Thirty: A Good Time to Start Writing Again

It has been a while since I last wrote anything on here.

There was no dramatic decision to stop blogging. Life simply happened, other things took priority, and somewhere along the way this little corner of the internet went quiet.

So, what better excuse to dust it off than turning 30?

Today, 9 September 2026, I officially leave my twenties behind.

Even writing that feels strange.

Where did my twenties go?

When you’re 20, 30 sounds properly grown up.

Ten years feels like an enormous amount of time. You imagine that by 30 you’ll have everything sorted and possess some great understanding of how adulthood works.

Then you actually get here.

I can confirm that no such understanding has arrived.

At 11:59pm I was 29. A couple of minutes later I was 30. There was no sudden burst of wisdom, no dramatic transformation and, disappointingly, no instruction manual appeared.

I’m still me.

But looking back, I’m certainly not the same person who entered his twenties.

And perhaps that’s the point.

Ten years is a long time

I’m deliberately not going to turn this into a year-by-year account of my twenties.

Some things are worth sharing. Some things are better kept private.

But ten years inevitably contains a lot of life.

There were things that went brilliantly and things that went spectacularly wrong. There were achievements I’m proud of, decisions I’d probably make differently now, unexpected changes, new beginnings and endings I didn’t necessarily choose.

There were people who became important to me.

There were people I lost.

There were plans that worked and plenty that didn’t.

And there were probably hundreds of ordinary days that didn’t feel significant at the time but collectively made me the person writing this today.

That’s the strange thing about looking backwards. While you’re actually living through a decade, it doesn’t feel like a story.

It’s just Tuesday.

Success looks different now

One of the biggest differences between 20-year-old me and 30-year-old me is probably how I think about success.

When I was younger, I was much more interested in the visible signs of doing well.

There was something satisfying about looking successful, sounding successful and having something to point towards as evidence that life was moving in the right direction.

I don’t think that’s unusual when you’re young.

But somewhere during my twenties, my definition changed.

I’m less interested now in whether something looks impressive and much more interested in whether it actually makes my life better.

Peace matters more.

Time matters more.

Security matters more.

The freedom to say no matters more.

And I’ve learned that something can look fantastic from the outside while being completely wrong for the person actually living it.

Perhaps that’s maturity.

Or perhaps I’ve just become harder to impress.

Life doesn’t care about your timetable

Another lesson from my twenties is that life is remarkably uninterested in deadlines.

There are things I thought would happen much earlier that didn’t.

There are things I worried might never happen that eventually did.

And there are things I once considered incredibly important that I barely think about anymore.

It’s very easy to look sideways and decide you’re ahead or behind based on what somebody else is doing.

But ahead of whom?

Behind what?

There isn’t a universal schedule.

I’ve become much more comfortable with the idea that something happening later doesn’t make it worth less.

Sometimes you simply get there when you get there.

Not everything needs to become a lesson

I think there’s also a temptation when writing something like this to turn every difficult experience into an inspirational lesson.

I’m not going to do that.

Some parts of my twenties were difficult.

Some things hurt.

Some things I would rather hadn’t happened at all.

Not every bad experience secretly turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to you. Sometimes something was simply rubbish and you had to live through it.

But life continued.

And with enough distance, even the experiences I wouldn’t have chosen became part of the decade.

I can acknowledge them without allowing them to define the whole thing.

There was plenty of laughter too.

A lot of it, actually.

So, were my twenties a success?

I don’t know.

I’m not sure a decade can be graded.

And I’m certainly not producing a KPI dashboard for it.

I didn’t do everything I imagined I would at 20.

But that’s partly because the person deciding what my life should look like at 30 was a 20-year-old who had never actually experienced his twenties.

Why should he get the final say?

I know considerably more about myself now.

I know more about what matters to me.

I know more about what I’m willing to tolerate and what I’m not.

I’ve become more comfortable changing my mind.

And I’ve learned that sometimes walking away, starting again or admitting that something isn’t working requires more confidence than stubbornly sticking with the original plan.

That’s probably worth more than ticking everything off an old checklist.

What about my thirties?

I don’t know.

And for once, I’m quite happy leaving it at that.

Of course, there are things I’d like from life. Everyone has hopes, ideas and plans.

But if my twenties taught me anything, it’s that plans change.

The things I wanted at 20 weren’t necessarily the things I wanted at 25, and the things I wanted at 25 weren’t necessarily the things I wanted at 29.

So trying to decide, on the first day of being 30, exactly what the next ten years should look like seems slightly ridiculous.

Ten years ago, I couldn’t have predicted everything that would happen in my twenties.

I doubt I’ll do any better predicting my thirties.

Maybe that’s part of the fun.

For now, I don’t need a list of things to accomplish before 40.

I’ll make plans when I need to make them, change them when they need changing and see where life goes.

There are some things I’m bringing with me from my twenties.

There are some I’m happily leaving there.

And there’s plenty I haven’t figured out yet.

That’s fine.

I’m 30.

I’ve got time.

Here’s to the next decade, whatever it turns out to be.

And, apparently, here’s to blogging again.