The Pressure to Have It All

There is a strange expectation that comes with being in your twenties. You are young enough that nobody expects you to have everything figured out, but old enough that people have started asking what you are going to do with your life. What are you studying? What do you want to do after graduation? Where do you want to work? Are you applying for internships? Do you know what you want to do?

The questions are usually harmless, but when you hear them often enough, they begin to feel like deadlines. At university, it can feel as though you are supposed to be simultaneously building your future and making the most of your youth, as though these two things should never come into conflict.

There is the internship you should apply for, the society you should join, the networking event you should attend, and the leadership position you should probably consider. You should get good grades, gain work experience, build your LinkedIn, go on exchange, maintain a social life, exercise, travel, and somehow find enough time to sleep. None of these things are unreasonable individually. In fact, most of them can be genuinely valuable. The problem is that they rarely feel like choices. Instead, they begin to resemble a checklist for what a successful university student is supposed to look like. There is always another opportunity to pursue and, consequently, another reason to feel as though you are not doing enough.

The pressure to become

Perhaps what makes your twenties so overwhelming is that, for the first time, your life feels almost entirely yours to construct. School provided a relatively straightforward path: there were subjects to take, grades to receive, and milestones that told you what came next. University is different. Suddenly there are hundreds of possible directions, and every decision seems to carry consequences for the future. We start asking which degree will lead to the best career, which internship will look strongest on a resume, which extracurricular will demonstrate leadership, and which experiences will make us more employable. We begin to treat ourselves almost like a business case, constantly asking where our time and energy will generate the greatest return.

This mindset can be useful in moderation, particularly for students studying Commerce. We are taught to think about opportunity cost, incentives, and optimisation, and these concepts have obvious applications to our careers. But it becomes more complicated when we start applying the same logic to our entire lives. A hobby becomes valuable because it can be discussed in an interview. A university society becomes worthwhile because it demonstrates leadership. A holiday becomes something we need to justify because we could have been working. Even rest can start to feel like an inefficient use of time. Somewhere along the way, we stop asking what we actually enjoy and start asking whether what we are doing will make us better on paper.

Everyone seems to be ahead

Social media has made this feeling considerably harder to escape. At any given moment, you can open LinkedIn and see someone from your course announcing an internship at a prestigious firm, while Instagram shows someone else travelling through Europe and TikTok offers another person's perfectly curated university experience. Someone is starting a business, someone is graduating early, someone has secured a graduate position, and someone else seems to have somehow managed to do all of this while maintaining perfect grades and going to the gym five times a week. We are exposed to an endless stream of other people's milestones, often without seeing any of the uncertainty, rejection, or sacrifice behind them.

It is difficult to remind yourself that these are snapshots rather than complete lives. You see the internship, but not the applications that were rejected. You see the holiday, but not the months someone spent saving for it. You see the achievement, but not the anxiety that preceded it. And because these achievements are so visible, it becomes easy to compare someone else's most impressive moments with your own ordinary Tuesday afternoon. Nothing about your life may have changed, but suddenly the degree you were proud of, the job you worked hard to get, or the weekend you spent with your friends feels insufficient. You start wondering whether you should be doing more.

When ambition becomes exhausting

There is nothing inherently wrong with ambition. Wanting a successful career, financial independence, or meaningful work is not something we should be encouraged to suppress. The problem begins when ambition stops being something we genuinely want and becomes something we feel we need in order to prove that we are keeping up. There is a difference between working hard because you care about where you are going and working constantly because you are afraid that stopping will put you behind.

The distinction can be difficult to recognise. You apply for another internship because everyone else seems to be applying. You take on another leadership role because it will look good on your resume. You attend another networking event even though you are exhausted because you cannot shake the feeling that someone else might be making a connection you are missing. Eventually, your twenties can start to feel like a project that needs to be optimised rather than a period of your life that you are actually living. You become so focused on building the person you want to be in five years that you forget to consider whether you are happy being the person you are today.

