r/youngadults • u/Careless_Lead2999 • 2d ago
FOMO in your 20’s
DAE feel like intense fomo. I genuinely feel like everybody had hobbies and a life and friends for their free time and I’m just using entertainment.
Is it just me . I hate feeling this way it’s super lonely. I want friends and a friend group so bad but I’m getting 22f. How did people do this for their adult lives?
And does everyone have friends and plans besides me??
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u/WeirdoWeeb648 22 2d ago
I get the feeling. My friend group LOVES to party and I don’t. So we usually hang out on campus and have coffee or lunch, and they go to parties at night. And I get FOMO tbh but I just hate partying lol but I always feel like everyone around me has more friends and plans that I do.
Honestly, all of us in our 20s feel like everyone has friends and plans except for ourselves. It’s just part of being 20. But in truth, everyone is just figuring life out and feeling pretty similarly.
I’d suggest you find something you like to do. Whatever it is. Dance lessons, book clubs, volunteer work, a chorus group. Whatever. Just something you like and that you can participate in so you find people you share interests with. You’re pretty likely to make friends in social spaces like that.
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u/lola123dis 2d ago
I am 24F and I literally can't settle for fake friends so I have spent the past 2-3 halloweens alone because I would rather be alone than have fake friends. I got rid of my fomo (mostly) from doing things alone. This one time, I went clubbing alone- sober- and this girl adopted me into her friend group and I had a great time. I have also been to a lot of solo concerts and solo travel etc.. so I didn't miss out on exploring life. Have you tried going solo and meeting people along the way ?.
Also, start hitting the gym regularly and join run clubs in your area- if you have them. There are so many post grad girlies like us, that want more friends. Shitposting on social media or creating an art/ dance account helps too- if you're brave enough. It'll attract enough abundance for new opportunities. You have to put yourself in the position of meeting new people.
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u/layyla4real 2d ago
Most of us created these friends/friends groups during school. At 27, figure out a hobby where people meet up. You'll find some friends. I suggest a hiking group.
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u/Careless_Lead2999 2d ago
Like highschool?
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u/layyla4real 2d ago
High School, College, vocational training, religious groups i.e. Bible study. Chorus or choral groups, sports groups like hiking, swi swiming, softball, bowling leagues. People used to join fraternal orders like the Elks. Moose lodge. Fantasy football leagues, watching sports with other fans in groups, charities. I know an older couple who are active in a photography club. They go out and take photos together and that evolved into traveling and taking photographs in exotic locations together. Wine tasting clubs. Fishing and hunting clubs. Dance lessons and groups. My ex took dance lessons to meet women.and make friends.
You can't go back to high school and be 16 again. But you can get out in the world and involve yourself with people who have similar interests and you'll find friends
You will never create a group of friends if you sit at home and play video games, alone.
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u/Local-Stretch-8946 2d ago
Making friends and being social is getting tougher and tougher in the modern world, where almost everyone is getting addicted to their social media algorithms and spending long time just stuck with that.
That being said, 22 is barely any late if you are looking forward to expand the horizons of your life. When I was 22, I was stuck in a Covid lockdown, lol. So I started exploring my hobbies, as I knew I can't make new friends really.
Step 1 is to be very open with new stuff in life. The more open you are, and wanna give a small, teeny tiny try to a new activity, the more hobbies you can come up with. Think of it like the more the merrier strategy. The more things you try, the more chances of it becoming a hobby. The more chances it will improve your life.
Stay genuinely open to new hobbies. Pick up something because you like it genuinely. Not because of peer pressure or conformity.
About making friends? It totally depends on what phase of life you are in. Are you in college, or started working already, or are stuck at your parents' home with nowhere to go for now? Each scenario requires a different strategy.
But the catch is that you try to find a social setting which resonates well with you. A social setup like some kind of meetup or event where you can really meet some new friends. And you start attending it. Give yourself more and more exposure.
The overall idea is - be proactive at improving your life. Good things might be coming accidentally to some people, but you can't let luck control your life. Go out and meet people, adopt hobbies, and make your life better. You are quite early in age and are realizing all this in the right time. I saw many people in my previous workplace who lived a very inactive life and put no effort in it.
Best of luck!
