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Why does 30 feel like a deadline?
35 points by zemahran 14 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 43 comments
I’m going to be 28 in a month, and I’ve never felt more emergency in my entire life even though I just had a good pizza and everything seems chill.

This feeling sometimes haunts me at night. Some days are good, I sleep well and I have a good morning coffee. Other days I feel like I am an absolute fucking failure.

I stopped taking advice from anyone regarding career expectations because I suddenly woke up to the fact that everyone is probably trying to figure it out, even the most successful ones. Luck is probably a bigger component of most successes and no one seems to know everything for sure. All what someone has in terms of advice seems to be their “best guesses”.

From where I stand I don’t see any reason to take someone’s best guess over mine. If we’re all trying to figure it out, then I don’t trust anybody, except maybe a few second hand experiences from people that I find worthy.

Because we’re all different, I find that most career advice sums up to garbage, at best.

I don’t know whether in June 2026 I’d wake up feeling anew, as if post 30 is a new age where life would feel like it’s just starting, or I would crush myself in despair.

For now I like to think that most of it will depend on what would happen during the next 2 years. Strange I know!




> I stopped taking advice from anyone regarding career expectations because I suddenly woke up to the fact that everyone is probably trying to figure it out, even the most successful ones. Luck is probably a bigger component of most successes and no one seems to know everything for sure. All what someone has in terms of advice seems to be their “best guesses”.

I'm 37. What has been more and more apparent to me is that most people don't know shit about shit. Even experts in their field. For example this forum, which I dearly love: if you share anything you have built, an idea, a counter-argument, you will find someone ready to demolish it and say it is worthless, not to waste your time. It's been done before. Nothing new exists under the sun.

When I was younger, I thought they knew better, so I kept at it and learned. Now it is apparent that most people default to a cynical, negative kind of state. It probably it is a manifestation of our physiological need to conserve energy and not to abandon our comfort zone, a worldview we force onto other people, and many fossilise into without accomplishing much.

So now, at 37, and perhaps more arrogant than before, I have learned never to take a no for an answer from anybody. Never to listen to anyone that says "it's stupid" or "it is impossible." The world and the future depends on reckless people that try to do what no one has dared to do before. You can still be humble and learn, but you'll find the true Masters are the most optimistic and enthusiastic ones. Keen to help and keen to share. The nay-sayers can be safely and absolutely ignored without exception.

You have spent your 20s mostly learning and following orders. In your 30s, it is time to carve your own path, however crazy or silly it might be, as long as you feel that deep pull towards it you cannot say no to. As other said, you have at least 20 more years to achieve the impossible, and it is plenty of time.

30 is not a deadline, it is a threshold. You learned from the world, now it is time to start creating your own world.


Every now & then I look around and recognize that I'm probably at a slightly better place in life than most people I know, but then I remember that I probably also don't know anything about anything, so what does that tell me about most people

Everyone seems to have a different definition about "what works", and they double down on it even when it makes little sense to everyone else. So almost always there's a hidden factor that we like to call "luck" when we tend to underestimate the outcome and "hard work" when we overestimate it – But fact is there seems to be little correlation between inputs & outputs of most people that "made it"


Luck is a huge factor in success, but one tends to make their luck. As the saying goes, "showing up is half the battle."

No luck saves you if you don't even try.


The more important thing to figure out is that people you talk about have deluded themselves into believing that they know shit, and how do you specifically not fall into that trap, not just professionally, but in every day life.

Everyone even in their 20s has a well established personality on things that they believe are good and true, and especially for Gen Z these things are usually super warped due to growing up on the internet. You really have to take like 2-3 years to "deprogram" yourself of things that aren't true, and you will have a much better life.


30 is only a deadline if you are 'brainwashed by society's expectations'.

Society's expectations: you must have

A personable spouse to help you in your career, and be married in your 20s

The 'prestige' house located in the 'prestige' area of town.

The 'right number' of children going to the 'prestige' school (Note that 'right number' varies per country, in France the 'right number' is 3.)

And of course, you must be driving the 'prestige' car.

And most of all, you must have the over-extended mortgage and other debt to pay for all of this, and to keep you always chained to the money treadmill.

Silly dumb me, I was sucked into all of the above, till around the age of 40 I realised that I didn't need to have bought into any of that at all.


Not everything is a societal expectation. I have friends that have had kids in their 40s, and they are great fathers so it’s certainly possible, but at some point age is a hard reality.

If you choose to have kids, you might want to be able to play sports with them or go on a hike, and there are limits to human endurance as we age. If you want to have grandkids, there are certain realities that you can work out with basic math. 30 is not even close to being too old, but it should be a time to consider sorting things out if you want kids or not.


You can absolutely take a hike or play sports well enough to play with kids in your 60s or 70s as long as you put in a bit of effort to stay in shape. Plenty of people run marathons in their 70s.


If its a good place, and in a nice area to live, i would say, well done. Many did not want to take that risk and have with 40...nothing. The rest, like prestige cars, i would agree.


