How to Live, or What the Future Looks Like at 25

When I was younger, the blueprint for life was simple. I imagined it to be something like this: school through to college, graduate, get a job, meet a girl, fall in love, get married, start a family. All of that was ahead of me, way in the distance. As is common with such a perspective, my measurements were skewed. I estimated -- rather reasonably, I thought -- I would have all of that taken care of somewhere between 25 and 28, maybe as late as 30 if I opted to pursue a graduate degree in between.

I don't remember when I discarded this blueprint. But when it went, it went quickly, with a scoff, and without a second glance. It wasn't just that I was changing, but that the times were. The combination of socioeconomic conditions forged by our parents' generations with a greater cultural acceptance for pursuing "life experiences" (sprinkled in with longer life expectancies) meant that kids my age -- who had grown up idealizing the aforementioned blueprint, who now found it grossly outdated -- had the luxury of time. We could explore, misstep, or delay all we wanted. And so we traded careers for jobs, plans for detours, and stability for transience. There would, after all, be time for Life later.

It's been written about abundantly (in this Times article that Google spit out, for example, albeit not the one I had read some time ago that I had been searching for), but the categorization and examination of this shifting dynamic among young people is always treated with a certain alienness. Its otherness is always at the forefront, and even as I recognized myself going through this larger realignment of attitude, reading about it somehow made it seem strange and perplexing. And so I began to wonder just what my outlook was becoming.

I do still want a career, but I am no longer in the hurry I once was to attain it. The idealism that colored much of my later teen years has metastasized into a kind of optimism about time -- a belief that deferral of certain career and life goals now does not mean being denied them in the future. There's been a subtle shift toward a certain kind of passivity -- a desire to be impacted, rather than impact. This isn't to say I've abandoned proactivity, but that I'm more focused on goals for what lessons and insights I can take from them, rather than on those that are based in my accomplishing something.

I say all this, but there's a slight hypocrisy in the fact that I'm still pursuing career goals. I have a small production company in Los Angeles that I run with three partners. Being in New York, I can never claim to be as involved as my two partners steering the ship in Los Angeles, but I am actively planning and scheming and working, for long-term goals of the company and, by extension, my career. But perhaps what I've been trying to say is that those career goals now find themselves being balanced by a healthy appetite for discovery, in ways completely unrelated to my career. I am lucky to be working in a creative field, because if I live a life of constant discovery, it stands to reason that I will become a better writer, a better thinker, a better dreamer.

And so I live in New York, because this is where I wanted to spend part of my 20s. It's a city rich with life, still distinctly American, but also incredibly different from the Southern California I grew up in. I lust after travel opportunities because I want to see new places, encounter strange things, and interact with something unspeakably foreign. I believe it will make me a fuller person. I read, I watch, I consume, because what I learn from strangers will undoubtedly inform how I empathize with the rest of the world. I aim to learn to do things -- from getting scuba-certified last year to a years-long dream I've had of learning how to work on a farm -- because coming from a humanities background, I am always seeking to balance my knowledge with things that exist outside of theory and interpretation.

This wasn't the life I thought I'd lead when I was a kid, but it's a life I'm thankful to be able to lead now. I wonder, if kids today will see us and think to emulate, and if they do, whether or not the shifting strata of ideas and expectations our society sits on will again dictate a change in pace by the time they are in their 20s.

I will be able to call myself a filmmaker without feeling completely fraudulent one day. But I am not in a particular rush to get to that day. I have other things I want to be as well. I think what it boils down to is a desire, perhaps youthfully naive, to continually have my perspective altered. After all, it is not just me that is changing, but the world around me, and what better way to understand a mutable world than through flickering lenses? As nice as stability sometimes sounds, it requires a commitment to a certain sedentary acceptance -- that this is how things are going to be -- that I'm not ready for yet. There will be a day when I will seek a steadier life, I have no doubt. But when that day comes, I want to be able to look back on a life of imbalance, composed of both indulgent days and meager months, all the while ravenous for newness. Discovery should never end; astonishment always pursued. For now, that means chasing my interests in a hundred different directions. For now, that is the blueprint.