Feeling Lost in Your 20s? You Need to Hear This

(01:06):

Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. First of all, I am so excited you're here. I have been wanting to have a conversation with you for a while about navigating the decade that is your twenties, and today we're doing it. It is always such an honor to spend time together. And if you're new to the podcast, I just wanted to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family. I am glad that you are here and you have picked a winner of a conversation to listen to or watch because you made the time to listen to this particular episode. Here's what I know about you. I know you're somebody who values your time, and I also know that you're looking for ways to make the most out of your life and you're also looking for ways to support people in your life in doing the same.

(01:51):

And if you're here right now because somebody shared this with you, I want to point out something really cool. First of all, you got people in your life that care about you. That is not something to take for granted. And so thank you for hitting play. And secondly, if you're here right now because they shared it with you, it probably means one of two things. You're either in your twenties right now, so you're definitely in the right place. There is nothing more important that you could spend your time listening to or watching right now, or you're here because you have somebody in your life who is in their twenties. Again, you're in the right place and what you're going to hear today is really going to help you understand what the 20 year olds in your life are facing because it is way different from what you and I were facing when we were in our twenties.

(02:35):

And maybe your 20 something is the person who sent this to you because there's a lot of us parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents and older siblings who need a wake up call about how different life is right now for anyone who is in their twenties. And we need to show up differently to support the people that we care about in navigating this extremely challenging decade. So thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing this with people that you care about. And thank you for hitting play because this is a really important conversation for you and I to be having. I have so much I want to share with you that's really going to help you. And so let me start with a fact that I need to say loud and clear. Feeling lost in your twenties is normal. I'm say it again, feeling lost in your twenties is normal and you might be lost in your career or financially or you feel lost because you haven't found your person.

(03:33):

Or maybe you feel lost because your friend group is just disappeared. Or maybe you feel lost because you don't even know what to do next or what to focus on, or it doesn't feel like you thought it was going to feel or you thought you would've moved out of your parents' house by now. Or maybe you feel lost because you feel every single one of those things that I'm describing. So let me share some good news. By the time you're done listening or watching today, you're going to feel better. You're going to understand the very unique challenges that happen in your twenties at this exact moment in history, and that's going to help you navigate this decade better. And I'm also going to teach you how to take the pressure off yourself. You're going to learn how to be more decisive and how to start making the decisions that you need to make to move your life in a new direction.

(04:21):

And if you're listening because you have somebody in your twenties, you're also going to hear some advice about how to show up differently and be more effective in trying to support people. The goal today is to teach you how to improve your life starting today in a way that's not going to cost you any money. I'm so excited to share all this with you. And don't worry, we are going to cover specific advice on career and dating and friendship and how to make the right decisions in your twenties because I have thousands of questions from listeners just like you. So let me give you some context first. Okay? Before we jump into the advice, I always love to have the context for why something might be a problem. Why exactly are your twenties so challenging? There is a framework that I'm going to show you that has three parts to it that you experience in your twenties, and this framework is operating in the background.

(05:15):

And once you see these three things, you're going to realize why you feel lost, and you're going to also realize that it's a reflection of what you're dealing with. It's not a reflection on you personally because your twenties are not just about cool outfits and going out and having a dream job and finding the love of your life and documenting it all on social media. Your twenties are in fact a really challenging decade. I want to hit you with some research. There is this research from the Harvard Study of Adult Development. This is the longest running study on human happiness. It's been going on for over 80 years, and it has shown conclusively that your twenties are one of the most uncertain and anxious decades of your entire life. So if you're feeling those things, the research bears out that that is basically a normal thing to feel in your twenties.

(06:04):

And a lot of people feel it. And the reason why your twenties are one of the most uncertain and anxious decades of your life comes down to these three major changes that happen in your twenties that no one sees coming, no one is talking about it. And if you don't know about these three things, these three major changes that are happening, you're always going to feel lost and you will always blame yourself. And it's not your fault that your twenties are bumpy.

