Emily Gould says it so much more eloquently than my inside voice.
“As I walked to the office I’m working in right now in Dumbo this morning I thought about how I used to cherish fantasies of transcending my transient lifestyle and how I pretty much don’t anymore. I glanced idly at the antler-shaped decor items in the windows of West Elm and the signboard advertising 6am Pilates at the fancy gym and the bundled Bugaboos parading past me on the street, and I thought about how it’s kind of weird that, as I’ve gotten older, all the signifiers of “real” adulthood just keep receding further into the distance. Or maybe I’m just at the age when it hits you that apartments and babies and careers and healthy lifestyles and incremental pay raises don’t just happen. It’s not like going from junior year to senior year if you pass all your classes. You actually have to work for these things if you want them. You have to make a bunch of choices that lead to them, and some of those choices are so unappealing that it’s tempting to just want to stay where you are, even if ‘where you are’ is a sublet with cracked walls and a stained carpet on a garbage-strewn block that’s just close enough to the pretty brownstone blocks to remind you that you don’t live there.”
