this is absolutely brillant. quoted from Thought Catalog

A Checklist For Your Mid-Twenties

SEP. 6, 2011 

By BRANDON SCOTT GORRELL

1. Watch your group of friends change – some marry and fade; best friends unexpectedly become strange; new acquaintances suddenly offer perspectives which are simultaneously impossible to ignore, intriguing, unrealistic, exciting, and awareness-of-self inducing
2. Realize your perception of people you meet on the internet has gone from ‘exciting/ forbidden’ (age 10-13) to ‘subversive guilty pleasure’ (age 14-21) to ‘can’t discern if culturally acceptable’ (age 22-23) to ‘can’t discern if this accurately reflects reality’ (age 24-??)
3. Realize your idea of friendship is reworking itself, seemingly beyond your control – individuals with certain characteristics who, at age 18, would have not met your standards suddenly find themselves in your favor, perhaps the consequence of convenience, compromise, or a softening of ideals
4. Have a battle with drinking – are you sophisticated, a drunk, affluent, depressed, bored, psycho, killing time, having fun, are you too old for this? Is this a spiral? Is a half-bottle of wine acceptable? Is an entire bottle of wine acceptable? Is even getting drunk acceptable? I blacked out the other night, fuck.
5. Become genuinely compelled by high-culture food, e.g., sushi, kale, organic, local, fusion, sweet potato fries, bloody marys, salmon, brunch, tartar, -ianisms; feel aware/ suspicious/ anxious about your newly acquired interest; perceive what you will later come to know as “first world guilt”
6. Realize resolution of first world guilt has become a major unconscious agenda; the agenda is vague and unanswerable to an extent – the fact may be simply that you are, in a completely egregious way, not currently an African person starving in the horn of Africa
7. Struggle with the tenets of individualism; earnestly believe, contradictorily, the entitled stance that you’re special and that your unique contribution to the world will pay off, as well as the stance that you’re not at all special and that the idea of having a unique contribution to offer is a cliché and simply not a universal given, but instead a common, scrutable perception of reality
8. Ask yourself how it’s even possible to change anything; feel nervous about the inherent apathy embedded within the latter question – and thus embedded in your worldview – and so feel doomed to some sort of facist-corporate apocalyptic future scenario as well as a personal mediocrity that ultimately seems bleak and irredeemable
9. Have regular flashbacks of your childhood, which revolved around how to figure out how to work a lighter, playing hockey on rollerblades in someone’s cul-de-sac, and feeling like the whole neighborhood felt you their son or daughter; remember the lake, remember the plastic smell of toys, remember the smell of your best friend’s basement, remember blowing out a Nintendo cartridge, remember the asphalt, remember the first erection, the first hand-hold, the painfully innocent first grade kiss
10. Recall the present; realize, confusingly, that it is what it is; concurrently understand that you’ve accepted the passing of childhood and decided that childhood-related nostalgia is something to be enjoyed but ultimately discarded – understand both concepts as unnecessary albeit meaningful and sigh-inducing; feel unsure, feel capable, feel okay, feel career-minded, still know your childhood address, feel afraid, feel drunk, feel annoyed, remember your back yards, remember the intrigue of your parents’ bedroom, feel concerned about tomorrow, feel invested in your boyfriend’s outfit, feel hurt she still talks to her ex, feel confident, remember the sound of the bell that called you in from recess, feel doomed, feel free