How your 20s are like the bear market
Your 20s can feel like a bear market: uncertain, uncomfortable, and as if our efforts aren’t paying off. Learn how you can invest your time and energy on habits, skills, and behaviours that will ensure you come out of the 'defining decade' better than when you first entered.
HABITSMINDSET
3/30/20262 min read
I like to think of our twenties like I do with the bear market. It's a time where stocks, good and bad, are available at discounted prices. Depending on which ones we choose to invest in (or not), will determine the rewards we reap during a bull market.
Likewise, in our twenties the areas of our lives for which we choose to invest our time and energy into will determine the rewards we reap in our thirties and beyond.
Time is the currency we use to invest into ourselves—specifically our habits. F.M Alexander is often credited with the idea that "People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures". This idea is why the importance of replacing bad habits in favour of good ones cannot be stressed enough.
The problem with bad habits is most feel good in the moment. Not only that, but they may be integrated into our paradigms which we don't tend to be aware of until we bring our conscious attention to it.
One way I see the difference between a bad and good habit is very similar to the difference between instant and delayed gratification. Instant gratification gives you the reward straight away (drugs, porn, doomscrolling, etc.) without having to put any real effort in whereas, delayed gratification (working out, meditating, self reflection, etc.) you put in the work before you receive any rewards.
If it's easy then hard, it's instant gratification. And if it's hard then easy, it's delayed gratification.
Another way I see the difference is by thinking about how high the ceiling is when looking at a habit. If the ceiling can be reached almost instantaneously, it's most likely a bad habit. Conversely, habits classed as delayed gratification tend to have much higher, and really limitless, ceilings.
Sitting in my room smoking weed, not talking to anyone whilst listening to the same songs, and watching the same YouTube videos over and over again has a very low ceiling—and I became an expert in that pretty quickly. Instead, I had to adopt habits with much higher ceilings. Such as taking stronger drugs (only joking).
The importance of choosing good habits can be seen in the discovery by researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health that a second wave of neurons arise during our adolescence and ends some time in our twenties. Once this period ends, the neurons we utilise within the brain will remain, whilst the unused are pruned. Almost as if our brains are clay that is reliant on the time, care, and attention we give them.
Once the clay hardens, what you have left is what you take with you throughout your life and it's difficult to completely reshape it without starting over. The good news, however, is that the clay never fully hardens. This means it’s still entirely possible to make significant changes to your life regardless of your age .
I once read that life is like getting on the wrong train. The longer you wait to get off, the more time and money it's going to cost to go back. The longer we take to address unhealthy habits, beliefs, and behaviours, the harder and more costly it's going to be when we're faced with the consequences.
If you want to learn more about improving your habits, check out the following:
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