The fear of being ordinary

Underneath much of this pressure is something we do not always like admitting: most of us are afraid of being average. It is not enough to simply graduate. We want a good graduate job. Then a prestigious one. Then a promotion. One internship becomes two, one leadership position becomes several and a good grade becomes a reason to aim for an even higher one. There is always another benchmark because there will always be someone who has done more. The problem with defining success through comparison is that there is no point at which you can definitively win. If your goal is to be more successful than the people around you, there will always be someone ahead. The more achievements you collect, the more normal those achievements begin to feel. What once seemed extraordinary becomes expected, and the goalpost moves again. Eventually, ambition can become less about pursuing something meaningful and more about avoiding the feeling that you are falling behind.

The impossible idea of having it all

Perhaps this is where the idea of “having it all” becomes particularly problematic. We are encouraged to believe that we should not have to choose between the different parts of our lives. We should have an ambitious career and plenty of free time, a high salary and complete flexibility, an exciting social life and enough sleep, relationships and independence, travel and financial security. We treat these things as though they should be able to coexist perfectly if we are simply organised enough.

But life has never worked that way. We understand opportunity cost almost immediately when we study economics: choosing one option means giving up the next best alternative. Yet we are often unwilling to accept the same principle in our personal lives. If you spend your summer travelling, you may have less money. If you take on a demanding internship, you may have less time with your friends. If you prioritise university, something else will inevitably receive less attention. These are not necessarily failures of planning. They are simply trade-offs.

For women, the pressure can be even more complicated

The expectation to have it all is certainly not unique to women. Students of every gender can feel pressure to succeed, build impressive careers and make the most of their twenties. But women can face an additional contradiction in how ambition is perceived. They are encouraged to be confident, independent and career-driven, while still navigating expectations around being warm, approachable, nurturing and likeable. A woman can be ambitious, but there can still be an unspoken expectation that her ambition should not become intimidating. She can pursue leadership, but she should not appear overly competitive. She can prioritise her career, but she may still be expected to make space for relationships, family and everyone else's needs.

The phrase “you can have it all” is therefore complicated. On the surface, it is empowering. It suggests that women should not have to choose between professional and personal fulfilment simply because of their gender. But it can also become another impossible standard. If women can have it all, what happens when they do not want it all? What if someone wants a demanding career and is happy to make sacrifices elsewhere? What if someone wants a family and is willing to make different professional choices? What if someone does not want to become an executive at all? There should be room for all of these choices. Equality should not mean creating another perfect template for what a successful woman looks like; it should mean giving people the freedom to decide what success looks like for themselves.

Maybe your twenties are supposed to be uncertain

We expect an extraordinary amount from our twenties for a decade in which we are, by definition, still figuring ourselves out. We expect ourselves to know what career we want before we have experienced most careers, to know who we are while we are still becoming that person and to make decisions about our futures while having very little idea what those futures will actually look like. Then, when we change our minds, we often interpret it as evidence that we made the wrong decision in the first place.

But changing your mind is not necessarily a failure. Sometimes it is simply information. You can leave a degree, change careers, decide an internship is not for you, lose friendships, make new ones or realise that the future you once imagined is no longer the one you want. These experiences are not detours from your twenties. They are your twenties.

There is a particular pressure to make these years count, as though every decision needs to contribute to some carefully constructed future. But not everything has to be productive. Some experiences can simply be enjoyable. Some weekends can be wasted. Some decisions can be made because they feel right rather than because they look impressive on a resume. You are allowed to spend your twenties becoming someone without knowing exactly who that person will be.

You do not have to have it all

There will always be another opportunity to chase, another person who seems further ahead and another version of yourself that looks more successful from a distance. If we spend our twenties trying to maximise every part of our lives simultaneously, we risk becoming so focused on building an impressive future that we forget to experience the present.

Maybe the goal is not to have the perfect career, the perfect social life, the perfect body, the perfect relationship and the perfect resume all at once. Maybe success is less about having everything and more about knowing what is worth having for you. Some things will matter deeply. Others will matter less. And some things you will only discover you want after you have tried something else.

Your twenties do not need to be perfectly optimised. They do not need to be a constant sequence of achievements. You can be ambitious without making achievement your identity, and you can want more from your life without believing that what you have now is not enough.

Because perhaps the point of your twenties was never to have it all. Perhaps it was to figure out what “all” actually means to you.