I’ve read many articles that all say your twenties are your time to be selfish. You should be focusing on yourself, doing things for you and no one else. This selfishness is OK because that’s what we all should be doing in our cognitive prime. At the risk of becoming the most unpopular millennial of our generation, I disagree. I do not believe that your twenties, or any decade of your life for that matter, is a time for selfishness.

A fair share of young writers promote this idea by saying that we need to focus on ourselves and our needs, putting them before others, as if before our twenties we're tireless martyrs. Without this, we cannot grow personally and professionally or find our identities. While personal and professional growth are integral to any one person’s development as well as that of society, that should not mean that these years must be our “selfish years.”

I don’t have any problems with having fun on weekends or treating yourself once in a while, but spending a decade believing that you and you alone should be your focus just doesn’t work. If every single one of us took that advice, our generation would not be prepared to take over top positions in the government, to propel the fields of education and social services further, or to advance science, medicine and technology, all within a few short years. Instead, the world would be full of self-focused individuals more biased toward their own needs than people already are naturally. This is not a time to further encourage that bias and create even more divides within every line of work.

Where did this sense of entitlement come from, this belief that any one person deserves to only think about themselves for a decade of their life? If we carry this entitlement with us while we grow, we will progressively fail to do things for others, cradling our delicate sense of self worth. But that is not where self worth should come from. If you only define your identity based on this sense of entitlement, it will readily be stripped away.

Instead, our twenties should be a decade of growth stemming from finding out how we can best contribute to the world. It should be about finding our passions, yes, but also about how we can engineer these passions to further build up those around us, to help fix the problems plaguing the Earth.