(06:56):

And I first wrote about this phenomenon in the Let Them Theory book that I co-authored with my 26-year-old daughter Sawyer. And I want to read to you from page 158 of the Let Them Theory book where I first wrote about this theory I have called the Great Scattering. Here we go. When you were little, you and your friends and your classmates felt like a team. You were moving through life at the exact same pace and in the exact same place from kindergarten to high school, you and your friends had the same daily routine. You rode the same buses, you read the same books, and you learned the same subjects in school. You saw everyone your age all the time in class, in halls on the sports fields in your neighborhood. You had the same milestones from birthdays to graduations. You had the same vacation schedule, you participated in the same clubs, activities, sports and classes, which made you subconsciously feel like you are moving through life with a big group of people and you are a part of it, right?

(07:55):

So for the first 20 years of your life, the school system, sports teams, college dormitories, fraternities, sororities, the school calendar, extracurricular activities, birthdays made it so easy for you to be around people your age going through very similar experiences at the exact same time. And then boom, you enter your twenties and into a phase of life that I call the great scattering. Here's what the great scattering looks like. High school or college ends, and all of your friends scatter in different directions. Suddenly everyone is living in different places. And very soon all your friends are on different timelines, working different jobs, hanging out with different people, achieving milestones at different paces, and the structure that was the foundation of your life and how you measured, where you stood disappears. This is why in your twenties, you feel a tremendous loss of control about every aspect of your life because there's no longer a track, a template, a timeline or milestones for what to do next or when you're supposed to achieve it.

(09:14):

It's all up to you. In other words, in your twenties, your adult life begins. And for the first time in your life, you're officially on your own. There is no timeline, there is no group activity, there is no measuring yourself to other people. It is entirely up to you to choose how you want to spend your time, where you want to work, what city you want to live in, and who you're going to hang out with and when you're going to do it. And that's when the loneliness hits. That's when adult life gets hard and nobody sees it coming. See the great scattering, this fact that after college and high school, everybody scatters and the timelines that you used to measure yourself by how you knew if you were keeping up or not, how you knew if you were on track, it's gone. Your friends are no longer there.

(10:08):

The group chats get quieter and quieter. You suddenly find yourself alone on a Friday and Saturday night with no idea what to do and no one to do things with. It's harder to meet people to date because you don't have friends to introduce you and you don't have classes or parties or clubs to go to. And for the first time in your life when you hit your twenties, you might feel totally and completely alone. And now let me hit you with some other research. 60% of 20 year olds here in the United States are back living in their hometown. So it might've felt like you went away, but now you're back and you never left. And on top of that, here's what's different about being in your twenties today than it was for me. Hybrid work. Hybrid work has made it so confusing because it's challenging to create close work relationships with people that you don't see in person.

(10:57):

And so what does that mean? It means the social life that somebody my age had in their twenties because I would go into work. I was also going out after work with my colleagues. Well, that doesn't exist for you. And all of this can create so much confusion because for the first time, you may be feeling completely lost and wondering, where are my friends? Am I on the right path? Am I in the right place? Am I on the right timeline? Am I falling behind? Should I have found my person by now? Should I know what I should be doing for a living now? Should I quit my job? Should I be doing that thing that person's doing? And you wrote in again and again and again talking about this. I feel like all my friends are doing amazing things and I feel like I'm alone in my childhood bedroom.

(11:42):

Here's another one I thought I'd have my life figured out by now. I feel like I'm still 23, but I'm turning 27 in two months or this one, I'm 29 and recently single. I feel like I'm so behind in life and not where I thought I would be at 28 SOS. Let me explain why you feel lost. That gauge that you used to measure yourself by disappeared with the great scattering. And see, I put a name to this phenomenon by calling it the great scattering, and I think it's important to label what is happening because when you can say to yourself, hold on a second, I'm not behind. I'm just in the great scattering, it allows you to just go, it's not just me. And it's so important for you to label this and to call it by name because here's the other thing. You experienced the great scattering in your twenties for the first time, and there's a really important purpose that you lean into the reality of the great scattering.

(12:44):

See, you are learning a new skill that you're going to need for the rest of your life, which is this. How do you make new friends when your friends scatter? How do you figure out what's important to you? When everybody's doing all kinds of different things that are important to them, how do you personally measure success and fulfillment for yourself, not based on what everyone else is doing, but based on what's important to you when you're doing it? I want to read one more section from the Let Them Theory book about the great scattering to you. This is on page 1 61. The great scattering happens to all of us, and it can be incredibly confusing and disorienting. Hear this now and forever onward. It's up to you to change the way you think about life and how you measure success as an adult because the great scattering happens in your twenties, but versions of this will continue to happen over and over as you age.

