Aadrita Chatterji

There is a reason why people are scared of their thirtieth birthdays.

As soon as the clock turns twelve, we are not blowing candles on a cake. We are shivering with fear and tension, anticipating the countless questions awaiting us on the other side of the door. Questions about a stable career, marriage and children. Life on social media makes it worse as we see our contemporaries building their lives with apparent ease and security. Some of us are early, some of us are on time and some of us are late. Nobody knows who has set the timeline, yet we are running against an invisible deadline.

Things Should Be Done By The Right Time

Our parents used to tell us, “How would it be if you were in primary school at eighteen years old? Not good, right?” It was a culture and a system where we were expected to eat solid food at six months, walk at nine months and speak at one year old. If we didn’t, the family elders would panic in concern. They tended to ignore that every child, every person, comes with their own timeline that may differ from the standard. The three goals: career, marriage and family are traditionally connected to social and economic stability.

As we grow up, we human beings internalise the pressure. We start palpitating each time our birthday comes around, terrified of growing another year older. We are reminded of what’s left to achieve, often compared to the next-door neighbour born into generational wealth and a perfect arranged marriage. The planets revolving around the sun do not compete with the asteroids, meteoroids and comets. If they can move around the solar system on their pathways in peace, then why are we hurrying along?

Slow and steady wins the race, not the person who wants to climb the whole stairs in one stride.

Michael Bassey Johnson

We Don’t Need To Rush Life In The Process

The pressure to be ahead is not an adult stress point anymore; it’s something that we have inherited from our childhood. One of the most realistic and thought-provoking commentaries on the ‘modern life’ is perhaps Taare Zameen Par’s ‘Jame Raho’ (2007), where father and son are awake at the crack of dawn, ready to face the day complete with their breakfast and multivitamins. By contrast, we have the eight-year-old Ishaan Awasthi imagining dragons and superheroes on the toilet, yet oblivious of the world ahead of him.

As our childhood curiosity and imagination vanish with time, we become dull and jaded. Settling down destroys the joy of experimenting with different career options, travelling to see the world, making long-lasting relationships and pursuing higher education because the biological clock is ticking. Here’s where gender dynamics become starker: many women are pushed into ‘safer’ careers, fearing that higher education will delay marriage and children. Over time, both men and women experience anxiety, dissatisfaction, jealousy and an unwillingness to restart their lives.

Nobody knows who has set the timeline, yet we are running against an invisible deadline.

Aadrita Chatterji

Things Will Happen At The Right Time, With The Right People

However, we have seen people who challenge these man-made deadlines. We know about the young woman next door who went back to university after working a corporate career for two years. We know about the middle-aged man who joined a gym after the doctor diagnosed him with lifestyle diseases. We know about the couple with young children who quit their jobs to go on a year-long world tour. Such examples might seem poor thinking and judgement on their part, but who is to confirm whose path is right, and whose is wrong?

Life is rarely linear, while social and cultural expectations say that any achievement beyond the stipulated timeline isn’t worth celebrating. Instead, let us normalise gap years in education and career if for a greater purpose. Let us normalise choosing our partners carefully instead of rushing into marriage. Let us normalise focusing on our emotional and financial states before planning children, or not. With the pressure to achieve by thirty removed, we make planned, informed decisions, dare to experiment, refuse to compare ourselves to others, and be intentional with ourselves.

In this essay, we don’t support a lack of planning or responsibility for their actions. God knows that the writer of this essay is extremely meticulous about her future, and should she decide to make major lifestyle changes, it will be because she sees potential in it. Instead, she says that people should have a choice in how they want to live their lives with maturity, integrity and dignity. Instead of treating career, marriage and family as the ultimate, let them choose contentment as the goal. As people with friends, family and well-wishers, they seek neither admiration nor contempt.

All they seek is support.