or thanks for working on your body or thanks for investing the time in this or investing the money in this.” And I think that was just a really cool lesson to learn. I mean, I’ve heard all the cliches, you reap what you sow, but to truly experience it was something else.
Three: Assume everyone’s got it
The way I see it, you’ve got two options. You can assume everybody’s doing better than you, you can put yourself in the victim role, and you can put them on a pedestal. You can endow them with a perfect life that you end up becoming resentful of even though it’s fictional until everybody’s just hurt and hating each other. Or you can assume that they’re fighting a crazy big demon just like yourself and that they are struggling just like you and you can meet them with compassion and love and give them space to express themselves. Obviously, don’t feel guilty if you can’t act like a saint all the time, you’ve got to, man. But what I found is that the latter is always true. Everybody always has the demons, man. Everybody. I’ve never found an exception. In fact, there was this one time I had to interview a guy, he was like a famous artist, and he’d grown up kind of like nice, upper-middle-class family, and then just transitioned into stardom. And it didn’t seem like there was that much struggle from my point of view. And I remember after the interview, I had this resent and I was like, “Oh, damn, you’ve got the easiest life ever.” And then a few months later, he came out with this piece about how he was struggling with depression and anxiety and I was like, “Damn, I was too arrogant to see that.” And it reinforced the idea that I’m struggling, you’re struggling, we’re all struggling. But we struggle a little bit less if we acknowledge it and struggle together. Hell yeah.
Four: At some point, drugs stop being fun
Don’t get me wrong, drugs start out really fun. But over time, they get less fun and less fun until one day, they’re not fun at all. Now here’s the thing that I wish I knew at 20: they don’t get better. That point does not reverse. It’s not like more drugs will eventually make them fun again. Once they start to suck, they stay sucking. And there’s this idea that we all cling to because every once in a while they are really cool and that’s usually because of the company and the environment you’re in, not because of the drugs. But then we’re like, “Oh, maybe the drugs will get cool again.” But they don’t, they just don’t. Once they start to suck, they stay sucking. It took me way too long to learn this, but there’s a Terence McKenna quote that I really like. He was referring to psychedelics, but I kind of like it for all drugs and alcohol. Once you get the message, hang up the phone. Put more simply, if drugs have started to suck, it’s time to change. Maybe there’s another quote that I really like which is, “Sobriety has given me all the things that drugs and alcohol promised.” And I would say largely, I’m not 100% sober. I still slip up, I ain’t no saint. But I’ve found that to be 100% true.
Five: Don’t stress if you don’t crush it this decade
I’ve talked about this before but damn, man, there is a freakish pressure that the internet is putting on young people, especially young creative people, to be stupidly successful super young and to pump out as much high-quality stuff as they possibly can. Like an amount that