Your twenties can feel confusing when you’re chasing a version of life that was never really yours to begin with. Real clarity only starts when you stop performing other people’s plans and begin listening to what feels true to you.
It was a Tuesday in Melbourne, and I was standing in a warehouse surrounded by pallets of flat-screen televisions when my phone buzzed with a group photo from a university friend's new office. Natural light, glass walls, someone holding a coffee like a prop. I put the phone back in my pocket and picked up another box, and something shifted - not dramatically, not like a movie, but the way a bone you didn't know was misaligned suddenly clicks and you realize you've been compensating for it with your whole body. I saw, in that fluorescent-lit moment, that I'd been building my life from a blueprint. And the blueprint wasn't mine.
I don't mean that loosely. I mean I had an actual mental image - detailed, unexamined - of who Lachlan Brown should be by twenty-five, by twenty-eight, by thirty. I'd spent years trying to construct myself into it. The blueprint said: get a degree. Done - psychology, Deakin University. Get a good job. That's where it started to fall apart. Because the jobs I could get with a psychology degree weren't the jobs the blueprint had imagined. The blueprint had imagined offices with natural light and meaningful work. Reality gave me that warehouse, eight hours a day of physical labor that had nothing to do with anything I'd studied.
The answer, which took me another decade to see clearly, was that nothing had gone wrong. I wasn't lost. I was trying to follow a map that had been drawn by someone who wasn't me.
Where the blueprint came from
I don't blame my parents for this. They did what parents do - they passed on their understanding of how life works. Their understanding was shaped by their experience, which was shaped by an economy and a culture that offered a relatively clear path: study, work, stay stable, build slowly, retire with enough. It was honest advice. It was good advice, for the world they knew.
But it wasn't just my parents. It was everything. The education system told me that good grades led to good universities which led to good careers which led to a good life. My friends were following the same trajectory, which made the path feel inevitable rather than chosen. The culture I grew up in - suburban Melbourne, working class, practical - valued reliability over exploration. You didn't move to another country to "find yourself." You found a trade or a profession and you got on with it.
None of this was malicious. All of it was limiting. Because when everyone around you is following the same blueprint, it doesn't feel like a blueprint at all. It feels like reality. It feels like the way things are. And questioning it doesn't feel like independent thinking - it feels like something is wrong with you.
That's what my twenties felt like. Not rebellion, not adventure, not a conscious search for meaning. Just a persistent, low-grade sense that the life I was building didn't fit, the way a shirt that's technically your size can still feel wrong on your body. Everything was technically correct. Nothing was actually right.
The warehouse years
I've written about the warehouse before, but I want to say something here that I haven't said publicly. I wasn't just unfulfilled during those years. I was ashamed. Deeply, quietly ashamed in a way that colored everything.
I had a degree. My parents had worked hard to support me through university. My friends were starting careers in offices and firms and hospitals. And I was lifting boxes. The gap between where I was and where the blueprint said I should be felt like a personal failure, not a systemic one. I didn't have the framework to see it as anything other than evidence that I wasn't good enough.
What I was actually experiencing - though I couldn't have named it then - was what Buddhism calls "dukkha." Not suffering in the dramatic sense. The subtler kind. The unsatisfactoriness that arises when reality doesn't match your expectations. My expectations had been built by other people, installed so early and so thoroughly that I couldn't distinguish them from my own desires. I thought I wanted a corporate career. I thought I wanted stability and a clear trajectory. I thought I wanted what my parents wanted for me.
I didn't. But finding out what you actually want is impossible when you're still operating inside someone else's definition of a good life. You have to step outside the blueprint first. And stepping outside the blueprint, when everyone you know is still inside it, feels less like freedom and more like falling.
What actually broke the pattern
I wish I could tell you there was a single moment of clarity. A dramatic turning point where I saw the truth and changed my life. That's the story people want, and it's the story I'd tell if I were trying to sell something. But the reality was messier.
What happened was a slow accumulation of small decisions, each one slightly braver than the last. I started reading about Buddhism during my breaks at the warehouse - not as a spiritual pursuit, but because something in the philosophy resonated with the discomfort I couldn't articulate. The idea that suffering comes from attachment to how things should be. The idea that the self we're trying to protect is largely a construction. The idea that you don't have to believe every thought your mind produces.
Those ideas didn't fix anything immediately. But they created a tiny crack in the blueprint. A space where a different kind of question could enter. Not "how do I get back on track?" but "whose track am I trying to get back on?"