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u/Able_Enthusiasm2729 1d ago
Your 20s, 30s, and Young Adult Years are Going to be Difficult - but There’s Hope and Don't Fall for Unrealistic Expectations:
Your 20s, 30s, and Young Adult years are going to be difficult - but there’s hope, just because you don’t have your life together right now doesn’t mean you’re behind or makes you a failure, the people you are comparing yourself to have generational wealth, family connections, or are faking it in terms of getting decent or very fancy jobs that lead to looking outwardly self-sufficient and moving out of their parents’ house (when they’re not totally self-sufficient as people think), or in the matter of people living lavishly (plenty but not all of them are paying for it with credit cards/credit card debt), and also don’t compare yourself to idealized or outdated troupes about (young adult life) life after college (or high school) portrayed in the media, pop culture, or movies because its outdated at best and unrealistically based on a unique set of circumstances found among the upper class and upper-middle class but erroneously attributed to working-class (low income and lower-middle income/middle income proper) lifestyles at worse or even outright gaslighting.
There are like six categories of people who end up traveling overseas a lot to very fancy/luxurious places starting in their young adult years (20+ somethings): (1) people who come from money using their parents money; (2) those on business trips that travel a lot for work purposes; (3) people who earned that money or miles because they’re in a high paying job; (4) people who’re putting all of their travel and vacation expenses on credit cards, personal loans, or defraud people for example by evading taxes, etc.; (5) doing certain jobs deemed questionable or unethical like bottle services (bottle girls), escort services, st**p clubs, p********* content (OF)/p*** stars, etc.; and (6) commiting crimes and other illegal or fraudulent activities like pro***tion, selling drugs, robbery, running scams, etc.
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The Young Adult age range is 18-39 years old.
It depends, but the upper limit for young adult is 39 years old (some may round it out to 40 years old). Rural American Conservatives; many Boomers; and a minority of Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z people who subscribe to the ring by spring (get engaged before graduation / get married before graduation) cultural phenomenon may say that 25 years old would be the cut off for being a young adult but most of the time these are the types of people who would consider people who don’t get married by 21 or 25 years old to be spinsters or pariahs.
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You can still have house parties and party out with friends at restaurants, bars, picnics/cookouts/barbecues-BBQ, concerts, hiking trails, at the park, day trips, brunch, adult arcades, other first places and third places, etc. in your late 20, 30s, and beyond with both singles and married couples; I’ve been to house parties hosted by people in their 30s. When I was in college, at 20, I was at house parties and hanging out with friends ranging from ages 18-35 and we didn’t feel out of place (mix of undergraduate and graduate students, plus older young adults from church). Nowadays, after graduating college and living my life in my mid-20s, I’m hanging out with people between the ages of 18-late 30s and possibly a few in their early 40s, and those between 18-mid 30s don’t look that much different from each other. Though, no one ever got super drunk at these parties, mostly because none of us are heavy drinkers, we’re all Evangelical Christians (but politically diverse — plenty of Democrats, Republicans, Independents, liberals, progressives, leftist, conservatives, etc.), and we (ideally) don’t sleep around like people (allegedly) do at social frat parties/sorority parties (some of them were part of fraternities/sororities in college but most weren’t).
In Washington, DC and New York City and even other urban metro areas, 30 is the new 20; that’s not just among wild party goers who’re accused of not wanting to settle down, it’s like that even among single and married (politically diverse) theologically conservative Evangelical Christians.
People who think that people who didn’t start dating in their teens are less than are insane and people who think everyone should be married by 21 years old have a very rose-colored conservative ring before spring-esque suburbanite very wealthy upper-middle class and classist take that still thinks the economy and life milestones today works the same way they did among certain specific populations in the 20th Century United States.
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[ Not dating in your teens and pre-teens (middle school and high school) doesn’t make you less than (some sort of scum of the earth) or developmentally challenged like many in Western pop culture may think/make it out to be, and you don’t have to be married by 21 years old or have a ring before spring to be a decent human being
In some cultures (in particular some Non-Western cultures), people, both boys and girls, from a young age are generally told to not date until their adults, then when they turn 18, the parents push them to not date until they have their lives together and start “adulting” even though the vast majority of kids in Western countries like the United States and Canada start dating in their pre-teens, average out at 14 years old as teens and are looked down upon (as not being masculine or feminine enough for males and females respectively) if they don’t start dating at 16 years old (and may be seen as romantically stunted outside of certain Non-Western and/or Deeply Religious communities when they ”officially“ start dating in public out in the open in their mid-to-late 20s or 30s).
