After spending years looking forward to parent coffee mornings, I now can’t think of a ghastlier prospect. If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that I’m not prepared to settle down until I’m very old and very grey. It’s time to rethink the old rhetoric and expectations of adult life. As the days and months continue without our lives progressing much, I think we need to stop worrying about stages in life and whether or not we are ‘on track’. It can seem quite overwhelming as a young adult when peers start progressing into various career paths, with their entire futures seemingly set out for them. I was always that friend with the ten-year life plan, pre-named children and a pre-selected house in a colourful Notting Hill mews.

“If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that I’m not prepared to settle down until I’m very old and very grey”

Now, I don’t know where I will be in a few months, let alone in a few years and, surprisingly, I actually love it! All I know is that I want to live in New York with my friends, have a successful career and have fun. I don’t think we can expect life to be as we thought it would be – I don’t think anyone’s ten-year plan included pressing pause for a year. While this can seem scary, it is really just a reason to make sure that we don’t let go of things we don’t want to – ever. I will not disregard my friends to focus on a husband, sacrifice my career for a family or give up scrapbooking just because I’m busy.

“I will not disregard my friends to focus on a husband, sacrifice my career for a family or give up scrapbooking just because I’m busy”

When you are allowed to see six friends in a pub one week and not even enter a shop the next, you start to realise that you have to let everything go a bit; holding on to expectations and plans really doesn’t get you anywhere. All the pedestaled examples of twenty-somethings 'just working it out' don’t really fit now. While Friends, How I Met Your Mother and New Girl (among countless others) provide an idealised image of living with friends, trying to find love and getting things hilariously wrong the whole time, I think that these conversations need to start changing. We now find historical social restrictions so ludicrous that they have become entertainment (enter Bridgerton). Yet, we are still entrenched in expectations and are subject to a horrible time pressure. There are still certain things we feel we ought to do only at certain stages of life (teenage house parties, bad hair choices and shopping in Cath Kidston).

“All the pedestaled examples of twenty-somethings 'just working it out' don’t really fit now”

Why should we have to fear moving into each decade, heralding it as a huge, irrevocable transition? Sitting at dinner the other evening, my father was so excited when he overheard me discussing ‘Ring of Fire’ with my brother. He was devastated that such games didn’t exist in “his time”. Despite it being a rather horrific mental image, he should play drinking games with his friends, drink echo falls and wake up swearing off all alcohol (only to repeat the same mistakes the next evening). Maybe this would have stopped him longingly peering into the kitchen when we had friends round (in 2019 of course). Why should we consider it strange when we see someone over the age of 35 in a club? In a world where everyone has been cooped up – when we are let out, we should all be let out.

A generation of opinionated, ambitious and frankly angry young adults are sitting at home, brewing over how they are going to change the world, one woke Instagram post at a time. There is a definite sense that things are starting to change; my career should not be dictated by my 'biological clock', I should be able to talk about the menopause and single-use plastics should be a thing of the past. When everything is so topsy-turvy, I think that we should all take this opportunity to consider what things are most important to us and live exactly how we want to. I will set up the first over 50s nightclub with a Dolly Parton themed bathroom, see my best friend for yoga twice a week, have four children, own a company and travel the world – someone try and stop me.