Being in your 20s is hard. And not in that roll-your-eyes kind of way, that fake way where you loudly sigh and you toss your head back and breathlessly exclaim, “oh god, I’m getting soooo old.” No. Your 20s are hard in a different way. 

Your 20s are hard because the first three years are spent partying with no responsibility in sight. The next three years are spent recovering and trying to scrape together any remaining pennies and start a Real Person’s Life. And the three years after that? A painful and confusing balance between maturing into real adulthood while also enjoying your youth, the whole time wondering the hell you’re doing and why the world is handing you all these responsibilities.

Will it ever get better? Fuck if I know. But maybe we can laugh about these things together…

1. Everybody is getting married and it’s annoying as fuck. Not because you’re jealous. Because it’s expensive. Because it’s time-consuming. Because it forces you to look at your own life and you’re thinking, “Is it not okay that I still just want to party?” Because Facebook.

2. Between you and the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, you are both in crippling debt. You feel badly about yourself for not having more money. You wonder how you’ll ever buy a house or have a family with that kind of debt. Then you realize you don’t even want either of those things yet, and you’re just putting unnecessary pressure on yourself because of everybody around you.

3. Or you and your significant other just broke up. So now you’re in your late 20s, newly single, and basically everybody around you is shacked up. And you’re like, “wait… maybe I am going to die alone?” and then you begrudgingly sign up for a Tindr account.

4. You still have to call your mom anytime you start a new job because you need her to explain your health plan to you. Don’t understand deductibles, never will.

5. You must plan in advance what nights you want to go out that week, because there’s no way you can hang two nights in a row. You are tired as fuck, you are hungover as hell. Last Friday night you and your roommates got way too excited about watching the new Hunger Games release and making candles… and then you fell asleep halfway through the movie.

6. Grocery shopping. A fucking nightmare. And the only time you can go is when all the other dewtards can go, so it’s always complete shit-show. If single, you’re the lucky ones, as you are not bound by another person who lives with you and shares meals with you. If you have a S/O, you will become excited that ShadyBrook Ground Turkey 99% lean is on sale for $3.99. And then you will hate yourself.

7. The oceans are destroyed, the icecaps are melting, ISIS is coming, measles are back, and we’re all going to die. When are you having a kid again?

8. Your parents are getting old. Relatives are dying. People you know from your hometown that you figured wouldn’t amount to much indeed did not amount to much, and they are all ODing. It’s survival of the fittest and somehow you are one of the lucky ones, but you still feel like you’re hardly even scratching the surface of functioning adulthood.

9. When you hang out with some of your friends, they commiserate over how hard it is saving for a downpayment… on a house. Meanwhile, it took you three years to save on a downpayment for a used car, and you still can hardly afford the monthly bill.

10. Taxes.