Every summer brings the same pressure: the feeling that this is the moment your life is supposed to truly start. The season of visible skin, visible lives, visible milestones. Everything feels heightened under the weight of the solstice: the electricity of adolescence, the desperate pursuit of beauty, and the shimmering promise that this year, your transformation, your glow up, your reinvention will be complete.
The season is synonymous with youth, freedom, possibility, and the idea that life should be unfolding in full colour. Somewhere along the way, many of us begin treating our ambitions the same way we treat summer itself—as something fleeting. A narrow window. A season that can somehow pass us by.
In between the golden, honeyed light of the day and long, languid evenings, the pressure to be somewhere, become someone, clamours more than ever; that urge to prove that life is moving exactly on time, and not one second later. We are taught to chase speed, to fear delay, to believe that ambition belongs to the young and that every dream comes with an invisible deadline.
Never before have our timelines been so public. Between ‘30 under 30’ lists, viral breakthroughs, and an endless stream of achievements displayed online, age has become one of the most misleading ways we measure achievement. We’ve become obsessed with the “right” timing—the idea that by a certain age, you should have already “made it.” Between social media and constant comparisons, it’s easy to feel like you’re falling behind, racing against an invisible clock.
In this issue, we talked to artists, DJs, filmmakers, and creatives who prove that growth doesn’t follow a schedule. Many of them didn’t find their rhythm until later in life, or they wholly reinvented their paths along the way. They’ve learned that the best things take time; much more time than we’re led to believe.
Let this be your reminder: life isn’t a single, short season. There is no deadline for growth, no expiry date for success, and no age limit on ambition. And no such thing as missing your moment when you’re still willing to create one.
Your season hasn’t passed.
CHERIEN DABIS | DIRECTOR, ACTOR & WRITER | PALESTINE, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Cherien Dabis does not walk a straight line, and she never has — not even as a child. While others were busy imagining what they wanted to be, she was already preoccupied with a larger question: why. “I was reading books like What Color Is Your Parachute? at twelve, trying to understand what I was meant to do with my life, she shares. “Looking back, that was its own kind of timeline pressure. Not about success, but about finding direction early and committing to it.”
Her search for purpose has followed her through every chapter of her life, from dance studios and film sets to writers’ rooms and directing chairs. Along the way, she has learned to distrust the timelines society hands us — the invisible deadlines attached to success, ambition, and self-discovery. “I think ambition is overrated. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized it’s not about ambition for me — it’s about contribution.”
As the daughter of immigrants, achievement was never simply about recognition. It was tied to security, responsibility, and the desire to make sacrifice mean something. Yet the path she ultimately chose — one built through storytelling, filmmaking, and creative risk — offered none of the guarantees she had been taught to seek. To her, the arts were not a soft landing, but a disruption—a gamble on herself that transformed the sacrifices of her past into a language of her own.
She started in the arts with dance, and began ballet at twelve—a point that, in the rigid world of classical training, felt impossibly late. Watching girls who had been practicing since they were toddlers, she convinced herself she had already missed her window. That persistent, gnawing feeling of being “behind” fuelled her for years, driving her to push relentlessly in a desperate attempt to catch up. Eventually, she had to accept that her path wasn’t meant to mirror anyone else’s. Dance, she realized, wasn’t the destination; it was the doorway. It was the first place she began exploring discipline.
For years, she carried the heavy, external pressure to “arrive” on a schedule. However, as the seasons turned, that cold ambition gave way to something warmer, something more vital: the desire to contribute. “I don’t want to achieve for the sake of achievement,” she says, her voice turning away from the noise of status and toward the subtlety of impact. “I want to keep deepening my craft. I want to feel inspired. I want to be part of a movement toward truth and justice.”
It was this surrender to the process that allowed her to bloom in her mid-30s. She finally turned toward the camera as an actor—a territory she had once avoided because she was too scared, too guarded, too busy hiding her own reflection from herself. “In my teens and 20s, I avoided vulnerability like the plague,” she reflects.
The worries of youth peeled away, leaving behind someone who no longer feared the discomfort of being seen. She learned that to truly grow, one must be willing to stumble. By embracing that vulnerability, she finally found the alignment between who she was and who she was meant to be. Her journey shows that we are not racing against a clock; we are, instead, unearthing the people we have been waiting for all along.
JESS | DJ & ARTIST | EGYPT
For Jess, the path to artistry was not a road she set out to travel, but one she eventually stumbled upon when the time was finally right. For years, her world was demarcated by the high-pressure, fast-paced rhythm of tech start-ups. Music, while always present, was relegated to the margins—a private sanctuary for her inner self. Success had a clear language there: lists, achievements, growth metrics, and the constant pursuit of what came next.
When she first began mixing in 2020, there was no grand plan behind it. “It came from sheer curiosity and a desire to express emotions through music,” Jess recalls. From the calculated metrics of the start-up world to the intuitive flow of the DJ booth, Jess found a lesson in patience. She found resonance in the words of Julia Cameron, who wrote that creativity often waits with grace until we are finally ready to listen. “It helped me understand that some things take their time to emerge,” she tells YUNG, “even when they fall outside the timelines we expect for ourselves.”
