What Should You Dedicate Your Twenties To? — A (Very) Short Answer

Finding your equilibrium.

Photo by Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash

Consider the life-long question:

What’s a meaningful life?

This is the perfect question to be asking yourself in your first real decade — that is, your twenties.

I call it the “first real” decade because you haven’t really lived until you turned 20. You don’t remember most of your childhood. And teenage years are full of awkwardness and fantasizing about sex.

You can’t really call that life.

And anyway, when else — if not in your twenties — do you have the freedom, the curiosity, the unstoppable drive to get to know yourself, the world around you, and how everything fits in it?

In a magazine I recently read (New Philosopher), one writer said the meaning of life is to “dedicate yourself to a cause greater than yourself.”

I’ve heard this thesis before.

But I’ve also seen people who do selfless work — the brain surgeons, volunteers, entrepreneurs, teachers of the world — and who’re still hopelessly unhappy.

Why?

Because they’re doing something they don’t enjoy.