I'm in my 50s, and did the startup thing in my 20s during the original dotcom boom. It didn't matter. Your life will go on no matter what you do or do not do by 30. You'll spend the future decades learning and growing and adapting to a changing world, just like the rest of us. The only people whose lives peak by 30 are the ones who stopped growing at 30. Don't do that. Keep living, learning and growing. Do it forever, and there are no deadlines... just ongoing life.


This really resonates with me. At 39 I’ve started to realize this myself.


First of all, 30 is a very arbitrary deadline. I heard rumors that there is life even after age 30 :) ([cough]I am in my mid-40s[cough]).

Also, you are absolutely right; it's up to you to carve your own path. That being said, the path doesn't have to be glorious by somebody else's standard heck... it doesn't even have to be glorious by yours. However, as long as you are fine with it, who cares?

One thought, though. "I don't see any reason to take someone's best guess over mine.".

I think using black-and-white logic is detrimental. Even if people use "best guesses," the quality of these guesses (including yours) could be very different.

It's up to you to decide whether you want to climb the corporate ladder, build a business, or become a Tibetan monk. That being said, there are a lot of people who did it before you. Their advice will be imperfect, but the quality/probability of their advice will be better than that of a person who has never done it before.


It feels like a deadline because in many ways it *is* a soft deadline.

It is an uncomfortable fact, but at 30 you are about ten years into the productive fifty years of your life. You are about ten years into the thirty years of your life (~20~50) where you can take on major projects, which often take 15-20 years, and be confident you can see them through.

It sounds like over the next two years you need to figure out what you want and what you can accomplish; that is lots of time. However, I wouldn't discount advice the way you do. It's true that people are figuring out where they are, but advice from people who've already passed through where you are in life is informative.


I felt the same way getting close to 30, that I was getting old and approaching an age where everything in my life was about to crystallize, freeze, and stay that way forever. That the interesting time in my life, where I could make important changes, was about to end. Now I’m 39 and I actually feel younger now, because I’m starting to realize how long life is and how much more I have to go - and I don’t intend to live it all out as a frozen version of myself. I enrolled in a PhD program and it was tough to give up creature comforts but it’s been exciting, like I’ve taken advantage of my agency/autonomy for the first time in my life. I’ve stopped dealing with impossible family members and pressuring myself to do what other people want. I’m enjoying this adventure so much more now, and appreciating little things. What I’m trying to say is, happiness and satisfaction is a matter of perspective and growing older will hopefully give you more perspective. I think my best years are still ahead of me.


I used to think like you and now that I am almost 42, I don't really care that much about hitting a certain thing by a certain age. Don't get me wrong. I still have Goals but I have stopped trying to set arbitrary deadlines. Important thing is to do what you want to do and keep going.


This isn't an age thing but a sick system thing.

When you're "in" the career treadmill it all feels urgent and important and your entire value revolves around it.

Quit the job and spend a few weeks looking at the ocean or the mountains and it all fades away.

My advice would be to be happy with less, and specifically to just move away from uber high cost of living areas where everyone is grumpy and it feels as if the sky is always falling.


I felt the same as you back then.

If it makes you feel any better, my life is significantly better at 36 than it was at 28! I look better, sleep better, feel better and am more knowledgeable about the world around me.

That said, the drive I had in response to that urgency to "make it" (back then, it was to get past the $200k ceiling and pay off student loans) is a big factor behind why I feel like this (both accomplished several years ago...after 30!)

Keep learning, growing and exploring; there's no age limit on that!


It sounds like you are putting pressure on yourself to "succeed", to "achieve" a certain level of something by 30.

What? And, more important, why?

Comparing yourself to others is not a game you can win. You can only lose. So don't play.

(What do I mean by "you can only lose"? Let's say there are 100 people in your neighborhood. If you're doing better than 90 of them, you're not looking at them. You're looking at the 10 who are doing better than you. And if you're doing better than all of them, you're not comparing yourself to them at all, because you're not there any more. You've moved to a better neighborhood, and you're comparing yourself to your new neighbors. "Neighbors" can be real, or it can be a metaphor. As you move up, you start comparing yourself to new people, not to the same old people. And so you're still not a "success", even though you're on your third or fourth group of people that your comparing yourself to.)

As I said, don't play that game.

But even if you're playing a different game, even if you have a fixed standard of what you want to achieve, why are you pressuring yourself to achieve it by 30? Why the artificial deadline?

Don't judge who you are by external achievements. Don't put your identity in them. Find out who you are, apart from what you do.


>>> I would build a startup instead of chasing job applications and begging for promotions.

Higher expected value and more free time being an employee, but work on your passion and the possibility of a stellar outcome building a startup.

Like OP says, advice is very specific to who you are and where you are at.


My life got so much better after I turned 30! It indeed felt like a deadline but for taking important matters more seriously - fitness, investments, relationships. Getting serious with those 3 put me were I wanted to be.

30s is by far the best age for a man


> Luck is probably a bigger component of most successes and no one seems to know everything for sure. All what someone has in terms of advice seems to be their “best guesses”.

One of the main truths that no-one here wants to admit. There is always an element of luck involved which is hidden by many folk here reading on HN.