That question changed everything. Not overnight. Over years. But once you ask it honestly, you can't go back to following the map without knowing you're following someone else's directions. And that knowledge makes the map feel different. It stops being reality and starts being a choice. And once it's a choice, you can make a different one.
For me, the different choice was leaving Australia. Moving to Southeast Asia with no clear plan, no job lined up, and a vague idea that I wanted to write about the things I was learning. It was terrifying. My parents were worried. My friends thought I was having some kind of breakdown. And from inside the blueprint, they were right - I was abandoning every marker of a sensible life.
From outside the blueprint, I was finally starting mine.
What I found on the other side
I want to be careful here because I don't want this to sound like a tidy redemption story. Moving to Vietnam didn't solve my problems. It replaced one set of problems with a different set. Financial uncertainty, loneliness, culture shock, the daily humiliation of not speaking the language, the constant low-level anxiety of having no safety net.
But there was a difference. These problems were mine. They belonged to a life I'd chosen rather than a life I'd inherited. And that distinction - between chosen difficulty and inherited difficulty - is the difference between feeling lost and feeling alive.
In Vietnam I started Hack Spirit. I started writing about psychology and mindfulness and relationships in a way that felt honest rather than performative. I met my wife. I learned, slowly and badly, to speak her language. I built a company with my brothers. I became a father. Each of these things emerged not from following a blueprint but from following curiosity - asking "what interests me?" instead of "what should I do?" and trusting the answer even when it didn't make sense on paper.
None of it would have happened if I'd stayed inside the blueprint. Not because Melbourne is a bad place or because my parents' advice was wrong, but because the blueprint had no room for the person I actually was. It only had room for the person I was supposed to be. And that person - the corporate professional, the stable career builder, the reliable son who stayed close to home - would have been perfectly fine and quietly miserable for the rest of his life.
What I understand now
I'm 37. My daughter is eight months old. And I finally understand what my twenties were about.
They weren't wasted. They weren't a wrong turn. They were the necessary, uncomfortable process of discovering that the identity I was trying to build wasn't mine. The warehouse wasn't a failure. It was the place where the blueprint finally stopped fitting and I had to admit it. The anxiety wasn't a malfunction. It was my mind's way of saying this isn't right, even when I didn't have the language or the courage to say it out loud.
I understand now that you can't find yourself inside a blueprint someone else drew. Not because the people who drew it didn't love you - they did. Not because their intentions were bad - they weren't. But because identity isn't inherited. It's constructed, piece by piece, through choices that feel uncertain and relationships that surprise you and failures that teach you things no blueprint could anticipate.
The Buddhist teacher Shunryu Suzuki wrote that "in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few." My parents' blueprint was an expert's mind - refined, efficient, proven. What I needed in my twenties was a beginner's mind. The willingness to not know. The willingness to be bad at something. The willingness to stand in a warehouse at twenty-four and say: I don't know what I'm doing and that might be exactly where I need to be.
But here's the thing I keep turning over, even now. Recognizing that the blueprint isn't yours doesn't tell you what is. You step outside the map and there's no second map waiting. There's just the ground under your feet and the honest, uncomfortable admission that you don't know where you're going. I left the blueprint behind. I built something different. And some mornings, holding my daughter in a country my twenty-year-old self couldn't have imagined living in, I still feel the pull of that old question - not "whose track am I on?" but something harder. Something I'm not sure has an answer.
Is what I've built actually mine? Or is it just a different blueprint, assembled from different influences, that I haven't yet learned to see clearly?
I don't know. I'm not sure knowing is the point.
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Lachlan Brown
Lachlan Brown is a writer and editor with a background in psychology, personal development, and mindful living. As co-founder of a digital media company, he has spent years building editorial teams and shaping content strategies across publications covering everything from self-improvement to sustainability. His work sits at the intersection of behavioral psychology and everyday decision-making.
At VegOut, Lachlan writes about the psychological dimensions of food, lifestyle, and conscious living. He is interested in why we make the choices we do, how habits form around what we eat, and what it takes to sustain meaningful change. His writing draws on research in behavioral science, identity, and motivation.
Outside of work, Lachlan reads widely across psychology, philosophy, and business strategy. He is based in Singapore and believes that understanding yourself is the first step toward making better choices about how you live, what you eat, and what you value.
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