10 Feb 2016

For many of us, twenty-something life is either close on the horizon, or a sad, sad reality. We’ve actually reached an age where our responsibilities extend beyond school assignments and occasionally doing the laundry when our parents tell us to. Suddenly we’ve got real jobs to do, university to attend, and expenses that suck up almost every penny we earn. We’ve entered the Real World without knowing it, and there’s very little signage telling us what to do or how to act so we don’t get eaten by the wildlife or offend the natives.

It is a time when our lives are undergoing massive fluctuations, and sometimes it can be terribly difficult to find the joy in job hunting, paying hundreds of dollars for petrol and pulling all-nighters to finish a thesis that has already broken our spirits.

That’s when we need to stop, breathe, and cast our minds back a little. It’s not too far, just a few years to when we were seventeen or eighteen, just starting out as adults, but without the weight we carry now.

School was nearly over, and we had no immediate responsibilities to attend to other than packing for schoolies and planning our Euro-getaways. I remember the end of school being a time of absolute freedom, of parties one right after the other, of beach trips with your school friends, of having absolutely nothing to do at home except marathon Breaking Bad or invite the gang over for a movie.

It only lasted a few short months before we realised that we should probably get a real job and earn some money to pay off uni or fund our gap years, and then that beautiful time was buried under full-time work, and actually having to be responsible for our own learning. Eventually, free time becomes something we crave desperately, but whenever we get it, we feel guilty that we’re not filling it with something worthwhile.

This is when we need to remember that wonderful time during adolescence when we took hold of that free time like the horns of a bull and rode that bad boy until the cows came home. We need to enjoy our spare time, and make sure we’re doing as much as we possibly can while we’re still young and don’t have careers and kids and mortgages to worry about.

Here are some of the lessons from adolescence that we need to remember if we’re to make the most of our twenties:

1. The night time is for more than just sleeping

One of the earliest realisations you have when you emerge into your twenties is that sleep is incredible. Your bedtime gets earlier, you rise even later, until a large majority of your time is spent tucked safely away beneath your doona cover. Sure, sleep is important, but its not worth giving up what could be an awesome night out with your friends just so you can look rested in the morning.

As a teenager, the night became a time filled with potential; there were adventures to be had, a whole wide internet to surf, and friends to talk to and stay up with until the wee hours of the morning. Whatever happened to 2am being an acceptable time to maybe consider going to sleep? We need to bring that back, just every once in a while.

2. Doing nothing isn’t always a waste of time

If you ever find yourself with a couple of spare hours, don’t spend half of it worrying about what you could do to use that time productively. Your adolescent self would have jumped at the chance to spend a day in front of the Play Station or binge-watching their favourite TV show, so why can’t your twenty-something ass be okay with just sitting on the couch for a little bit doing those things? You’re not going to lose your study or fitness regime if you take time to yourself now and then. The Italians even have a phrase for it; il dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing.

3. Friends make everything more fun

When university and jobs start taking over our lives, we often lose the chance to hang out with our friends as much as we used to. But, as your just-out-of-high-school self will recall, friends became an integral part of daily life, and rarely did a day go by where we didn’t talk to at least one of them. So make the best out of those little spare moments you get to meet your friends.

See if any of your uni breaks marry with someone else’s, so you could grab lunch or a coffee together. Try and sync up your bus trips home so you have someone to talk to on that long commute. Start hanging out with your mates in the night, when most of them are free to come over or meet for a beer at the pub. You’ll be surprised just how much seeing a friend can brighten your day.

4. Take hold of every opportunity while you can

Back when we were teenagers, everything we did became a chance for something amazing to happen. Every party was an opportunity to make new friends, every weekend getaway without the parents was like an adventure waiting to happen, every concert was extraordinary, schoolies was a chance to find someone to love.

We would drink and dance and scream like there was no tomorrow, because there really wasn’t a tomorrow, not in our minds. As you get older, you lose that ability to just be in the moment and enjoy what you’re doing right there and then, because you’re always concerned about getting up for work in the morning or spending too much money. But letting loose is the only way to really blow off steam and enjoy young life to the fullest. So drink too much, dance too hard, scream too loud. Life is too short not to.