The Roaming 20s
Ravyn Lenae perfectly captures the essence of being a modern twenty-something-year-old
A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to see Ravyn Lenae perform live while she was on her Bird’s Eye Tour. In the days leading up to her performance and the months afterwards, I was obsessed with her. Her tantalizing, wispy vocals are both hypnotic and persuasive. After only a few songs, she convinced me to grant her a seat within my musical Holy Trinity—dethroning the mystical Snoh Aalegra. Now, Frank Ocean (The Father), SZA (The Son), and Ravyn Lenae (The Holy Spirit) congregate in the throne room as my favorite triage of deities.
Though I didn’t capture it on video, one song from her setlist really stuck out to me more than the others. I like to think of this song as the current anthem of my life and the theme song for anyone in their 20s.
“As I pull my world apart, can't say where I fit in. I just know I'm twenty-four, small to the world I'm in… Pay me no mind, I'm just a pilot roaming. Look to the sky, you'll see a pilot soaring.”
When I first started this Lyric of the Week post weeks ago, I didn’t have a job, a dollar to my name, nor a car. Even further, I was “symptomatically depressed.” In other words, I didn’t feel sad but I was definitely behaving as such. A combination of pessimism, nihilism, and self-loathing had me paralyzed, and I was ignorant of the relevance of any of my day-to-day activities. I applied to jobs and got rejected. None of my articles that I had written were published at the time. My days were becoming dull and trite: I would occasionally read, maybe write for one of my Substacks, watch YouTube, sleep too long, lay in filth, and repeat the cycle all within the confines of my twenty-four-foot by twelve-foot box of a bedroom. For a brief moment, I felt like living was without purpose. I felt feel liminal. And I know that I’m not the only one. Being a young twenty-something-year-old in 2024 is hard. The job market sucks. Every job, internship, or apprenticeship to just get your foot in the door requires you already have ample experience. Our frontal lobes are still loading. Social media continues to drain years out of us. Literacy rates are declining while loneliness is at its peak. Friends you made in college aren’t around you nor in contact as frequently, and life is starting to feel bleak yet very real, realer than real—hyperreal, if you will. My twenty-second year on this earth might have been my most introspective and vivid year to date. I don’t have everything figured out yet. I’m still building and working out the kinks, however I am making progress nonetheless.
Ravyn, twenty-five-years-old herself, gets me. She gets us. Your 20s seems to be all about figuring stuff out, and between the polyphony of breathy tones from Ravyn and her adlibs, the acoustic-like string instrumentation, and the extended metaphor of being an aimless pilot, this record captures just what it means to feel like a wandering young adult without a clear vision of the path that lays ahead. As someone who was “high-achieving” for much of my life, sitting still without a detailed itinerary for my adult years is a novel feeling for me. Ravyn’s words let me know that I’m not the only person who feels in limbo, thus, I can forgive myself for not having a script with the beginning and end written for my life. There’s no harm in figuring things out along the way; we all are. Though my impatience sometimes gets the best of me, I am learning and trying to enjoy the ride. I may not know exactly where “I fit in,” but if you want to maximize the pleasure you feel from reaching your final destination, you’ve got to relish in the commute as well. There’s beauty in travel. There’s growth and new heights to be reached amid the flight.
If you’re a struggling 20 something, you should check out this playlist a couple of my friends and I made. Shout Margot and Jade <3