Why your twenties feel sooo confusing, and why that’s actually normal
You’re not behind. You’re just in the middle of becoming someone you haven’t met yet.
There is a strange expectation that by the time you reach your twenties, you should somehow start knowing what you’re doing. You finish school, you get a job, you figure out where you want to live, you make new friends, you build a relationship, and somewhere along the way you’re apparently supposed to become a fully functioning adult who knows exactly where their life is going.
Except that isn’t really how it works, because your twenties are often the first time in your life when there isn’t a clearly defined next step waiting for you. School gave you grades, semesters and graduation dates, while your twenties give you choices instead, and having choices sounds exciting until you realize that every choice also means deciding what not to choose.
That’s one of the reasons this decade can feel so confusing, and it doesn’t mean anything is being done wrong. It simply means decisions are being made about a life while its shape is still being figured out.
Big decisions get made without having all the information
One of the hardest things about your twenties is that you’re expected to make decisions about your future before you really know yourself. You’re supposed to choose a career while your interests are still changing, know where you want to live before you’ve experienced enough places to know what actually feels like home, and understand what you want from relationships, friendships and lifestyle while you’re still learning where your own boundaries are.
And then there’s the added pressure of making the right choice.
But most decisions in your twenties aren’t permanent. Careers can change, moves can happen, and it’s entirely possible to realize that the degree worked so hard for isn’t actually what you want to do forever. Friendships can be outgrown, and something that once felt wanted can eventually reveal itself as something that was only ever felt like it should be wanted.
None of that means the earlier decision was a mistake, because sometimes an experience has to happen before it becomes clear that it isn’t the right fit. Clarity tends to come from doing rather than from thinking, which is exactly why so much of this decade feels like trial and error instead of a straight line.
A version of self starts forming that isn’t defined by other people
There’s another reason your twenties can feel so strange, and it comes down to the fact that, for the first time, more decisions are being made without the structure that shaped nearly every year before it.
When you’re younger, there are usually plenty of people telling you what happens next, whether that’s parents, teachers, friends, school or university, and there is a fairly obvious path laid out in front of you. Then suddenly you’re an adult and someone asks what you want to do with your life, and you’re expected to already have an answer…
But figuring out who you are isn’t something that happens simply because you turned twenty.
It usually happens through trying things, changing your mind, meeting different people and discovering which parts of yourself actually feel worth keeping. That’s why this decade can involve so much experimentation, whether that shows up as a changing style, shifting friendships, different priorities, or even a completely different sense of what feels comfortable socially.
Someone might discover they’re far more introverted than they thought, or realize they genuinely enjoy time alone, or suddenly care much less about impressing people they used to care about impressing.
None of this necessarily means too much has changed. It might simply mean there’s finally room to figure out who someone is without everyone else’s expectations sitting on top of it.
The comparison problem
This might be the most familiar one. Your twenties are probably the first decade where everyone around you starts taking completely different paths at the same time.
Someone gets engaged, someone else moves abroad, someone starts their dream career, someone buys an apartment, someone is travelling constantly, someone is still living with their parents while figuring things out, and someone else seems to have everything together at twenty four.
Because social media makes it possible to see all of these lives happening simultaneously, it becomes incredibly easy to turn someone else’s milestone into evidence of falling behind.
But that comparison is almost never fair, because it measures an entire life against a small, carefully selected part of somebody else’s. There’s no way to know how they actually feel about their job, whether they’re genuinely happy in their relationship, or how much uncertainty they’re quietly carrying behind the parts that get shared.
Most importantly, their timeline was never supposed to be anyone else’s timeline, since there isn’t a universal order in which life is supposed to happen.
Your twenties aren’t one long preparation for “real life”
This idea is worth challenging too. There can be a tendency to treat this decade as if it exists purely to prepare for the person someone is eventually going to become: get the right job, build the right career, meet the right person, move to the right city, save enough money, become confident, fix everything that feels unfinished, and only then finally be allowed to enjoy life.
But what if this decade isn’t just preparation, and what if it’s simply part of life too?
Growth and enjoyment don’t have to be sequential. It’s possible to work toward something while still appreciating the life currently being lived, to want more without treating the present self like an unfinished project, and to hold goals without turning every year into a deadline.
It’s possible to be happy and still feel lost
This is something that doesn’t get talked about enough. Sometimes nothing is particularly wrong. There can be good friends, a job that isn’t hated, people who genuinely care, and plenty to be grateful for, and it’s still entirely possible to feel like there’s no real idea of what comes next.
Those two things can exist at the same time, because feeling uncertain doesn’t automatically mean feeling unhappy. Sometimes it simply means the next step hasn’t revealed itself yet, and that’s a very different thing than being unhappy with where things currently stand.
So what actually helps
Probably not trying to figure everything out at once.
It helps far more to pay attention to what life is already showing, noticing what brings energy and what constantly drains it, which environments make someone feel most like themselves, which relationships feel easy and which ones require constant shrinking to fit into, and which interests keep resurfacing even when nobody is asking anyone to care about them.
There’s no need for a ten year plan in order to start paying attention to those patterns, since the next step often only becomes obvious after the current one has actually been taken.
Changing your mind is allowed
Maybe this is the most useful thing to hold onto. It’s allowed to change direction on a career, on where to live, on who to spend time with, on what success even means, and on what an entire life is meant to look like.
Changing course doesn’t mean the earlier version of that life was a failure.
It can simply mean a person understands themselves a little better now than they did before, and perhaps that’s one of the real purposes of this decade. Not becoming a perfectly finished version of anyone, but collecting enough experiences, mistakes, relationships, places, ideas and small realizations to gradually understand what actually feels true.
Your twenties don’t need to be figured out completely. They just need a willingness to keep figuring them out, one stretch of certainty and one stretch of doubt at a time.
That doesn’t mean anyone is behind because their life doesn’t resemble someone else’s, or failing because they changed their mind, or running out of time because everything hasn’t clicked into place yet. It simply means something is still being built, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all.