Snippet 29: Why Do I Feel Lost In My 20s? (The Psychology of Your 20s Host, Jemma Sbeg)
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One thing I've heard from a lot of people is, and I think when we polled our podcast community about this, one thing that really came up was people feeling lost. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe I should have said that earlier, but that's essentially, I think all of those feelings wrapped up in one title and one word would be the feeling of being lost, right?

And I think that all comes down to this expectation that you need to be on the right path right now. You need to have everything figured out right now. And that is not the case. And I think in our 20s, we are bombarded by all of these life choices that we need to make. We were talking about some before, right? Should I move to a new country? Should I go and do my doctorate degree? Should I just quit my job and go traveling?

And all of those things paralyze us because we're overcome by this thing called the paradox of choice. And I also think this is something that's come up a lot more in the last 20, 30 years. We're presented with so many options, which is a good thing, that it paralyzes us and we can't even make one. And there was this really interesting experiment they did on this, a little bit of a tangent, but...

These psychologists from Stanford, they went to the farmer's market and they set up a stall for jam. And on day one, they had 27 jams for sale. And on day two, they only had five. And we think, and they wanted to see how many, how many times people purchased the jam. And on the second day, when people only had five options, their sales were like up 300%.

And it shows us that we actually don't want as many choices as we think that we do. And when we do have more choices, we're less likely to act on those. And we feel lost because we're unsure of whether we're going to make the right decision. So that's another kind of psychological element behind this experience. I guess part of this feeling of feeling lost or directionless is this idea of needing to have sorted out

like your ideal life. Like I've heard a lot of people say that like, oh, I don't know what to do with my life.

And the implication there is that that is a really bad thing. Yeah. And sometimes even like when I talk to my mum, she will say that she'll look at my career and say that like I don't have any direction in my career or something like that. That's so funny. And I kind of be like, that is true, but it's also not necessarily a bad thing. But at the same time, the phrase you have no direction in your career is definitely a negative rather than, oh, you don't have any direction in career. Well done you. Yeah. Yeah. How do you...

Yeah, what are your thoughts on that? I really like this train of thought here because I think about this a lot.

I think that a lack of direction comes off very negative, but it also means an abundance of opportunity. And that's something that we need to realize. And one of my good friends said this to me the other day, because I recently started doing my own show full time. It was a massive risk for me. I took a massive step away from the financial security that my nine to five offered me. I did something a little bit against the grain. And

And the thing that really like struck me was because this path is unconventional, I have no idea. Like podcasting hasn't really existed for that long, right? I have no idea where I'm going to be in like five years time or 10 years or when I'm 50. And if I continue to work in my nine to five, I would know. I would know that, you know, you move up between, you move up the ranks, your pay increases, you have a family, all those things, right?

And what she said to me, and it really stuck with me, was stop trying to imagine what your life looks like down to the detail and just imagine how you want your life to feel like on an average Monday afternoon. And I was like, wow, that is so profound. She was like, picture yourself at 50 and what are you doing on a Monday night?

And what does that entail? Because you're not going to be thinking about all the milestones that you hit. You're not going to be thinking about all the successful things that you've done. You're not going to be putting the pressure on yourself to meet all these certain goals. Instead, when you think about it that way, you just think about what kind of life do I want to be living? What emotions do I want to be feeling? And you acknowledge that there will be multiple paths to get there. And I think that that's very liberating, right? So I said to her, like, I would want to be living in...

a big city and I'd want to be having people over for dinner that I'd met, you know, in various places. Maybe I'd have a few people living with me who had picked up along the way, friends, family, random acquaintances. And I want to be able to come back and talk to my friends or talk to my partner about an amazing day that I had. And I want to feel loved and I want to feel happy.

And it doesn't matter what happened before that, as long as I'm in that spot. And I think that is a much better frame of mind to be in rather than to look at your life as a series of milestones that you need to hit or a series of decisions that you need to make and a correct way of going about your 20s and then also your broader life.