6 Things to do in your 20s to make your 30s good

6 Things to do in your 20s to make your 30s good Why do people spend so much time telling you a  list of books to read in your twenties  or a  list of places to go in your twenties?   Those are actually ways only to  escape  your twenties. Escaping by doing that stuff just sets you up for a disaster in your thirties. Here are things to do in your twenties to make your thirties fun. 1.   Build a career that enables you to work from home. The best way to get control of your life is  working from home,  because once youre home, then things start to  shift in favor of you  instead of your company. But there are relatively few types of jobs that translate to a career from home.   Survey the types of careers that are typical of at-home workers and set yourself up for one of them. Almost every person who is working from home  either works very hard in their twenties to build their own business  or they  worked hard in their twenties to specialize  so that it was too costly for the company to replace them. So when they ask, it is easier to let them work from home. 2.   Women, freeze your embryos. Im actually a fan of approaching your biological clock head-on  instead of procrastinating by freezing your eggs. That seems like you’re just putting off the inevitable realities of having a family.  Nothing changes when the eggs are frozen except that you build a bigger career that you must scale back when you do have kids. But sometimes really bad things happen to us, like your whole family burns up in a fire and you have to go to six years of therapy, and you cant start dating until youre thirty-one. So for cases like this, or less extreme, its good to just have your embryos saved. Why doesnt everybody just  save embryos? It’s kind of like  cord blood. Its what rich people do to avoid calamitous medical situations. 3.   Build muscle. You already know that good-looking people get the best jobs and a wider selection of partners. What you didnt know is that you can kind of buy yourself some time if youve been lifting weights really hard-core the whole time in your twenties. Muscle  just sort of lingers on  so you can do mostly lame workouts in your thirties if you lifted weights in your twenties.  This plan allows you a lot more flexibility. It allows you to have years when you dont work out because youre trying to rearrange your life, and it makes all transitions easier to know that your body isnt falling apart when youre doing them. 4.  Go visit your siblings.   Its really not that fun to stay in touch with your siblings in your twenties because everybody  uses that time to separate from their parents and build their own identity. And this is the time when people are in the most denial that  they are like their parents  and  will marry someone like their parents. So a way to stay in denial as long as possible is to avoid siblings, because siblings can always tell  when youre acting like your parents. The problem is that a fascinating study from Harvard  reveals  that the only indicator of who will be happy and who wont later in life is who remains close to their siblings. So you might think that whats really going to make you happy is to be hot enough to get into exclusive clubs, but that doesnt last. Your siblings are what lasts. So go visit them when you have time off. 5.   Dont stress about relocation. Its overwhelming to think youre twenty-two and  you can live anywhere. Unfortunately, its not actually true. Its true that you  can  live anywhere, but its not true that youre going to  want  to live just anywhere. After you have kids youre going to want to live where your family is because this is what happens:  Nobody really cares about your kids. In fact, nobody even likes other peoples kids. They like their own kids. The exception to this is family. Family loves other family. We love our nieces and nephews and grandkids similarly to our own kids, so  youre going to want to be near family. Youre going to relocate to family when you realize none of your friends actually care about your kids. You’ll know because theyre not inviting you for holidays anymoretheyre going to see family on holidays because they want someone to dote on their kids. 6. Your twenties are not practice time. Its your life. So dont worry about relocation. Its playing in the world of false choices. Meg Jay has a great Ted Talk about how people in their twenties spend too much time making dead-end decisions that they pretend dont count. Instead, focus on using a systematic way to try new jobs and new relationships to figure where you fit. And dont worry that things dont feel right  in your twenties because everything happens so fast. You know how people always say to you, “Oh, my gosh, youve grown up so fast.” Well,  time speeds up as you get older, and youre not going to believe how fast your twenties are over. So much of what people in their 20s focus on is how they look to the world right now. Its why Facebook rules the day, and street photographer James Maher named his photo (up top) The Pose of a Generation. But all that Facebook-induced,  short-term thinking leads to depression. Take your life seriously enough to be able to share difficulties and failures. And remember that the best decisions you can make are ones that will last into your thirties. That way, you know you are doing things in your twenties that will matter.