Age anxiety

It has been the fifth year since I started pursuing my PhD degree. So many happy or sad, exciting or boring, encouraging or depressing things happened in the past four years, from which I learned a lot.

Recently, age-induced anxiety has slightly grown in my brain. It resembles a layer of fog blocking in front of my eyes and isolates the connection between my deep mind and the real world. To be specific, many of my classmates (undergraduate, senior, and junior) have been married or at least been engaged. Nevertheless, I am 25 years old, still blank in loving experiences. You may tease me at this point, thinking what a nerd he is. Indeed, for individuals at this age, society thinks that they should be prepared to get married and build up new families some years later. It forms an invisible net that catches everybody in the world.

As a matter of fact, I don’t wanna give a fuck. I own my life only one time, and I wanna make it meaningful. My destiny points to the remote future, so whispers of love are not my style. Just as the song Wind Of Change goes, the future’s in the air, I can feel it everywhere, blowing with the wind of change, take me to the magic of the moment, on a glory night.

However, these are what I think, not what I take. Being exposed to the reality world, I can’t get rid of the invisible net, which loads on my heart like a pressure no matter what the shape of my soul is. Hence, here comes a contradiction. The deep ego drives me to move forward, while the shallow ego, the interface of my mind and the entity world that deals with everyday affairs, is entangled by the so-called invisible net.

In general, there exist two strategies with opposite directions dealing with such a mutual contradiction. Explicitly speaking, they are pulling back the deep ego and dragging the shallow ego, respectively.

<–Even worse, peer pressure deepens such an anxiety. One of my senior high school classmates graduated and obtained her Ph.D. degree several months ago, and another, who is one of my best friends, published a paper in the Nature journal. I am sincerely glad for their achievements, while the anxiety entangles me.–>