Looking back, Jess sees that timing as a gift. Entering music later allowed her to approach it without the pressure of expectation. She wasn’t trying to build a career as much as she was following a feeling. “Music is endless,” she says, her voice bright with the thrill of the hunt. “Every time I think I understand a genre or a certain sound, I discover another artist, another influence, another direction that opens up something new.”
Having once chased—and achieved—the public validation of “25 under 25″ lists, Jess knows first-hand how seductive and hollow those milestones can be. She watched as those public accolades slowly morphed into an invisible, ticking clock, threatening to turn success into a race against an expiration date. “At the time it felt like the biggest validation; I genuinely felt on top of the world,” she unveils. “But what I didn’t anticipate was how those kinds of markers can slowly create a sense of expiration around success.”
While DJing has become an integral part of her identity, she still speaks about herself as someone in motion. Much of her creative journey now revolves around discovering the producer and creator within her — the part that moves beyond interpreting other artists’ work and begins creating something entirely her own. “Creativity doesn’t follow those timelines.” Rather than rushing that process, she’s allowing it to unfold naturally, embracing experimentation, uncertainty, and the unfamiliar territory of being a beginner again.
“The poet Theodore Roethke once wrote, “We learn by going where we have to go.” I’ve always loved that line because it reflects how creativity actually unfolds,” she concludes. “It’s rarely one big breakthrough. It’s small discoveries that slowly reshape how you listen and create.”
NATALY AUKAR | COMEDIAN | LEBANON, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Nataly Aukar has little patience for the mythology of overnight success. Ask her about timelines, ambition, or falling behind, and her answers arrive with the same deadpan clarity that defines her comedy: blunt, funny, and just uncomfortable enough to expose an inconvenient truth.
For the Lebanese comedian, success was never something that arrived early. In fact, quite the opposite. “Everything,” she says when asked what she achieved later than expected. Years of work, setbacks, and persistence shaped her career long before any visible milestones did. “It was frustrating at times, but ultimately I’m glad I didn’t get things when I was too young to know how to handle myself.” Success arrived when she was old enough to understand what to do with it.
Despite her accomplishments, Aukar admits she still feels behind — every day, in fact. Not because she’s failed to achieve enough, but because the feeling itself never really disappears. The finish line simply moves. The next goal replaces the last one. “We’re always made to feel like our time is limited,” she says, deadpan. “That has never changed, and I believe it never will—at least not until the robots take over and none of us matter at all.”
Perhaps that’s why she remains sceptical of the public scorecards that dominate modern culture. Forbes lists, viral moments, social media comparisons? Her solution is remarkably simple: mute everyone. Twice, when asked how she protects herself from comparison culture and public milestones, she gives the exact same answer.
Beneath the humour lies a deeper philosophy. Reinvention, she believes, requires self-awareness. Starting over is not a singular event but a recurring state of being. “It feels like I’m starting over every day,” she admits. Every time she thinks she’s figured herself out, she discovers she hasn’t.
For Aukar, the secret to staying “unfinished”—in the best, most generative way—is to treat every day like a fresh, slightly confusing reset. She describes her life as a constant state of discovery, where she frequently thinks she has herself figured out, only to realize, “Nope, not even close.” She’s even currently on a quest to discover the truth about her own food sensitivities, proving that self-knowledge is an endless, messy, and occasionally digestive journey.
When asked what she would say to those who feel they have missed their window, she offers the ultimate, no-nonsense reality check: “Google Morgan Freeman’s career.” There is no deadline for becoming—only the work, the self-awareness, and the wisdom to know when to stop scrolling and start living.
MISTY | DJ & PRODUCER | EGYPT
For Misty, success has never been a finish line. It’s a series of milestones that keep moving forward, each one revealing another challenge, another idea, another version of himself still waiting to be discovered. “Success isn’t a one-time achievement,” he notes.
The Egyptian DJ and producer who runs Love Attack Records, has been making music since 2011, but the sound people associate with him today didn’t arrive overnight. In fact, it took nearly a decade to find. While he spent years producing and experimenting, something always felt slightly out of reach. It wasn’t until the release of his Things EP in 2021 that everything finally clicked. The ten-year journey it took to find his “real” sound. “That’s the sound I still carry today,” he says.
Rather than viewing those years as time lost, Misty sees them as necessary groundwork. “It made me realize timing isn’t late or early,” he tells YUNG. “It just lands when it’s meant to.” The countless hours spent refining his craft, testing ideas, and searching for authenticity ultimately gave him something far more valuable than early success: a creative identity.
Early on, ambition felt “loud”—a desperate, frantic need to prove something, to move fast, and to be seen. But over time, that noise has faded, replaced by something more focused, personal, and intent on impact. “It shifts,” he explains. “It becomes less about the volume of your output and more about the meaning behind it.”