> From where I stand I don’t see any reason to take someone’s best guess over mine. If we’re all trying to figure it out, then I don’t trust anybody, except maybe a few second hand experiences from people that I find worthy.

Don't listen to me and do what works for you.

> Because we’re all different, I find that most career advice sums up to garbage, at best.

Yes. 90% of it is outdated in a month.

Most of the advice here tells you to 'climb up the career ladder' like they did and everyone else is doing, when the 1% of smarter folks are building their own escalators, and I would build a startup instead of chasing job applications and begging for promotions.

It is all about time and its up to you how you best use the next 2 years. The indisputable fact is, you can never get those 2 years back ever again.


Besides "career expectations" what else about 30 feels like a deadline? On the other days you feel like "an absolute fucking failure," failure with regards to what? (assumption and guesses: with regards to your timeline progress in building a family? getting married? owning a home? having kids? travelling? perhaps going back to school? is this all exclusively about how many zeroes you are getting in your paycheck?) Please tell us OP!


I get there is a high similarity between things we all want want during comparable ages / phases of life, and I don't want a specific thing at a specific age per se, but I feel like to me it's a general dissatisfaction of the rate of progression, that seems not to go away – I also get that it's subjective, and fomo due to exposure to many things may sometimes get the best of me

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I went back for a full time MBA at 30, an MS in computer science at 35 and moved into machine learning from finance at 40. I have no idea what my late 40s will bring but I think despite a bit of career “lostness” I eventually found what I wanted and really didn’t sacrifice too much on the way.

Don’t know if that helps but hopefully you know there is a lot of life even after 40.


I think early 20s are a very powerful time for many people because naïveté can be quite convincing, and they have a lot of time to learn without unreasonable expectation.

People will start looking more at your record than your potential, which is a shift from optimism to criticism in 99.9% of cases. In my case, I had what felt like a meteoric rise in the early part of my career, but technology changed, and my interests changed, and now all of that is irrelevant. So all that success you feel like you missed out on so far, it’s probably not much different either way, but you can’t replay it the same way. Maybe you’re talking about money, and lots of things can reset that too.

That big tech co might take you, but increasingly for niche jobs not on the fast track. You can probably do a startup, but you might have to grind on your own for years while some kid gets his tweet funded. When you were young it seemed like the other way around because you only saw the top 0.01% of timelines ahead of you, and now it’s the same way looking back.

Sound advice is the same, but you’ll keep learning that you should have followed it, and there was still time then, but now it’s too late, at least until now becomes then and there was still time. Maybe it sounds something like this: focus on the routine physical act of doing something you respect and enjoy enough to ignore the outcome, and just keep doing it. Or maybe just save your money. Actually don’t ask me; I don’t even know why I’m writing this.

Okay, I do know why: because every other response is going to be some variant of suggestion to pretend that age doesn’t matter, and that your anxiety is totally unfounded. No. Things change. Opportunity is limited. Some doors are closing on you, and some you’ll learn were never open, but it sure feels good to think it’s all possible, and that’s slipping away. I regard dismissal of someone’s feelings as a nasty thing to do to someone, even if you’re just trying to help them, and even if you are rationally correcting them. You’re not wrong, but you’ll adapt and whether by rationality or necessity, correct your values to align with reality as it evolves.


Unless you aim to become part of somebody else's "NN under 30" list, 30 is no deadline at all.


Two words; biological clock. That, and our crazy, youth obsessed society.


"Anybody seen in a bus over the age of 30 has been a failure in life."

-- Supposedly a quote from the Duchess of Westminster, wherever that is. Kinda hard sounding, but there's probably something to it.


It was allegedly Thatcher who said it, and the age was 26


No magic happens when you turn 30. Nothing changes if nothing changes.


The end of every decade of your life feels this way. It's how we measure lifespans.

"By the time you reach 30 you should.." vs "By the time you reach 33.3 you should.."


It's all relative. When you're in your thirties, you'll panic on hitting forty.

None of it matters really. Would you rather be 25 and unhappy or 35 and happy?

Your answer may shock you! ;)


30's a walk in the park, 31 is the bastard.


Indeed! But why though


30 and you can pretend to yourself that you're still twenty-something, at 31 that kind-of goes away ...


You just dig a hole in my heart


Same here. But it's important to remember that age is just one aspect of life, and everyone's journey is unique.


You have all the time in the world


No you don't. Is this supposed to be comforting or a joke? I don't get it, human life is short, get on it.


Are you over or under 30?

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> I just had a good pizza

Just wait until eating any pizza makes you feel gross, cause aging.

> I stopped taking advice from anyone

Put a period on that! That's good advice.

Make sure to save up over the course of your 30s to buy that brand new Miata you never wanted when you turn 40.


>Just wait until eating any pizza makes you feel gross, cause aging.

That just means eventually gravitating towards higher quality pizza that isn't so laden with grease and is actually nutritious. Not a bad thing.


> Just wait until eating any pizza makes you feel gross, cause aging.

I hope that my relationships with food will never change


it's a well known fact that hope doesn't prevent aging tho




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