By: Hawi Bussa
There was a time—probably somewhere between getting our driver’s licenses and rolling our eyes at group projects in college—when we thought we had a vague idea of how life was going to unfold. Graduate, land a job that didn’t make us question our existence, fall in love, get married, have children, and then, somewhere along the way, figure out how to buy a house without selling a kidney. That was the plan. That was what adulthood had always been. Our parents did it. Our professors encouraged it. Even the movies—yes, even the questionable rom-coms—made it seem inevitable.
Then reality hit, and it didn’t just hit; it kicked down the door, took a seat on our couch, and started eating our emergency snacks.
It turns out, adulthood in the 21st century is less of a neatly paved road and more of a winding, pothole-riddled journey where half the street signs are missing. We were raised to believe that growing up meant checking off milestones like a well-organized to-do list. College degree? Check. Job with a livable wage? That’s where things started to get tricky. The cost of living soared, the job market became a game of musical chairs, and we realized that financial security wasn’t something you unlocked simply by working hard—it was a privilege that often felt just out of reach.
Somewhere along the way, the transition from student to professional stopped feeling like an accomplishment and started feeling like an elaborate escape room with no clear solution. We sent out résumés like they were distress signals, took unpaid internships that paid us in experience (whatever that means), and tried to convince ourselves that passion alone could pay the bills. And when we did finally land jobs, we were met with the reality that salaries hadn't kept up with inflation, promotions weren't guaranteed, and retirement? A mythical concept, like Bigfoot, that older generations spoke about as if it still existed.
And yet, we kept going. We adjusted. We redefined success, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of sheer resilience. We learned that stability didn’t always come in the form of a corner office or a white picket fence. Instead, it came in learning how to make a life for ourselves in a world that didn’t look anything like the one we were promised.
Relationships, too, took on a different shape. If our parents met in college, got married by 25, and had kids by 30, we were the generation that rewrote the timeline. Love wasn’t a given; it was an algorithm, a series of swipes and cautious conversations, a process that often felt more like job hunting than romance. Marriage became less of a default setting and more of a deliberate choice, one we weighed against career aspirations, financial realities, and the undeniable truth that commitment in the digital age required navigating more distractions and uncertainties than ever before.
For those who did take the plunge into parenthood, the learning curve was even steeper. Raising children in a world where social media amplifies every parenting decision, where the cost of daycare rivals rent, where the pressures of modern life leave little room for the kind of carefree childhoods we once had—it’s a challenge unlike any before. We’re trying to break generational cycles, provide emotional intelligence, and somehow still afford groceries.
But here’s the thing: even though adulthood didn’t turn out to be what we expected, even though it’s harder, more unpredictable, and occasionally overwhelming, there’s a kind of beauty in how we’ve adapted. We’ve learned to build lives that don’t fit traditional molds, to find fulfillment in places we never thought to look. We’ve created new definitions of success, new models of relationships, new ways of navigating a world that demands more from us than it did from those who came before.
Maybe growing up isn’t about arriving at some final destination where everything makes sense. Maybe it’s about learning how to exist in the in-between, how to embrace the uncertainty, how to keep moving forward even when the road ahead isn’t clear. Because if there’s one thing this generation has proven, it’s that we may not have gotten the adulthood we expected—but we’re making it work, one unpredictable, chaotic, beautiful step at a time.