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Checklist For Your Early 20s

Struggle with your identity. Feel like you’re maturing and constantly learning about yourself while simultaneously changing your aspirations and goals daily. Grapple with the tenets of individualism and feel like you have much to offer the world and can “induce change” while ironically doing what everyone else is doing: working a 9-5 cubicle job.
Battle your alcoholism. Realize that it’s no longer cool to get blackout drunk from late night bingeing. Switch from vodka shots to something more eloquent like scotch on the rocks in hopes of maturity seeping from your pores instead of -OH. Note to yourself that it still does.
See Psychology Today’s study on Why Intelligent People Drink More and justify your post-collegiate boredom-drinking on the fact that you’re smarter than the average population. Continue drinking.
Feel a sense of entitlement from your hard-earned Bachelor’s Degree. Think that you should immediately earn a high-paying job that garners a lot of respect, responsibility, and green paper. Be thrown into the job market and realize that nobody cares, everyone has your piece of paper, and begin earning $15/hr as someone’s professional bitch.
Begin your $300+/month student loan payments and realize that you’ll continue to make these payments until the very day that you die. Suddenly realize that your income is on-par or even less than your friends who just worked their way up the corporate ladder post-high school and constantly judge yourself. Do all of this while living in your parents’ house.
Learn words such as mortgage, refinancing, assets, BUDGET, gross profit, return on investment, and draw figures of Peter Pan. Bemoan aging publicly on a Tumblr.
Become infatuated with high-culture food now that you are off of the ramen diet. Go out to various chain-less restaurants with your friends and eat sushi and salmon and taste cheese and sample wines on the rooftop of a swaggy Santa Monica restaurant. Do this over dinner conversations about Obama, tax brackets, the peace corp, and teaching English abroad; feel like you’ve progressed in life and that you’re somehow a better person than your 19-year-old self. Silently realize that your righteous 19-year-old-self would condemn your scholarly first-world problems conversation and allow your humility to teach you that you’re still no better.
Have flashbacks and reminisce. Think about your childhood through your college years and start to feel older. Have a night of wild drinking and take two days to recover from it. Visit your old campus and allow youthful faces to show you exactly how old you’ve become. Talk about high school with old friends and feel the hiatus between yourself back then and now. Immediately invest in pricey anti-wrinkle creams and be silently judged by the soccer mom as she gets into her Honda Odyssey minivan and heads off to finalize divorce paperwork.
Watch your friends. Watch them get big-kid jobs and climb up the ladder and begin to make six-figured salaries. Read about their proposals on facebook and attend their weddings and be happy for them and sad for yourself as you quietly guzzle socially inappropriate amounts of champagne with your other single attendees. Get invited to housewarming parties and baby showers and become best friends with your newfound happiness-nausea. Feel the immediate need to start pouring 10% of your paycheck into your 401k. Watch it grow s l o w l y and realize that retirement is still an age you never aspire to reach.
Discern that everyone else is feeling and experiencing this too and that you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be in life - maybe even a little ahead. Understand that it’s okay to feel slightly lost and confused and that you don’t have to have all your dominoes lined up just this second. Remember that your parents are still proud of you and your friends will still talk you up to that cute RN as a great catch, should the opportunity arise. Be grateful that you’re not married because your life hasn’t become sexless (unless you’re the author of this article in which case your life is the epitome of abstinence).
Have fun because you’re still young, and you’ve got plenty of time to experience life (and if you feel like you don’t have plenty of time, just deactivate your facebook).