Being 35 is hard

Random clicks from my gallery - My view on 14 July 2025

 

No one ever warned me about this stage of life. Not my parents, not my teachers, not the adults who had adulted before me. I wish they had.

Finishing your education only to still feel like an imposter, or watching others pursue further studies while you’re standing still, is a pressure that no one really speaks of. Add to that the ticking of the biological clock. Schoolmates are now raising children or preparing their kids for scholarship exams, while I’m still questioning whether I even want children at all. Someone recently told me to think about retirement plans, reminding me that my partner and I don’t have kids and that time is running out. (But really, can 35 already be considered 'too late'?)

And then there’s the hardest part: watching our parents grow old. In my case, my one surviving parent. Seeing them lose their grip on the things they once did so effortlessly is heartbreaking. I keep asking myself whether I’ll ever be able to care for them as they cared for their own parents. Maybe as children, we saw our parents as heroes - stronger, wiser, more capable than we feel today. Now that it’s our turn to take responsibility, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m still an imposter, far less mature than they ever were.

The financial responsibility alone is crushing. My father never once failed to provide for me when I was in school. Whenever I needed something, he somehow made it happen on a modest monthly wage. Now looking back, I know this meant he made countless sacrifices for his own needs. For the longest time, he was the sole breadwinner until I began contributing. Now that the household runs entirely on my income, the weight of it is enormous. For someone with generous impulses and poor spending habits, ending the month with a thousand rupees left feels like a mountain. And I’ve never believed in spending what I don’t have, so credit cards are no help.

At work, reaching a managerial level has brought its own challenges. Some of the people you manage can be difficult, and sometimes upper management behaves like they share a single brain cell. With the belief system I’ve developed, the conviction that there is a “right way” of doing things, I often feel isolated. It can feel like one person fighting against the entire world. 

I wonder if this, too, is just an age-specific phase.

As children, we learned values through religion or moral lessons. As young adults, we dreamed of finding work we loved. Then we entered the system and saw how flawed it was. Full of determination, we fought to make it better. But now, nearing the end of young adulthood, I feel like I’ve hit the peak of that fight. It’s exhausting. And I fear what comes next.

Maybe this is what happened to the generations before us. They, too, must have once been filled with hope, determined to change things. They gave everything they had until they realised the system would always be flawed. So they settled into survival mode, doing the bare minimum, becoming the “zombie adults” we see today.

And I can’t help but wonder if that's where I’m headed, too?