(MENAFN- Khaleej Times)

Marriage, a nine-to-five job, working a stable career and then retiring for the golden years.

What place do these things have, when life is so different than when these things were sold to us? Ideals and dreams are just as unattainable as it was a year, decade or century ago? Is it just that we know life is hard now, entering the workforce and being unable to get entry-level jobs because of LLMs people have been fooled into thinking is a real?

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A re-adjust is necessary, because we can't act like 100 years of free trade and globalisation are so eternal ever since Henry Ford sold the idea of an assembly line and workers won us weekends. Traditional life goals like a career and marriage might go much further back, but even they are increasingly unattainable to young people focused on just getting by or seeking stability in their own lives.

Community decline has contributed to this, social bonds fraying for a toxic individualism which tells us you are not only an independent person who needs to rely on no one, but no one can rely on you your peace is far more important than building any sort of village, figurative or real.

As a journalist, I gain psychological fulfilment, emotional energy and of course money from my work but the stability I have from my career and collection of jobs is the stability I have been able to create for myself. I tell myself a story about the writers and journalists of the past- the thinkers, and I realise that I may not have one job with a salary, office and coworkers like my father or grandfather at my age, but I am a journalist because I am one. I practice the values and ethics, I do the work, I live the stresses of my comrades, and I often defend getting a graduate degree in the field in spite of the fact that the industry is low in trust as well as funding and anti-intellectualism at an all-time high.

So, with marriage or family life, the same resilience of internal narrative is the goal. People have had kids, gotten married, fallen in love and found a way to be romantic through war and peace, through genocide and disaster throughout all of human history. My mother's family comes from Aleppo going back over 900 years; we've been city folk of different religions living across the street longer than there's been most of the countries in the world, so no, the world isn't ending now even if it is harder to live in. We just have to live in it.

It isn't easy to explain in one column, but you can't go through life believing that history is over and that we're just going to walk arm-in-arm into some Star Trek idea of the future. We live in those times that will be written about in history books, so are you going to worry about meeting those life goals and having these things you think you must have, or are you going to live your life?

As a third culture kid, I needed both cognitive therapy and spiritual guidance to learn that these goals won't come along just because you want them. Wanting them is completely normal and natural, but attainment for attainment's sake does not offer us anything about ourselves or the world around us. Unpacking why we want a spouse or children, or a career and a house, instead of just blindly running for them however we can, offers a chance to focus on living life instead of waiting for that time to come.

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