Your time’s not up: Why you need to stop trying to achieve it all
Slow down, you crazy child. Hard work and hustling will take you far. But there’s no race to win and no deadline on goals
To best understand what’s bothering young people today, rewind to the 2009 comedy-drama Up In The Air. Forget about George Clooney for a bit. There’s Anna Kendrick, playing Natalie Keener, freshly minted Cornell superstar, who could have taken a job in San Fransciso but followed her boyfriend to Omaha, the middle of nowhere, only to be dumped by him a few months into her new job.
She’s not just heartbroken, she’s unravelling: “I thought I’d be engaged by now... I thought by 23, I’d be married, maybe have a kid, corner office by day, entertaining at night. I was supposed to be driving a Grand Cherokee by now.” Keener didn’t just have her life mapped out, she’d packed it so tight, it could only explode.
It’s roughly why so many 20-somethings are so disenchanted with their own lives – they’re all expecting to make their dreams come true by the coming weekend. Even the movie knows that this is a fantasy. “It doesn’t work that way,” an older high-flying woman tells Natalie. “At a certain point, you stop with the deadlines. It can be a little counter-productive.”
Clearly, no one’s listening. Because three years later, the HBO show, Girls, echoed exactly the same anxieties. Hannah Horvath, two years out of a posh liberal-arts college, is living in New York City and hoping to become a writer. Her rude shock arrives when her parents cut her off financially. “I don’t want to freak you out, but I think I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least, a voice, of a generation,” Hannah tells them. It takes a few episodes before she stops whining and starts to appreciate survival as its own kind of success. By the middle of Season 2, Hannah has a different voice: “I realise I’m not different. I want what everyone wants. I want all the things. I just want to be happy.”
The waitresses on Two Broke Girls (2011-2017) understand early on that there’s no rushing dreams, that life is too unpredictable to control. “You need to stop freaking out because you’re not where you thought you would be, in life or in our business,” Max tells Caroline in Season 1. “It’s real life, lower your expectations.” The mantra helps them keep at it season after season, making money, saving it, risking it on a cupcake business, losing it and making more.
And perhaps no one struggles with professional fantasies and reality than Emily on Emily in Paris (2020-). She’s 29, American, vaguely ambitious and dispatched to work in a venerable French marketing firm. Of course she’s going to kill it, right? Wrong. American ideas don’t play well in Europe, what’s sexy can soon turn sexist. All the way into Season 3, Emily is still trying to make everything happen, and happen quickly. It prompts the French CEO Sylvie to dryly observe, “Were you just trying to have it all? That is SO American.”
Forrest Gump was a mama’s boy, and not terribly bright. But even he figured it out in the 1994 film: “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.” Nothing turned out quite like he’d imagined, let alone planned. And even recreating that film, bit by bit for Indian audiences as Laal Singh Chaddha (2022) didn’t work out as planned. Maybe it’s time to start valuing the journey rather than scrambling towards the destination.
From HT Brunch, July 13, 2024
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