(13:41):

When your single friends get married, they scatter. When your friends start having kids, they scatter. When people move out of the city and into the suburbs, they scatter. When people become empty nesters or get divorced, they scatter. When you change jobs or go to graduate school, people scatter. When you get older like me and you become an empty nester or you get divorced, guess what? People are going to scatter again. When people get older or downsize or retire or go through a loss, they scatter again, this great scattering, this shuffling of timelines and people coming in and out of your life, it's going to happen again and again and again. This is normal and this is why you need to understand that from this point forward, you're going to measure happiness and success not based on when other people are achieving things, but based on what you are doing now and on the timeline that you're on.

(14:35):

So it's easy for me to read from the Let Them Theory, but you're the one that's going to have to interrupt this and teach yourself to look at your life differently because when your friend gets engaged, if you're still single, you're going to say to yourself, uhoh, I'm behind. If your friend gets a promotion and you're not sure what to do with your life, you're going to say I'm behind. And a great thing that I want you to say to yourself instead that will help you get out of this default way of constantly comparing yourself to this timeline that no longer exists is to say, alright, my friend's engaged. My friend got a promotion. My friend just moved to my dream city. Here's what I'm going to say to myself. It's not that I'm behind. I'm on my own timeline and it hasn't happened yet because it's not supposed to happen yet.

(15:19):

Got it. I'm on my own timeline. I'm not behind, and it hasn't happened yet because it's not meant to happen yet. Doesn't that make you just kind of, okay, got it. Great scattering. There's no timeline. I'm on my own timeline and the things that I want that my friends are getting, that's great for them. And if it hasn't happened yet for me, that doesn't mean it's not going to. It just means it hasn't happened yet. Got it.

(16:15):

Questions like, what is it that I want to do with my life? I feel like I want to do so much, but I don't know how to pick. How should I know what I really want to do with my life when there are so many options? It costs a lot of money to do all the things you dream of achieving in your twenties. How do I prioritize? I don't know what to prioritize. I really struggle with the balance of wanting to have fun, but also trying to build a career. What's interesting is that my twenties were not like that. And for those of you that are not in your twenties now, but you're a little bit older, your twenties weren't like this either. I mean, I didn't have a clue what anyone else was doing. I didn't know what people's jobs were. There was no LinkedIn or Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or YouTube.

(16:52):

All I knew when I was in my twenties, I was broke. I was in a new city and I needed money. So what did I do? I wasn't watching what my friends were doing. I had no way to watch what they were doing. I signed up for a temp agency. My first job, my first job was so bad. You know what I did for my first job in my twenties? You want to talk about lost? I would go every day into this law firm and I sat in a windowless conference room with a bunch of other 20 somethings that were working a temp job. And for a year I would hand stamp with these other 20 somethings who also hated their job as much as I did, who also felt lost. This is what it sounded like all day. As we would hand stamp one paper after another, we would sit in there for 12 hours a day stamping papers that were part of some big class action lawsuit.

(17:48):

We would talk about how much we hated our lives, how stuck we felt until about 7:00 PM You want to know why 7:00 PM Because if we stayed that late, the law firm would buy us dinner and none of us were making money. So we needed the dinner and it was one less thing that we had to pay for. And here's the thing, I was miserable, but I didn't know anyone who was doing anything different. I didn't have thousands of people broadcasting their amazing lives in my face. I didn't know that there were people traveling. I didn't know the expensive clothes they were buying. I didn't know the dream careers they were building or the amazing relationships that they had or the products they were putting on their face. All I had was the life I was in. The choice was either this or that. Just keep doing the same thing or do something different.

(18:37):

And so I really want to validate this and I feel bad for you. I mean, social media is amazing in so many ways, but one of the ways that it's making your twenties miserable is that it is revealing this infinite number of choices. Should I focus on my career? Should I quit my job and go backpacking in another country? Oh, I don't have any money to do that, but I'm still thinking about it. Should I live it up while being single or should I settle down and look for my long-term partner? Should I go home more and see my parents or should I be present here with my friends in the city? Should I be going out every night and having fun with my friends? Or should I be staying up every night and focusing on my health? Or should I be getting up early and getting to the gym?

