The tricky late-20s: some friends are all about marriages and mortgages while others are still going to all-night raves

Last November I celebrated “Friendsgiving” – a mawkish American import designed for those who cannot be with their families over the holidays – with my old group from university in London. I made cranberry sauce and toted some roasted carrots through my neighbourhood and up five flights of stairs for the occasion. I am the paragon of sophistication and maturity, I thought to myself.

It is rare to see everyone together lately. On my left side sat one friend visiting from Chicago, where she works as an attorney. She was wearing a new engagement ring. On my right sat another who seemed to have had little sleep. He had been DJing at a late-night rave somewhere in Tottenham the night before. I did not think at age 27 – not even a decade since leaving university in 2016 – that our lives would look so unrecognisable from each other.

When we moved en masse to London everyone had roommates, most were unemployed and looking to start their careers, some – like myself – would self-indulgently continue studying. Thanks to the naivety of being 20 – a disposition that I haven’t fully shaken – I thought not much would change from there. Arrested development sounded like an appealing prospect.

I am told that around this age the implications of the decisions we made early in our 20s are only starting to fully reveal themselves

Without the unifying force of university, where our differences were absorbed by the things that made us similar, everyone’s lives took on a different hue. People moved in with partners, some relationships ended, many chased and won promotions, some toiled away at law school while others went with the flow. All of these things added up and lead us to that table in November, with no less affection for one another but with profoundly different realities. The American writer Frank O’Hara might have called these the “sharp corners” of ageing.

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I am told that around this age the implications of the decisions we made early in our 20s are only starting to fully reveal themselves. But I wonder if this phenomenon is more acute now than it has ever been. Perhaps generational dividing lines are becoming starker. Once the crib sheet for transitioning into maturity was simple: university, job, marriage, house, children, all before 30. But now 20-somethings seem to be dragging their feet through the inexorable descent into adulthood, the path poorly defined.

Over the past several decades, as just one example, the median age for marriage in the United States has crept up by seven years. In Ireland, home ownership by the age of 30 has halved in the space of a generation. It would not be fair to say that everyone is reaching the so-called milestones of adulthood later than ever. But it certainly seems to be happening at a more uneven pace. Only one of my friends is married, and none have children. Not even one generation ago that would have seemed rather strange.

In Joan Didion’s essay Goodbye To All That – about growing up and deciding to leave New York – she says that at aged 28, “the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more”. Any more? I balk. The late 1990s TV show Ally McBeal concerns a 27-year-old freaking out about her unmarried status. By my measures, marrying at 27 would make me a child bride. But as things change, so does the culture.

Changing social mores count too: there are better opportunities for women to work, allowing them to put off the decision to have children by several years

Girls – Lena Dunham’s small screen definitive chronicle of young female millennials – is far more relatable to my friends than reruns of Ally McBeal could ever be. The lead character, Hannah Horvath is shocked – outraged, even – that her parents would deign to cut her off financially only two years after graduating from university. Perhaps it is exactly this kind of insight into the mind of a mid-20s woman that leads to accusations of millennial laziness and entitlement. I am sure much of it is fair.

But there are also screamingly obvious reasons for this delayed maturation. The economic forces are the driving factor: the rental market is hostile; last year the number of people in London, where I live now, moving between properties jumped 165 per cent. But changing social mores count too: there are better opportunities for women to work, allowing them to put off the decision to have children by several years. The average age of Irish people before they moved out of the family home in 2021 was 27.9 years. That dynamic delays, well, nearly everything.

So apparently hopeless is this cohort that a whole cottage industry has arisen out of therapising, problematising and categorising the 20-somethings who just can’t seem to get going. Hundreds and thousands of pages must have been dedicated to analysing the newly rocky path to full grown-up independence. The awkwardness of our third decade has taken on some mythical quality – with plenty happy to channel the stresses of those who see their friends change at different paces. Wait, should I have moved to Chicago to become an attorney?

Megan Jay’s book The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter and How to Make the Most of Them Now – a manifesto against goofing around – does exactly this. Our 20s, she contends, are of such profound importance that we better not, under any circumstances, mess them up. Wiling away the hours with frivolities can only set us up for a difficult future. “Late bloomers,” she says “will likely never close the gap between themselves and those who got started earlier.” And the decisions we make now – finding a husband, having a child, picking the right career path – will define our lives forever.

I finished reading it and immediately contemplated the ethics of burning it. Forget the ghoulish self-help books. We are now told that this widening time frame between childhood and fully-realised adulthood affects not just our personal lives but the entire direction of society too.

It is easy to get lost in the doldrums of data. We could spend hours wondering about the limitations of this kind of generational analysis

Take the emerging anxiety of declining birth rates as an example. As women have fewer babies, later on, we will apparently see rich countries change into ageing ones. In The Decadent Society by (the typically insightful) Ross Douthat, he explains the dangers of this modern phenomenon. Middle age, he contends, might be made harder for those who opt out of having children. But not only that. Society depends on the dynamism of youth to keep it moving forward. Without that momentum perhaps everyone suffers, he hastily concludes. Am I wasting my youthful dynamism? Oh good, another thing to worry about.

But it is easy to get lost in the doldrums of data. We could spend hours wondering about the limitations of this kind of generational analysis. Instead, I can’t help but feel maudlin and sentimental sometimes (yuck!). In Goodbye To All That, Didion recalls going out with a friend to drink Bloody Marys all afternoon as a way to stave off sadness. She didn’t feel guilty about wasting afternoons like that because she had “all the afternoons in the world”.

I am reminded of long afternoons with friends at the pub, the sole priority being making the most fun for ourselves in the moment. It is a rare occurrence now – we have learned about livers, there are calories to think about, Pilates classes to attend, nicotine habits to kick and cats to be fed. Not to mention the dynamic future of society to ensure.

But it is exactly that sameness that I still, perhaps foolishly, crave. Sharing the same anxieties, caring about the same frivolous things, believing erroneously that nothing would need to change. Wanting to make sure that all those “sharp corners” our lives would take would be angled at the same degree, all of our momentum perfectly equal. For now, at least, that seems to be a pathway consigned to the past.