It’s Thanksgiving and you’re back at home for the holiday with your family. The air is infused with scents of scrumptious stuffing and butter-saturated mashed potatoes. Black Friday ads are scattered in disarray in the living room, and the little cousins are running around pretending to be squawking turkeys. The scene is one of perfection, until a relative asks you what you’re doing with the rest of your life. The second that question is popped, the room seems to go silent and the relatives all await a well-thought-out response from you with expecting, badgering eyes. Yet all that you can muster up is “I’m not really sure.” The room is filled with gasps and whispers as if some scandal has just infiltrated the family. While this might be dramatized to an extent, or not, it has happened to every one of us; we’ve all been there. Why do we feel so pressured to find the course that will define the rest of our life before we are allowed to find ourselves?
The age range of 18-24 can be the best years of life, or the most stressful years. What’s more likely is that it’s both. Some stressors are unavoidable, like college or work or social and sexual life. While those occasionally produce distress, they can also produce eustress, which is good stress because it helps us mature into adults. One catalyst of stress that hangs over the heads of millennials is the dark, winding road to adulthood filled with creatures like taxes and bills. The worst part is that we are forced to traverse down this road, with thousands of curves and diversions, and find the exact right path to go before we’re even deemed capable of voting for president.
Many baby boomers will claim that millennials are “coddled” or “incapable of making tough decisions.” I argue that we are fully capable of making these tough decisions, but at a time in which we have had ample time to experience personal growth and experience. According to Dartmouth Research, the brain is not fully developed until the age of twenty-five, a far cry from the age of eighteen in which we are prodded to choose a major and life plan.
We shouldn’t feel pressured to know exactly what our major is or what graduate program we wish to attend at the age of eighteen. Having goals is important, and if you have your life planned out already, kudos to you! However, if you answer “I’m not really sure” to that tough question, never feel ashamed of this response. I mean entering college is like being given the entire world of opportunities in your hand, getting to look it over for a few minutes, and then having to decide which path out of thousands fits you best.
This expectation of us is totally unrealistic. These pressures from society to figure things out so early leads us to experience stress, depression, and feelings of inadequacy. It can also lead us to make rash decisions that we regret later in life. This has repercussions too: having a career that doesn’t correspond with our true passions can lead to a miserable adult life.
For those of you unsure about the future, experience life independent of high school drama or living at home with parents before making big decisions. Partake in internships, take classes of a variety of disciplines, meet people of great academic and personal diversity, satisfy your wanderlust! It’s these experiences that will aid you in uncovering and embracing your true passions; it is these passions that will guide you down that dark, winding road to adulthood.
If you are one of the millions of millennials who respond “I’m not really sure” at Thanksgiving, there is absolutely nothing wrong with you. You are not inadequate or unmotivated. You are not lazy or indecisive. You are mature, you are brilliant. It shows great maturity when someone doesn’t simply jump into a career path for the salary and social recognition. It shows brilliance when someone takes the time to discover their true passions and find a career that correlates with those passions.
So next time a family member asks you what you’re doing with the rest of your life, say “I’m not really sure” with confidence and pride, knowing that someday you will discover your true calling and it will be worth all the time in the world.
