life > legacy
building the life you want isn't one size fits all
"This feeling is very particular, and it materializes every once in a while when you realize that being young and being responsible are happening to you at the exact same time, and sometimes the two of them don’t leave a lot of room for anything else.” - @ Over Coffee on Substack
The other night I came home at 5am. My hair reeked like a chimney, my dry coughs tasted like the bottom shelf tequila shots I’d downed at the club 2 hours before. I threw myself on the bed and slept until midday.
This wasn’t what I would call a common occurrence, but I’ve definitely been a repeat offender. Nights that turned into daybreak, hundreds spent on ubers and vibes, moments of laughter that turned into core memories with friends. Isn’t that what your 20s are about?
Recently I’ve been battling with a dilemma I feel like everyone in their mid 20s-early 30s is currently facing in the fragile state of the world right now: living life vs. building a legacy.
I moved home at 26 for the purpose of “building a legacy.” I wanted to increase my savings and bulldoze a clearer path to my future. You know, the one where I have a three-story townhouse plus a myriad of other properties, money to travel on a whim with my near perfect credit score and a travel credit card I pay off before the interest even hits. Where I can afford private school and HBCU tuition and whatever my hypothetical children want, leaving them a finance-free path for themselves. That’s the legacy that’s run through my head on replay throughout early adulthood.
But the life you want comes with sacrifice. A great life has never been lived without sacrifices, I know that much. The question is, how much are you willing to sacrifice?
One thing about me, I love outside. And I don’t always mean standing on tables in a NYC basement club or dragging my tail home at the crack of dawn - although I have a penchant to do both. I love trying new restaurants that TikTok convinced me are as good as their aesthetic. I love taking trips around the country to visit friends and ask if I could see myself living there. I love curating an experience and any excuse to design an invite on Canva. I love living life!
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However, time after time, I’m reminded that the life you want comes with sacrifice. The biggest being monetary of course: all of these things require fund$$. But they also require you to give up things in other ways. Staying out until 3am means you might wake up groggy, less focused on your work project. Jet-setting every other month means you might lose out on growing intentional relationships. Swiping your card like you’re not on a fixed income means savings deplete and credit cards increase.
And I fear the imbalance. Every time I try to be “strict’ with myself, or say no to an experience, I get that feeling of internal FOMO. Not the kind you get seeing all your friends on IG while you’re in bed with a face mask on, but the chagrin you feel as you contemplate everything you’re turning down in pursuit of something else.
And once again I have to ask myself, how much are you willing to sacrifice?
As someone with a standard 9-5, it’s easy to get caught up watching content creators buy homes at 25, or going on lavish European vacations, and a doom scroll can quickly turn into an existential crisis. I’ve found myself not quite scared, but almost overwhelmed at the thought of getting older. Not because aging frightens me, but because I’m not sure where I’m going to be or what I’m going to be doing, or what I’ll have accomplished at milestones in my life. The thought that next year I’ll officially be considered in my late 20’s and still have to google the difference between a 401K and IRA is a little..yea.
And so, I’m kind of stuck at a crossroads. And the goal post for success seems to keep moving.
I want to be that productive, inspired woman who actually uses her 5-9 before her 9-5 to get shit done, but I snooze every alarm in hopes of REM sleep for just 15 minutes longer. I want to learn how to invest my money and build generational wealth, but even a Robinhood tutorial feels like a foreign language.
And the question that also sits with me is, how much of these things do I want for myself, and how much have I been conditioned to believe I should have? Am I chasing the Jack and Jill → HBCU → Fortune 500 pipeline that floods my LinkedIn and Instagram feeds, or am I chasing the life I actually want to live.
Living the life we want, and not chasing a preconceived notion of what my legacy look like, is something I think we seem to forget as adults that we can do. When we’re younger, we’re so used to having our path chosen for us, and so many of us are bursting at the seams for freedom to make our own decisions. Yet when we have that free will, little by little we tend to find ourselves straying back to what we know: that comfortable life that was chosen for us by parents, grandparents, friends, or societal conditions.
But life isn’t about building a cookie cutter future, and we’re not all going to get the white picket fence and three kids with a dog.
And honestly, the legacy I want to have is as a woman who did what she wanted. Who was hot and turnt and well-traveled and disgustingly educated and loved her life too much to sacrifice the things she really wanted for a future that someone once told her she was supposed to have.
Building a legacy doesn’t mean that I have to have a certain amount saved up in my retirement fund or be debt free by 30; it doesn’t mean I have to own a home (which is becoming more and more far-fetched in this economy anyway) or have a graduate degree; it doesn’t mean I have to have assets to leave the kids I don’t even know I for sure want.
It also doesn’t mean that I should keep blowing my previous rent money on fleeting moments of joy, or charge every unfavorable situation I find myself in to the game.
Building a legacy is building the life I love. The one that makes sense for me. In the words of Shonda Rhimes:
