30 Things To Stop Doing Once You Turn 25

Relativity Media/21 & Over

As 25 fast approaches, you may want to reexamine your behavior as a young adult. If you find yourself still relying on your parents for rent (while you puke up all the rest of your money from excessive cheap whiskey drinking), it’s probably time to modify these behaviors. In case you need more direction in attaining true adulthood, here are a few things to stop doing before you hit the middle of your 20s.

1. Binge Drinking

As a 21-year-old, your blackout sessions were fun, cute and endearing. Once you turn 25(ish), people will stop inviting you to their dinner parties if you exhibit this behavior.

2. Bringing Laundry To Your Parents

Even if you live in NYC and have heard rumors of all the feces particles that lurk in laundromats, that does not provide an adequate excuse for dragging your laundry back to your parents’ Connecticut mansion (or wherever they live) once a month.

3. Eating Candy

You can still grab the occasional Snickers bar, but maintaining hydrogenated corn syrup as a diet staple past the age of 25 will give you a gut, and possible Type II Diabetes.

4. Spending Hours On Social Media

Unless it’s your job, in which case do what you gotta do to make it in this world. You’re 25 now, and no one is going to try and pull you up by your bootstraps but you.

5. Obsessing About Old Lovers

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Not giving up on sophomore-year Jimmy (or even last year’s neighbor, Mike) will make you a sad sight for your friends. Grow up and move on—hopefully, you have more important things to think about at this stage in your life.

6. And Proceeding To Contact Them Incessantly

The law can classify this as stalker behavior when you’re a real adult. As a kid, you’re just pathetic and don’t fully understand the concept of rejection.

7. Vomiting In Public

This kind of goes with No. 1, but being that inconsiderate (or at least getting that out of control) does not fly once you’ve been legally drinking for four years.

8. Letting Your Friends’ Marriages Surprise You

Many of your friends have probably now been living with their significant others for at least a year at this point. Some have already tied the knot. It’s time to learn that people all over the world perform this odd ritual to urge on permanence and stability in their lives.

9. Hating Children

After marriage, you know what comes next. Putting aside your hatred for crying and the smell of poopy baby powder may come in handy as your friends begin to reproduce.

10. Being Overly Friendly To Mere Acquaintances

Doing this when you’re in your early 20s marks a certain beautiful naiveté. You have now learned that life is too short to waste more time than you need on the people you’re forced to spend minutes with due to uncontrollable circumstances, like work or real estate.

11. Denying Your Flaws

Now that you’ve been around for a quarter of a century, you should have gotten to know yourself pretty well—at least well enough that you get a sense of what’s wrong. Your friends have pointed out five billion times how you arrive places an hour later than everyone else. Own your perma-tardiness instead of making excuses. (Also, at this point, your friends should have learned to give you an hour earlier meeting time than everybody else).

12. Avoiding Sleep

Many young 20-somethings do this as if sleep were the plague. News for your 25-year-old ass: It’s not, and now, if you don’t get enough of it, you will actually start feeling it the morning after.

13. Having Serious Celebrity Crushes

You can drool over how hot Jessica Alba is for a lifetime, but having a picture of her over your bed no longer works in terms of your personal life. Sorry.

14. Partying After Day Drinking

As you exit your early 20s, this will get harder and harder to do. It will also feel less and less worth the struggle.

15. Working For Free

In this economy, that is the sad reality for a lot of people in their 20s. By 25, your unpaid labor (if you were unlucky enough to participate in such a shitty system) should have become paid, or you should have left for greener (money-wise) pastures a while back.

16. Latching Onto Trends For Trends’ Sake

 

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At this age, you must have established your own personal sense of style, so shaping your mustache into a handlebar just because everyone else wearing skinny jeans is doing it seems like a stupid idea. If you simply love to sport the handlebar, though, by all means, go for it.

17. Excessively Shopping For Clothes

On that note, bypassing trends gives you less incentive to buy hoards of new clothing every season. Also, you’ve stopped growing… up, at least.

18. Relaying Messages Through Other People

Unless you’ve managed to make it to high-powered boss status at your job (and thus have a minion paid to do your bidding for you), you should no longer be asking Matt to find out what Jenna thinks about you. In fact, this should have stopped as soon as moved onto algebra in high school (but we all know it didn’t).

19. Drinking Soda

Diet is technically acceptable, but do you really want to be drinking something that can easily clean the grime off of pennies?

20. Shopping at Abercrombie…

And other places that stop at a size 6 because their clothing is meant for 12-year-olds (and 21-year-olds who still have the body of 12-year-olds).

21. Splitting Bills To The Cent

When you were seriously struggling with every cent as a broke student or entry-level worker, being picky about how your meal was $2 less than your friends meant preserving a significant part of your budget. At 25, convenience should outweigh the need for those couple of bucks.

22. Avoiding the Doctor

It seemed pointless to go to the doctor because when you were younger, she or he just gave you a smile and a shining bill of health. Now, good health should not be taken for granted.

23. And Avoiding STD Tests

You cannot claim ignorance if you accidentally spread the clap and you’re not on a college campus.

24. Eating Ramen Multiple Times a Week

This stuff has zero nutritional value. Being cheap doesn’t make it good for your body (which is now steadily declining in terms of health).

25. Sending Dick Pics

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Gentlemen, this was never a stellar thing to do, but now, it’s gone far beyond a simple deal breaker.

26. Displaying Childhood Toys

It’s okay to still secret them away somewhere if they have massive sentimental value, but having your favorite childhood teddy bear/best friend perched on your pillows is not a good look when it comes to convincing others of your sanity.

27. Living In College-Style Conditions

Five roommates in a three-bedroom apartment was fun when you were first getting established in the big city. Now, it should feel tiresome and kind of dirty.

28. Not Saving Money

One day, you will want things like a car and maybe even a place to call your own (and not in a renting way). The money for that won’t magically appear in your bank account when you turn 30.

29. Working “Jobs”

Instead of doing something just for the money, start trying to build an occupation that you could see yourself meaningfully committing to. Bussing tables to get by suffices until you remember that you have hobbies and passions you’d like to pursue full-time.

30. Living With Your Parents

As if doing laundry at their place wasn’t bad enough, smoking pot in their basement all day is way, way worse. Time to get a job and a place where you can bring girls back without having to introduce them to your mom.