Age Milestones

Have you ever heard someone say something like ‘ You need to get married by the time you are 26 or 27???’ Or something like ‘ OMG you’re 18 and you never had a boyfriend/girlfriend??’ or ‘ 2 years into marriage and still no kids???’ How about ‘Completed college 6 months ago but don’t have a Job yet??’. Yeah, if you have heard something similar than you just witnessed something I like to call Age milestones: Grown Up Style. Shit that for some reason society expects you to have figured and get done with by a certain age.

Depending upon where you live these milestones change but there will always be these stupid milestones contributing to your 99 problems. Its type is community dependent but it will exist no matter the community. Hitting these milestones on time determines how perfect a specimen you are in this society. I mean a person who passed out of a top college by the age of 22, has a good stable job by 26, a spouse and 2 kids by 30 and a house by 35 is considered an ideal person to whom we should all look up to. We call them ‘The Successful One’ .But being able to hit these milestones at right age depends on a lot of factors, factors which are not always in our control. I mean what if you suffered from diarrhea on the day of your SATs or JEE or AIIMS ?? Gone is that dream of completing college on time milestone. You are not that successful now because of a freaking diarrhea. And then there is this age old question, ‘ Do I want to hit those age milestones at the appropriate age? What if I want to skip some of these milestones completely? ‘

Maybe, I want to stay single till I reach 30. I want to travel to all the destinations I wanted to, take care of myself, work my ass of for my dream job and party a little. Maybe I do find the right person and get married and still enjoy all these things with him. Maybe, I don’t want to have kids till 35 so that I can live my life first to the fullest. Maybe I don’t want to have kids at all. Who knows, maybe all I want from my life is to stay single forever so that I have time to watch more TV shows. Different but why not?? It’s my freaking life after all. Why is it that my life’s success is measured in at what age I get married or reproduce? If I hit all the parameters I want to hit in my life I’ll call it a win.

The truly successful ones are those who never followed any path but the one they wanted. Yet we geniuses look at their life and turn it into a course that we need to walk. Robert Frost asks you to pick between a certain path and and uncertain one, I say why not just let us make our own path; a mixture of certain and uncertain. I wish the society would stop with this ticking time bomb over our heads with this stupid age milestones. We’ll get where we want to get.

Thanks for reading.