(19:12):

Or should I be working on a business plan or a way to make money online? Should I start posting a day in a life videos or writing a book? I mean, the options feel endless because they are endless. And I want you to imagine something. Imagine if you were to walk into a grocery store and all you had to do was buy some milk and the entire grocery store, it's just all milk. There are 10,000 brands of milk and some are displayed this way and summer displayed that way in summer. Cool. And some are shelf stable. What one do you choose? How do you know? I mean, it's all right there in front of your face. All these different options. And what ends up happening when you have 10,000 things to choose from? Oh, you just buy the one milk brand that you always buy because trying to make a decision when it seems like there's a million options is so overwhelming that your brain always defaults to what you know.

(20:08):

And this isn't just sort of a common sense thing. There's really powerful research here that is going to validate why you feel paralyzed and lost and overwhelmed in your twenties. See, there was this very famous study about making decisions and what happens when you're offered too many choices. And this study was done by researchers at Columbia and Stanford and they discovered this concept called the paradox of choice. And here's how the experiment went. In a grocery store, you know how they give you samples and they want you to try to buy something. Well, imagine here's what the researchers did. They were going to give customers samples of jam and then they were going to measure based on how many different samples the researchers gave the customers. How many people ended up buying jam in one table? They had six jams. And when shoppers were presented with six jams that you could taste, 30% of the people bought a jar jam.

(21:09):

Now check this out. They then put out a table with 24 jars of jams, and you would think if there were more things you could sample, be more like you would buy something right wrong. 3% of people bought jam when they were offered 24 different types of jam. People were 10 times more likely to purchase jam when the number of jams was six, not 24. Now, I want you to zoom out and think about your life this after noon alone, based on what's going on on social media, there's literally more than 24 options of how you could spend your time, which based on the research means you're not going to do anything. See, the more choices you think you have, the harder it is for you to make a decision. This is what's called the paradox of choice. This is why it's so hard for your brain to make a decision because you're the very first generation that has had your brain programmed to believe there's always something better, that there's a bazillion different choices.

(22:17):

I don't need one jam. There's 24 things. There's a better partner, a better job, a better place to live, a better body. And you see 10,000 examples every single day of people living this better life. I mean, look at the dating apps. There's 500 people you could match with in literally the next two minutes at your fingertips. Looked at LinkedIn, there's 5,000 job options available to you. Look at your Instagram feed. There are hundred countries that you could be flying to today, and they're all on your feed. This is so important to normalize this sense of paralysis and overwhelm that you feel there's nothing wrong with you. Your brain is struggling with the paradox of choice. I want you to hear me loud and clear and start saying that the fact that you feel paralyzed and overwhelmed in your twenties by all of the options, it means you're mentally well.

(23:11):

The research is clear. When there's too many options, you choose nothing. 

(24:06):

Everybody wants to thrive. Everybody wants their life to move forward. Everybody wants to have a great job and a great social life, and they want to take better care of themselves, including the 20-year-old that you're worried about that seems like or so unmotivated to just sit there. And I want you and I to recognize this because if you're sitting there barking orders and to-dos at your 20 somethings, get a job, get a boyfriend, what are you going to get married? Why not just go back to school, fill out the application, get up earlier. You got to stick to a budget. You're actually making it worse. What every 20-year-old needs right now is someone to sit down with them and say, it's very overwhelming to be your age in a world where there's endless options. It's normal to feel paralyzed and overwhelmed by all of the things in front of you.

(24:52):

How can I support you? Have you thought about what you'd like to be doing in the next year? What can we work on together to help you actually put the ball in play? So the takeaway here is really important. Your 20 something in your life is dealing with a different reality than you and I did. They're struggling with the paradox of choice. They're capable of doing what needs to get done. That's why you're frustrated with them. But you and I need to recognize that this is a human being that's overwhelmed by all the possibilities. And even though they're an adult, they still need your support and decisiveness to push through this paradox of choice. Because even though you and I figured it out in our twenties, it's not the same thing as what 20 year olds are experiencing today. So can we agree to stop with the judgment and have some compassion and offer support because this isn't easy and we're meant to be doing life together.