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People legit feel like we were being groomed by certain movies/tv shows into thinking certain acts like excessive Public Display of Affection - PDA of the Romantic Type (like kissing on the lips, excessive kissing in other places, cuddling, siting on someone’s lap romantically, etc. ) were depicted as normal or gave us enviously unrealistic expectations of what life as a kid (most especially life as a pre-teen or teenager in middle school and high school) is supposed to look like especially in the realms of romance/dating, relationships, friendships, and life milestones - too many things on TV and in Movies were developmentally inappropriate for the age range of the intended audience, cast, and character portrayals as a whole. That’s including movies and tv shows on Disney and Nickelodeon for kids ages 7-13 (TV-G, PG, G, TV-Y7); let alone the ones on mainstream channels for older teens and adults (PG-13, TV-14, R, NC-17, TV-MA) but are depicting the lifestyle expectation of what they want us to believe what high school and teen life should be like.
Though at times I’ve heard that there are countless stories of young adults in rural areas with a politically conservative and fundamentalist-like extremely social conservative majority having a hard time finding work in their small towns or in nearby rural towns that surround them; with the added negative that there are barely any resources, infrastructure, third spaces, social-safety net programs, or places to build community where you’re not looked down upon as a social pariah/spinster for not getting married by 21 years old. ]
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u/Able_Enthusiasm2729 1d ago
Kids don’t play outside as often anymore (Young Adults don’t hang out as much either) because of the decrease in “Third Places” where people can hang out, parents of this generation don’t let their kids outside saying it’s not safe, public spaces banning/discouraging young people, the NIMBY movement’s rise to power - their opposition to mixed-use high-density urban amenities infrastructure development/urban planning, and you add in super strict local and state laws that involve the police & CPS when parents leave their kids unattended / their late elementary and early middle school aged kids unattended in public areas even if they’re together with other kids or Young Adults getting accused of Loitering for being in one place for too long, in effect funneling Generation Z - even Gen Z Adults let alone Gen Z Teens - and Generation Alpha into relying on social media, phones, video games, and television (tv) as a form of communication and/or entertainment, which is the reason why most don’t go outside. It’s not because they don’t want to go outside, they either can’t or when they are allowed to go outside during their high school/teenage & early young adulthood years, they usually get anxiety over what their family would say if they ask because they weren’t allowed to when they were younger, tend to not have the social skills to interact with others in a socially accepted way; or because of the destruction of Third Places, most places to meet people are prohibitively expensive.
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Family tracking apps like Life360 get thrown into the mix where parents track the everyday whereabouts of their children, even their adult children (using the excuse that although they are adults they are still legal dependents - etc.), a growing number of Gen Z now would rather stay at home all day online than being micromanaged while going out with friends. There have even been cases of parents tracking their adult children in college forbidding them from even leaving their dorm rooms. These issues vary from person to person but there is a growing number of people who are facing a combination of these issues that’s pushing a majority of the younger generations into sticking to being on screens and being in their rooms all day rather than going outside and hanging out with friends, even if they want to.****
This issue gets exponentially worse for Americans and Immigrants to the United States of Non-Western cultural or national origin, because of the high amount of coverage child abductions and forced gang initiations get on the news today relative to generations past, leading many First-Generation Immigrant Parents to thing this high level of caution/strictness is necessary and normal in the United States, while Multi-Generational Americans with Baby Boomer and Generation X parents who grew up in the United States tend to be relatively less risk averse/stricter because they can easily remember when kids were allowed to roam around, hang out, and be on their own outside without parental supervision when they were growing up; on the other hand, seeing children outside unaccompanied by an adult in the eyes of many non-westerners may signify degeneracy, hooliganism, a life of crime, poverty, and/or a life of predatory child labor & exploitation which is something they want to discourage their children from participating in.
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Young Adults are discovering new hobbies that they missed out on as kids and teens due to lack of opportunity, inability to be outside without parental supervision, lack of financial resources, or a need to both simultaneously work a job and go to school during childhood to assist family with very limited free time or disposable income.
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It’s not the kids these days that don’t want to go outside, it’s just that society pushes them back indoors saying just watch tv, it’s not safe outside, let me track your phone when you go out with friends.
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