Everywhere I look it seems that everyone is getting married, just engaged, pictures posted of another wedding on Facebook.
This bitterness may sound like the ramblings of a 50-year-old divorcee, but nope, I'm the fresh ripe age of 22. Yes, count them - 2 decades plus another 2, that count as my first anniversary of a new job and "growing up."
What does it mean to be all grown up nowadays? A paying job, 9-5 workday with evenings to yourself, a high stack of bills in a new city all by myself. Welcome to the good life! ... or not, as exciting as it sounds - I'm still missing the biggest piece of the pie, I've apparently missed the whole getting married bandwagon.
Girls, young girls, are getting married earlier than ever. Engaged in college, married and with kids by 24. MTV even has a show dedicated to this new trend, "Engaged & Underage," documenting the struggles young couples face stepping into this newly dubbed ritual passage of your early 20s?! COME ON!
This new trend could be due to the fact that we are a generation expecting promotions and more responsibility than our 20 year old parental counterparts in the 70s or 80s once did. You can't blame us though, with the average house cost at $450,000 - do you really expect us to be able to afford our first house by the time we're 30?! No. We want all the goods and we want them now.
Thus, everything that's supposed to happen: the job, marriage, kids, house etc is all compressed to things we should accomplish in our early 20s. We need to start working earlier to able to live off the money we save for ourselves in 401k and not rely on some falsely promised social security plan that will be sucked by the generations before us.
Might as well enjoy life now and save and sacrifice later when we can't physically do it anymore. We are part of an epidemic of feeling as though our lives will expire much earlier than before. That our happiness is tied to our financial success, products of a society of materialism and the status quo...
