I’ve read a lot of articles about what it looks like to act my age. I’ve seen the “20 things you should do your 20s,” “10 reasons to travel while you’re single,” “15 memes that sum up college” blog posts. You’ve all seen them, I’m sure, littering your Facebook feed or Twitter updates. I have clicked on more than a few of them and, I have found myself stopping for a minute to consider the points presented. At the end of each though, I’m left feeling a bit confused. I won’t say that there aren’t certain pieces of them that I agree with, but overall I believe that there is a very flawed idea of what being young means.

I’m writing to change the conversation.

In my opinion, based on my observations, many members of my generation think that being young encourages being short-term oriented–that being young indicates that you should “live in the moment” and never outside of that one moment. Not in all aspects of life, certainly. For example, we tend to go to college and tend to use our education post graduation, even if indirectly. And, again, it isn’t necessarily bad to be short-term oriented some times, because if you are too focused on repercussions of every choice you make you will be overly risk adverse. But, generally, I think most people my age are more concerned about what the next weekends’ plans are and not enough about what their life will look like in five years.

Sounds horribly boring, I know, but I am not going to preach about getting a 401k (not yet anyway, and if you want to start your retirement savings, get a Roth IRA–better tax plan), I want to simply talk about culture. I want to talk about the difference between a “fun” life and an extraordinary one.