I'm just going to chime in as someone who is not only so far over that hill (mid 20's) but the next one (mid 40's) and halfway up the following one (turning 59 in a month!).
I decided in my twenties to make the life I wanted. I roamed around until I found a spot on the earth that felt good to me. It, like most of the beautiful places in the world, is expensive--ridiculously so. But I accepted the consequences of my choice which meant living paycheck to paycheck on a waitress salary and tips. I never had a car, I never had insurance and I lived in a cottage in an elderly woman's back yard that was literally rotting into the ground. I loved it! I never felt scared about the future because I really subscribe to the power of trust. I trusted that everything would be OK as long as I kept following my heart. I got all sorts of advice from relatives, not to mention the larger culture's endless barrage of media hype telling me that my life would be greatly improved if I had a career. (I come from a family where my mom and sister both have doctor attached to their names). My response was to get rid of television and read alternative news sources and be thankful that my family lived in other states. I learned to make art, make meaningful relationships with people of all ages and to live on very little and actually enjoy that.
What i am trying to say here is that rather than worry about careers and children and mortgages, your twenties are much better spent IMO getting to know yourself, developing your ability to both take responsibility for and nurture your own freedom of choice. Find your tribe of people. When the majority of people around you are living like you, with similar values about what really matters, it makes it much easier to reject all the nonsense in very air we breathe that says there is only one way to do things. If you live in a place where you constantly feel like someone that is swimming against the currents, go exploring. It's a big old world and there are beautiful pockets of resistance everywhere!
The irony of my earlier choices is that I did end up with a career of sorts. I did end up with children and a husband and a house with a mortgage. It would take a novel to describe how all this happened but a few details are needed: I had my first baby at 33 and my second at 38. The reason I own a house is that an old man I waited on and talked to every day, who had no relatives, actually left me money when he died and it was just enough for a down payment. I have a "career" as an artist and an art teacher simply because I have refused to give either of my passions up for all these years whether they paid well or not.
Having kids is expensive--no doubt about it. But raising kids outside of the normal consumer culture is entirely possible. One of the things I feel most proud of in raising my sons is that neither of them saw material wealth as even desirable and their greatest joy is in the natural world and their relationships with others. My surviving son is in his mid twenties. He wonders about this stuff but he doesn't really worry about it. His dad and I have continually urged him to follow his passions and to trust that he has everything he needs to create whatever kind of life he wants. I believe that the world underneath the consumer frenzy driven world is the real world. That is where I want him to find his place. There are so many ways to do this but you have to first see the limits that the larger culture prescribes for what they really are: an illusion.
Working to support yourself is inevitable. Finding work you care about may mean that it is low paying but not necessarily. Even the most menial job can be done with both integrity and gratitude when you focus on why you are doing it (independence, goals to travel, etc).
I think that part of why things seem harder is that expectations have been raised unrealistically. Everyone is expected to own far more than they need. In native cultures people that wanted and consumed more than they needed were considered mentally ill and attempts were made to help that person heal from such delusional and self-destructive thinking. Now we elevate the materially "successful" to be role models for the young. No wonder everyone is so stressed. You are not crazy, the culture is!
Shifting your focus from the future to the present is a powerful tool. In the present you can engage in creating the life you want as those wants define themselves. Like all creative endeavors it is not static--it is fluid-- and you may be surprised continually at how your creation morphs and changes. At the end of my life I want to look back and say that it was an exhilarating adventure, not something to be stressed over and simply endured.
Lastly, I have to bring my younger son into this. He was a very sensitive soul. I know that though he struggled mightily not to let the larger forces of culture influence his view of himself, he was very vulnerable to the destruction of his self-esteem nonetheless. Many of you have read my
intro to Bluelight and how I came here because I was so grateful to know that before he lost his life he had this community that saw him as so much more than a high school drop out, a person with mental illness, an addict and a felon in the american injustice system. While all those things are true on one level, his truth was so much bigger, so much grander. Bluelight offered him a place to be himself with all his flaws and all his miraculous beauty. I hoped that he would find that in the world outside of Bluelight but he lost his life to despair instead. That is why I am so passionate about creating the life you want--for all the young people on here and elsewhere. It is as possible for you as it has always been for those who seek it. The only difference as far as I can see, and it is an insidious one, is that there is a far thicker fog of media hype around your generation than was ever there for me to wade through. Fight through it. The life you want is definitely out there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8
. Live out of home, 200km's from the town I grew up in. Living in a beautiful little country mountain town these days with my best mate. Life is hard, stressful, depressing, broke, we live off baked beans and don't know when they're going to cut the power. I'm BiPolar1, so this doesn't help with getting a job and stuff as employers up here are pretty judgemental.
