When you are a child, you likely couldn’t wait until you reached your teens so that you could stay out late and go to high school parties. Then, in your teens you probably couldn’t wait to be old enough to drink and live on your own. Watch any movie targeted at teens and you will likely see some sort of message about how your twenties are the best years of your life. But are they really?
Most of the people that I know in their twenties are struggling to get by with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, working less than ideal jobs just to get by, and are in relationships that they feel obligated to stay in because their other option (being single) is just a little bit worse.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t people in their forties who are going through the same things that I mentioned above, but the fact is that most fortysomething people have things at least a little bit more figured out than they did in their twenties.
Here are the main ways that life is better in your 40’s:
You Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
One of the major things I found beneficial as I reached my forties is that I stopped caring. Not about being successful or how I looked (those worries never seem to go away) but I stopped caring about what other people think. I stopped being bothered by others’ nagging questions; “When are you going to settle down? So what kind of job can you get with that degree? Don’t you think that you’re a little too old to be going out all the time?”. I also stopped wasting my time caring about what people thought of me, whether or not they thought I was “cool.” What does it mean to be cool, anyways? I likely won’t ever know and that is okay with me.