I wish I’d been more... I don’t know... intentional.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. – Maya Angelou.

Forward thinking doesn’t just come with age. It comes with practice and experience. That’s why some twenty-two-year-olds are incredibly self-possessed, future-oriented people who already know how to face the unknown, while some thirty-four-year-olds still have brains that run the other way.

What no one tells twentysomethings like Emma is that finally, and suddenly, they can pick their own families – they can create their own families – and these are the families that life will be about. These are the families that will define the decades ahead.

While most would agree with Socrates that, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” a lesser-known quote by Sheldon Kopp might be more important here: “The unlived life is not worth examining.

As we age, we feel less like leaves and more like trees. We have roots that ground us and sturdy trunks that may sway, but don’t break, in the wind.

Interviewers want to hear a reasonable story about the past, present, and future.

Older spouses may be more mature, but later marriage has its own challenges. Rather than growing together while their twentysomething selves are still forming, partners who marry older may be more set in their ways. And a series of low-commitment, possibly destructive relationships can create bad habits and erode faith in love. And even though searching may help you find a better partner, the pool of available singles shallows over time, perhaps in more ways than one.

Twenty somethings who aren’t at least a little scared about their relationships are often the ones who are being the least thoughtful.

The lottery question might get you thinking about what you would do if talent and money didn’t matter. But they do. The question twentysomethings need to ask themselves is what they would do with their lives if they didn’t win the lottery.