1. Wearing a backpack. Unless you do you parkour in your spare time, and/or want people to assume you deal weed.
2. Getting legitimately excited about the age you’re about to turn.
3. Dating someone for 2-3 years simply out of comfort/routine, with no expectation for a life together.
4. Putting off the cavernous hollow that is student loans. Though this is pretty cliche for a list like this, so we’ll tweak it a bit…
4a. Putting off the cavernous hollow that is the eternal dread of accepting that fact that your weird friend is gonna get married before you.
5. The duck face.
6. Taking a mental health day for no good reason other than that you totally deserve it, without any sort of work-related repercussions. Nowadays, #smartphones mean you’re also probably working from home.
7. Devoting an entire two week stretch in February to following the triumphs and failures of Minnesota native John Shuster, and the rest of the United States Men’s Olympic Curling Team.
8. Going straight to sleep, without doing anything to prevent the pounding hangover.
9. Doing things completely spontaneously. The realities of you and your friend’s commitments means you’ll probably need to plan out that road trip to Boston weeks in advance.
10. Watching all six seasons of the Sopranos in under 3 weeks.
11. ^ Just kidding.
12. Making out with people on dance floors. For the well adjusted, your DFMO career has probably come to a close.
13. Going to the cheapest drink place, and buying the cheapest drinks by default. In the real-world, these places are sometimes run-down and well below the standards of your friends with suit-ish jobs. They also prefer Blue Moon. Snobs.
14. Telling people you’re an “aspiring (insert profession of passion here).”
Note: you can pull this off for the first 1-3 years out of school, but it gets significantly less impressive as the years go by.
15. Being completely innocent and idealistic about the workplace, and the American economic machine in general. A few months at any job will expose you to the seedy underbelly of the soul-selling and blurred moral practices that keep your food on the table. Need that caesar salad before the meal.
16. Staying hydrated and headache free for an entire day. (I’d imagine this dwindles by the hour with each passing year)
17. Holding onto your boyish charm as your primary means of winning people over:
18. Wearing sweatpants in public at any and all hours of the day. This is now reserved solely for 9am-12pm on Saturday mornings. Completely disregard if you’re the type of person who tells other people about what they did at the gym.
19. Wearing fraternity/sorority sweatshirts without getting a strange look. This is now only acceptable at the gym, a BBQ, an alumni event, or in 15 years when your Pig Roast ’07 shirt is properly ripped and faded, and you’re a dad mowing the lawn.
20. Returning to your school, and feeling completely at home. :(
21. Doing absolutely nothing for extended periods of time, without convincing yourself that you’re a leech to society and semi-worthless human.
22. Putting off the quarter-life crisis. This will be inevitable, so just treat it like you’re going into that mad scary enclosed thing they use for MRIs…just close your eyes and daydream a bunch–if you look at it the right way, it could actually be pretty fun.