Does Age 30 Necessarily Entail Significant Life Changes?

Age 30 can be a convenient marker for many people.  If the twenties is a time for travels and new experiences, the thirties ought to be one that is more grounded.  More stable relationships, more stable jobs, and more stable routines that allow one to grow in a more structured environment.  But for people who have become so used to fluctuations, some voluntary and some not so much, transitioning to more routine-based way of life can be quite challenging, mentally and physically.  Romance and steady environment can help anchor a person to a particular way of life, but without genuine love for the physical location that one is to inhabit, it is rather impossible for keep the anchors steady.

Traveling does help one figure out where that physical location for the anchor ought to be in a rather limited way.  Travelers tend to see only the best and the worst about any place they visit, necessarily restricting their impressions of the locale to superficial ones based on what locals try the hardest to present to money-spending tourists.  Missing from the travels is insights of the mundane aspects of life in the locale.  Where to buy groceries, how often do the busses come, how expensive are apartments to rent?  Such information can be had in a few days, but cannot be reconciled with one's lifestyle until perhaps months of residence.

After all, how to live, in any locale, is a combination of different factors, only the holistic understanding of which can provide the surest definition of what is convenient and what isn't.  Having expressways that criss-cross an urban center can be considered convenient for someone used to driving a car everywhere, but such infrastructure is useless for someone who is used to walking and taking trains.  Similarly, if one never finishes work before 10pm, shops that shut down at 8pm can be the most irritating feature of one's own neighborhood. 

However, there are measures that one would consider to be absolutely convenient and absolutely not so.  Every new travel, in such context, provides incremental increase in new knowledge for such personal preferences.  In many previous posts, I put forth the strong preference for dense urban environment that is designed around public transport and less on cars.  24-hour shops are preferable to massive shopping centers that line the side of highways.   

My current travels in Shimane and Tottori prefectures only strengthen such beliefs. 

At the same time, being outside Tokyo also makes me realize just how much I cherish being away from the place of permanent residence, no matter how convenient that place tends to be.  The ability to be frequently in different places with different physical and cultural environments provide the needed excitement, if only just to appreciate how convenient the permanent place of residence really is.  Being able to travel not for pleasure but more for work only strengthens insights of not-so-frequently visited destinations around the world.

There is no denying that business trips can be tiring and repetitive, unexciting if taken too frequently for too little productive purposes.  One does not get to choose where to go, when to go, and what to do once one gets there.  But because one is tasked with certain missions at the foreign locale, one becomes all the more appreciative of the mundane conveniences that are truly necessary to make any locale a place worthy of continued residence and not just a place to be visited once in a while. 

Such understanding only gets more acute as one ages.  No longer would one be OK with mediocre accommodations, bare-boned modes of transport, and company of people who provide little intellectual nourishment.  Becoming picky on such things naturally would reduce the candidates of potential sites of residence and even line of work.  It means cutting some people and places out of one's life now and in the future, no matter how important and helpful those places and people were in the past. 

Ultimately, however, it is also necessary to not overemphasize the number 30 or the fact that thirties is different from the twenties in some dramatic way.  Social norms are something the majority follows, but they are not necessarily applicable or desirable to everyone.  Whatever age one happens to be, what is most important is to stick to one's own life choices rather than simply following what others or society thinks one ought to do at the current age.  To think and act for oneself, at the end, is the correct path for a more fulfilling life.