(25:46):

And in just a minute, I'm going to give you in your twenties some tools to help you be more decisive. But in the meantime, how about you ask for the support? How about you share this episode with the people in your life that are barking orders at you so that I can help them understand what's actually going on? And how about you ask somebody to sit down and help you or sit with you as you work on your resume or you apply for those jobs or you do the things that you know need to do, but you just feel too paralyzed to do 'em? Because when you start to navigate the day-to-day decisions and you start to move yourself forward with a little support, it's going to create a sense of momentum that's going to make you feel a lot better.

(26:32):

And that's this pressure to do everything. It's playing in the background, this pressure that you got to cram everything into your twenties. And you wrote in about this over and over and over again. Mel, what are the things I have to do in my twenties that are just going to be too late to do once I hit 30? What's the one risk everyone should take in their twenties? How do I look forward in the future and not be scared about time people pressure money? How do I live in the moment and stop worrying about the future? I feel so much unnecessary pressure to achieve big goals, educational and professional and personal by the time I'm 30. See, the big thing that's happening if you're in your twenties is you feel that now is the time to chase your dream career, to have your fun party years, to master your morning routine, to get the perfect skincare, to be fashionable now because you're never going to look better.

(27:23):

Take big risks because you can afford it. Now, move to the ski town. Move to the beach town, travel the world, make money online. Become an influencer. Get a dog. Why did I get a dog? See Beyonce, why she's touring? Get that photo in front of the Ferris wheel at Coachella, run a marathon. Live with my college friends. No live with my significant other. No live alone because I'm never going to get to live alone again. And now I'm alone all the time and I'm lonely. So it begs the question, why do you feel so much pressure in your twenties? I mean, I didn't feel this pressure in my twenties, and part of the reason is because of what we just talked about. I actually didn't understand the options. The other reason why I didn't feel this pressure is because when I was in my twenties, and this is important for all of us to understand how things have shifted.

(28:10):

When I was in my twenties, the social pressure that was aimed at us was to figure out your career and climb the ladder and save money to buy a house. That was the uniform social pressure of what you needed to figure out in your twenties. And if you were the kind of person like me who you started your career as a lawyer and then you realize, I hate this, and then you change jobs and then you change jobs, and then you change jobs again. Or you're like my husband who got laid off one job after another job. In tech, everybody thinks you're a freak who's never going to be successful. That's not the reality you're living in. If you're in your twenties today, it's actually the opposite social pressure. If you're in your twenties, it's sort like what kind of loser stays in the same job for an entire decade?

(28:57):

The pressure of doing your twenties correctly means doing everything in this decade, lots of changes. Whereas for a lot of us, stability was glamorized. But for 20 year olds today, it's adventure, constant change, upleveling Instagram worthy moments, trying the best meals, taking photos of everything. Performing your life is what's glamorized. And you know what stability feels like? Boredom, loneliness, feeling loss. If you're in your twenties today, you have this haunting sense that there must be something more than what you're currently have because the world has shoved in your face and told you that, oh my God, constant change is what you should crave. You should be moving, you should be, should be putting it all out online. It's just like the great scattering. Once you recognize that this kind of pressure is just something that's a social construct in the background, what's great about it is it empowers you to understand where the pressure is coming from.

(30:00):

It's not coming from internal, it's coming from external. This pressure that hits in your twenties is a lot like the great scattering. It's something that's happening in the background that creates all this anxiety and this confusion, but we're not talking about it. And because social media and comparison is not going anywhere, I actually think it's going to get way worse, especially with ai. You got to learn how to see it and separate yourself from it so you don't drive yourself crazy. See, you're not going to be just looking at the fantasy life of what some human being is posting in terms of the perfect meal and the perfect vacation and how beautiful their life is. You're going to be looking at AI driven accounts, glamorizing what a human being isn't even doing. And look, I think you should do all those things that you want to do in your life.

(30:50):

You should make a bucket list everything that you want to experience in your life. You should absolutely put that somewhere and have it on a list and make a plan to do it before you die. But here's the truth, you need to hear. Forget the pressure. You don't need to do it all in your twenties. And look, I get it. Everyone who gives advice to people in their twenties, do it now. Do it before you have a partner in a mortgage and kids do it. Do it, do it. Well, the reason why we say that is that number one, first of all, we were not aware of all the options you're aware of. So when we say do it, do it before you can. We were talking like change your job. I mean, that's what we were basically pushing other 20 year olds to do when we were your age.

