The way you’re feeling isn’t uncommon; I had many of the same feelings and opinions that you do at your age. The way I see it, you have a few ways to approach it, and then I’ll tell you how I approached it.
It seems to me that for most people, at some point from their late teens through their mid 20s have to answer some major self-defining questions. Who am I? Who do I want to be? What am I going to do with the rest of my life? This is a time when you start to see how alike or unlike your peers you are. Do these similarities and differences make you feel included or different? And does that result something that you like or something you don’t. And then you’re stuck either deciding that you want to be more like others, and finding ways to conform, or you find you want to be more of an individual and finding ways to be different. Most people end up picking some of both, basically deciding that the things that are important to them should be what they are, and simplify the less important things by conforming.
From my own experience, I went through this at just about the age you are now, I’d gone straight into college out of high school and on to grad school, so a lot of those sorts of questions didn’t really start to become important until I started to get more and more in the “real world”. For me, like you, I was distressed at how different I felt from pretty much everyone else, but I was also unwilling to conform, if anything, I wanted to differentiate myself further because the parts of me that were like everyone else weren’t working out well. In the end, I found that I just needed to embrace that difference, not in dispair, but more like adding color and spice to life.
There’s certainly parts that make things difficult as a result, particularly uncommon political and religious views, taste in music, movies, and other arts that are far outside of the mainstream. But in a change of perspective, it makes life that much more interesting and fulfilling for me.
Also like you, I’ve always felt that people are too busy. Why work 50 or more hours a week? It seems like a waste of time to work so much and not doing the things they love. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s important to be busy, it’s just important to have what I’m doing be something I care about. If I’m spinning my wheels on something I’m uninterested in, it’s a bad kind of busy, but if I’m working on a passion project, it’s a good kind of busy. Yes, for a lot of people, they’re doing jobs that don’t enjoy for money to buy random crap, but for some people, their jobs are truly fulfilling.
And, as such, speaking for myself, as part of that, I work a condensed schedule less than 40 hours precisely because I am really only interested in having enough money for all the things I need and some of the things I want. After that, the time I’d spend at my job isn’t worth the extra money I’d get paid. I get weird looks when I explain that to coworkers and such, especially since most in my field are very ambitious types. But then I get into talking about what I do with the extra time I’m afforded, and the response is always “I wish I had time for that”. So, yeah, I still end up being pretty busy, but a majority of what I’m busy doing is stuff I really want to do. And I’ll say, I think I’m now as or more fulfilled than many of my peers.
But the thing is, that’s not something that just materialized, it took effort. I can get by on fewer hours at work because I’m well educated and good at what I do, so I still make good money working few hours. When I finished college, I had the choice of conforming and going for the type of job making a lot more money and working all the time, or focusing on other things that are more important to me, and I chose the latter. But there’s sacrifice and trade-off for these things. Hell, I’d love to win or inherit millions so I wouldn’t have to work at all, but that’s hardly a way to live my life hoping for that. But my point is, I embraced that difference, it seems weird to most people, but I’m far happier for it, certainly far happier than I would be working 60 hours a week, even bringing home two or three times as much money as I am now.
