Do you really need to have life figured out in your 20s?

Financial pressure and delayed milestones make it harder for many people in their 20s to follow the old timeline for adulthood

Graduate, get a stable job, earn enough to live independently, settle down and start building a future. For many young adults, these still sound like the things that are supposed to happen in their 20s.

The problem is that reaching them does not always happen in that order — or within the same decade.

Work changes the timeline

For young Filipinos entering adulthood, work alone can make the timeline unpredictable. The Philippine Statistics Authority estimated 2.96 million unemployed Filipinos in January 2026, when the unemployment rate reached 5.8 percent. Another 6.35 million employed people wanted additional working hours or another job.

Even for those who are employed, financial stability can remain difficult to reach early in adulthood. Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that 48 percent of Gen Z respondents globally did not feel financially secure, up from 30 percent a year earlier. More than half were living paycheck to paycheck. A

Pressure to meet adult milestones can leave young people feeling behind, even when their lives are still taking shape 

Philippine report on the survey, which included 419 respondents from the country, found that 66 percent of Filipino Gen Z respondents were living paycheck to paycheck, while 34 percent struggled to cover monthly living expenses.

Milestones are moving

Those conditions can affect decisions that used to be treated as markers of adulthood. Marriage, for example, is happening later than the stereotype of settling down soon after college might suggest. PSA data show that the median age at marriage in 2024 was 28 for women and 30 for men. The country also recorded 371,825 marriages that year, down 10.2 percent from 2023.

None of these figures means young Filipinos have stopped wanting stable careers, relationships or financial independence. They do show why using age alone as a deadline can leave out the circumstances behind those choices.

Young adults face a changing path to independence as work, money, housing, and personal goals move at different speeds 

Why one timeline does not fit all

A person who changes jobs at 26 may be looking for better pay or a clearer career path. Someone living with family at 28 may be saving, contributing to household expenses or simply finding independent housing too costly. Another person may have no interest in marriage yet.

None of this means young adults should stop making plans for where they want their lives to go. The difference is between having a direction and treating every goal as something that must be completed by a particular birthday.

A better way to measure progress

For someone in their 20s, a more useful check may be whether life is becoming more manageable: Are your skills improving? Are you handling money better than before? Are your decisions giving you more options?

Those questions say considerably more about progress than whether somebody else reached a milestone first.

— Jasper Valdez