(31:33):

So we weren't aware that there were all these options. Number two, most of us grew up in households where your parents or your caregivers literally sacrifice everything to give you a better shot at life than they had. And that might've been what was modeled for you that that's what it's got to look like when you have kids. But here's the thing, it doesn't have to be like that. It doesn't have to be like that at all. Your life is not over when you turn 30. Your life is not over when you get married. It's not over when you have a mortgage. It's not over when you get a dog or a cat. It's not over when you have kids. One of the greatest things about social media is you can find examples of people who are doing life differently. You want to do van life with very little money and take little kids with you.

(32:22):

There are people who can show you how to do that. You want to travel the world while you have kids and raise kids. Great. I have a very close friend who lived in Chicago and then got involved with this organization in Tanzania, and they were over in Tanzania when their son was born. They lived there until he was six years old. So instead of putting all this pressure like cram everything into your twenties when you don't have a lot of money, and ah, all this pressure, let's take the pressure off. Let's relieve the pressure, let's flip the valve. And I want you instead to imagine a world where you create this bucket list and it starts in your twenties and you trust in yourself that you are going to create a life and live a life where you're going to be checking those things off throughout your entire lifetime.

(33:13):

That's the way I'm doing it. And that's what I want you to do too, because you can have everything. You just can't have it all at once at the same time, and there's no reason to cram it into your twenties. And that brings me to the three truths I want to tell you that are really going to help you in your twenties where you are right now.

(34:01):

Start dreaming out. Write down everything you want to do and don't hold back every time you're inspired. Add it to the list. If you're a notes person, put it in the phone. If you love creating those little folders on social media where you save all those posts, that's the way that I do it. Just put 'em on social media. Put 'em in those little folders. Have a list for your life of all the things that you want to experience, places you want to travel to, meals you want to cook, things you want to wear. Heck, my daughters aren't even engaged and I already have a folder about weddings. They may never get married. Who cares? It's not about the timeline, it's not even about doing it. It's about creating space to dream without invalidating where you are because there is no expiration date on these things and you're killing the joy by putting so much pressure on yourself.

(34:50):

I mean, I can give you so many examples of life beyond your twenties. I mean, when I was in my thirties, my husband and I, we took our six and 8-year-old on a week long backpacking trip in the Wind River range because they were so little. We rented llamas. That's a thing that you can do in Wyoming and Idaho. We rented llamas and they helped carry the packs. We didn't stop traveling. We did it on a budget. When I was in my late thirties, I had always wanted to own my own business. My husband and I figured out how to own this tiny little paint your own pottery studio, retail store that was open in the afternoons and the weekends didn't make any money. We checked the box. It was a dream. My husband started a restaurant business in his late thirties. He didn't have to do it in his twenties.

(35:34):

Heck, I didn't even get serious about social media until I was in late forties. I didn't get paid for my first speech until I was around that age too. In fact, I have done some of the best traveling and the best trips of my life in my late forties and my early fifties. And honestly, I like it a lot better because had I backpacked in my twenties, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I can enjoy it now because I've saved a little money. I learned how to do a back flip at the age of 48. You're not dead when you turn 30. Stop acting like it. You guys think your life is going to end when you have kids. Mine actually began because you think that when kids come into your life or a dog comes into your life or a mortgage comes into a life that all of a sudden you've got to change your whole life.

(36:20):

No, no, no. Stop and consider something. Give yourself a little bit more credit when you have kids they're coming into and are a part of the life you're creating. And if you already do have kids, you just keep living your life with them in it. So the takeaway here is start the list, expand the dreams. Allow yourself to really visualize what you want. But don't you dare give it a deadline. Don't you dare put pressure on it. That's the fastest way to kill a dream, is to put a deadline to it and try to squeeze it into a moment in time when you're not meant to do it. And that way, this list, it becomes not a to-do list or a bucket list or this thing that you feel pressure to achieve, but it becomes this lifeline that is pulling you through your whole life.

(37:16):

It becomes this lifeline that expands this habit of dreaming and visualizing and sprinkling all these amazing things through your whole life. I mean, how cool is that? And that brings me to the second thing. There are no wrong decisions, okay?