"I wasted my 20s". No, you just have to get off Youtube

Picture this: you're having a break, or you're finally relaxing after a long day, and you open Youtube hoping to watch an interesting video, and all of a sudden you see this title:

I wasted my 20s.

Oh, damn! You were about to relax and switch your brain off for a while, only for your biggest insecurities and fears to be triggered by one, brief title. What if I am actually wasting my twenties? What if it's already too late? Oh God, what do I do?

Before you even realize, your relax moment is ruined, and you are (ironically) wasting it by trying to calm your mind. Sounds familiar?

If it does, then keep reading, because in this article I will try to object this statement using my personal experience as a 25-year-old and some examples from the Internet.

Ever since I turned 18, I have always felt like a child cosplaying as an adult, and I have spent a good portion of my 20s trying to fight this feeling, or at least trying to make it make sense somewhat.

I have also spent part of my 20s in a world pandemic, in a time where my possibilities were definitely narrowed, and I often wonder where I would be now had Covid never happened.

Consider that I am also prone to black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking, which did not help my case.

For starters, let's analyze the title.

I wasted my 20s

Sometimes there are variations, but in these sentences the creators never explain what they actually mean by "I wasted", so people have to click on the video and watch it in order to grasp the meaning.

However, curiosity is not the only thing that drives them. The ambiguity of such sentece gets their brain thinking about how they are spending their own twenties, thus triggering their preoccupation, which reflects what "wasting one's twenties" means for them.

Therefore, I think these titles are so triggering because we assign a meaning to them before even watching the video. Said meaning is linked to our own life and perspective, which might have nothing to do with the video per se.

This leads to the question: what does "wasting your twenties" mean to you?

As I mentioned before, I am currently working on breaking my "black-or-white" thinking pattern, and I think that part of this work is also recognizing when people use unnecessarily absolutist terms to describe a concept that is actually more nuanced.

To me, that's the case with the concept of "wasting your twenties". Your twenties are an entire decade, full of memories and moments. If you do not feel like you have accomplished anything by the time you turn 30, that's completely valid, but if you looked back at the single experiences that built this time of your life, would you really consider all of them a waste of your time?

The truth is, unless you have been living an extremely difficult situation, like dealing with a severe illness, abuse, a war, poverty, you name it, chances are that you will probably remember a ton of beautiful moments to be grateful for, and you might also find out that they kind of outnumber your "failures".

If optimism does not work for you, a more neutral approach is simply checking your privilege. When the Covid pandemic started, I was twenty, and with the lockdowns in full force, we could not do many things, including going at university in-person, meeting our friends whenever we wanted, or even working, as many student jobs are also in-person jobs.

So, I had several relatives telling me that because of Covid those first years of my twenties had been wasted due to lockdowns. However, I refused to see it this way: I still have managed to get my Bachelor's degree, do an internship for a German company (in German!) even though I could not travel abroad, and most importantly neither me nor my relatives and friends ended up being hospitalized because of the coronavirus.

Considering that I had little to no control on the general situation, these are enough reasons for me to actually be grateful that I got to spend my time this way. People were literally dying all over the world, businesses were closing down, and I am supposed to be regretful because... I spent my time at home studying, videocalling my friends and somehow working? No way!

Sometimes we end up in situations that we cannot control, where our possibilities inevitably get hindered, and considering said situations a complete waste is not an objective thought, because it's dictated by FOMO, not by a thorough reflection that took into consideration the whole picture.

Shall reflection not work with you, let's talk demographics: in a lot of countries nowadays the average life expectation exceeds 80 years old, which means that our twenties are not only the beginning, but literally just 1/8 of our life, so you do not have to have it all figured out by that small time frame and, even if by your thirties you don't have it all figured out, you would still have the remaining 6/8 of your life to accomplish all your life goals.

Moreover, our life path is usually not linear, especially in our twenties: there's plenty of people on social media who openly talked about switching multiple jobs and even careers during their twenties, before getting a more stable career path as they were closer to their thirties or even past that age.

Youtuber Ana Yudin even shared her hypothesis (not backed by data but by her personal experience) that people generally don't find their life vocation until they turn 27-28 (source). Adding this to the demographic discourse, we get two key takeaways:

1. we have way more time than just our twenties to pursue our goals;

2. since we have so much time, we are likely to change our path and plans many times as we grow and evolve during our lives.

If demographics don't work for you, I have one final tip for you: look at how often these titles are used. They're everywhere! Search for "I wasted my 20s" on Youtube, and watch how many results pop up. This means two things:

1. the fear of "wasting our twenties" is more common than you think;

2. these youtubers are using clickbait-ish titles to attract more viewers by triggering their FOMO, and are probably copying this idea from other youtubers as well. How inspiring!

Do I really think that all these youtubers are clickbaiters? No, and you shouldn't attack them online for this, but this perspective can help you rationalize these polarizing titles and not overthink them too much.

It's not that deep, give yourself some grace!

Once you find the reframing tactic that works best for you, you will realize that it's actually not that deep. No matter if you have had more mishaps or more success, in most cases your twenties are not (or were not) the tragedy that you think of, and framing them as such is an act of cruelty towards your past self - who didn't know any better - your present self - who has to deal with these regrets - and your future self, too.

If you could meet your future, 30-year-old self, would they be happy to be seen as someone who cannot even conceive new plans and projects for their life because everything had to be done during their twenties? They would be offended!

That's why reflection ultimately becomes an act of kindness towards yourself, since that will ultimately lead to accepting where you are, thus moving forward in a more serene way.

And if that means getting off Youtube, go ahead! The spring has arrived and there's no better time for touching grass.

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this article, if you want to share your experience tell us in the comments and, if you want to read more of my articles, subscribe to my profile, I post every month!