Counting down to 29

Tejashree Raul interrogates the culture of milestone anxiety while coming to terms with her own 'advancing' years

- 

As I inch towards *shudders* 27, I find that I am suddenly hyper aware of numbers. I am not sure when the dread began, but there's something eerie about approaching an odd number like 27 that feels... inconveniently adult. Maybe it's the internet's obsession with timelines, maybe it's the relatives whispering in my ear about what I should've achieved by now. Whatever it is, it surely feels overwhelming.

On the one hand, I'm unhealthily nostalgic, with a habit of going through photo archives. I love being the youngest person in the room, the one who gets an eye-roll when I mention the year I was born—pure bliss. But lately, I find that I am curious to know what lies on the other side. Now that my frontal lobe has allegedly finished developing, I'm oddly excited for my thirties. Being stable, a little wiser, and actually knowing when to call it a night? Honestly, it doesn't sound like the worst deal.

As ELLE India nears three decades, I'm curious whether the constant pressure to stay relevant and current is similar to the pressure we place on individuals. Every milestone measured, every year analysed-but do we really need to treat time as a quantifiable resource alone? I know I'm not the only one negotiating my relationship with age, ambition, and the myth of 'having it all figured out.' So I turned to the people who understand this pressure in a way few do-those who've built careers in an industry obsessed with the 'next big thing,' where relevance has an expiration date printed in invisible ink.