Balancing the demands of a 9-to-5 job with the creative pulse of music has taught him to treat his time as a precious resource—something to be guarded, not spent. When Misty loses that discipline, the anxiety of “falling behind” creeps back in. But he’s learned that consistency is the antidote to that fear, and curiosity to stagnation. Curiosity, to him, what keeps artists evolving long after others become comfortable. It’s what pushes him to remain a student of music, constantly exploring sounds, ideas, and possibilities beyond his own boundaries.
Perhaps that’s why he remains sceptical of the timelines that dominate modern culture. Success, he believes, has little to do with age and everything to do with impact, consistency, and the work itself. “The minute you forget timelines, that’s when you finally become at peace.”
Even now, after years of building his career, he admits he still feels unfinished — in the best possible way. There are always more records to make, more ideas to bring to life, and more ground to explore. In many ways, that feeling is what keeps the music alive. By staying focused on his own rhythm, he’s learned that there’s no pressure to win the race if you’re the one setting the pace.
NELLY ATTAR | MOUNTAINEER | SAUDI ARABIA, LEBANON
Nelly Attar knows better than most that growth rarely happens at the summit. Over the years, the Saudi-Lebanese athlete has built a reputation for accomplishing extraordinary physical feats (and being the first Arab woman to summit K2), but her relationship with success cannot be confined to mountains, records, or milestones.
A professional mountaineer who has spent her life conquering literal peaks, Attar views the societal pressure to “achieve by a certain age” as a form of artificial stress, amplified by a digital age that traps us in a loop of comparing our behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s highlight reels. “We get to define what success is,” she says. “And whether that’s financial, athletic, or project-based, it belongs to you.”
Attar’s life has been a series of deliberate re-alignments. Before becoming one of the region’s most recognised endurance athletes and adventurers, Attar studied psychology, worked in mental health, taught dance, opened her own studio, and later watched that chapter come to an abrupt end during the pandemic. Each reset, she discovered, wasn’t a return to zero. It was an accumulation. “It’s never really starting from zero or scratch,” she explains. “I come from a place of experience.”
That experience was forged in the fire of 2020—a year that brought the dual weight of closing her business and the grief of losing her father. It was her darkest rock bottom, yet it was the crucible that revealed her own reservoir of resilience. “It revealed to me how resourceful I can be,” she reveals. “You will never be who you were before, but a new part of you emerges.”
Today, Attar is in the midst of yet another transition. She is shifting her focus from the solitary pursuit of her own summits to the broader mission of helping others navigate their own. She believes that in a world leaning towards convenience, the most revolutionary act is to seek out discomfort. “You stop evolving when you choose to stick to your comfort zone,” she says. “If you stick to it too much, you don’t just stay stagnant—you regress.”
In fact, she resists the idea that success can be measured by age at all. Instead, she believes it is defined by impact: the lives we touch, the people we inspire, and the courage to keep evolving long after we think we’ve found our path. “You have not missed your window,” she insists. “You don’t need a revelation or something drastic to change. You can choose to change right now, as you are reading this. Anything that was meant for you will come—but you have to be the one to start.”
CHANTAL BROCCA | RESEARCHER, STYLIST & ARTIST | EGYPT, ITALY
Chantal Brocca refuses to play by the rules of a system she believes is fundamentally broken. To the Italian-Sri Lankan based between Milan and Cairo, the modern obsession with timelines is a symptom of a culture that has replaced true substance with the frantic, weekly cycle of disposable consumption. “The world is flying at hyper-speed levels,” she observes. “We are screaming for each other’s attention to sell more plastic garbage. We are rushing like maniacs, but for what? We don’t need more—we need redistribution. We have a massive perception problem.”For Brocca, the pressure to succeed is a trap—a carrot dangled by a society that values marketability over the soul. She challenges the very definition of the word, questioning why we so desperately chase the approval of “taste-makers” who care little for inherent value. “It’s so important to stop and think,” she urges, “before we get caught in the net of this frantic madness.”
This refusal to conform extends to the modern myth of the expiration date, which she views as a dehumanizing by-product of a system that measures people like assets on a balance sheet. “We are alive as long as we are alive,” she says, dismantling the concept of retirement. “Expiry dates belong on perishable food labels—don’t make the mistake of treating yourself like an empty commodity.”Instead, she advocates for a life built on the steady accumulation of depth. To Brocca, our worth isn’t found in checking off boxes or reaching a final destination; it is found in the way our experiences, our relationships, and our unique understanding of the world compound over time. “Timeless works of great and enduring brilliance were produced in later stages of life, when creations could crystallise into their truest form.”
To her, we are merely stewards of a larger, ongoing dialogue, carrying forward the torch of ideas that our ancestors spent entire lifetimes perfecting. These ideas are never truly “complete”—they are living, breathing things that we must sculpt, refine, and, when necessary, rescue from the modern impulse towards distortion.
To Brocca, the goal is to marvel, to wonder, and to enjoy life in ever-expanding orders of magnitude. The choice is yours, and she is clear about it: there is no time when you should decide to stop enjoying your own life. “We are inundated with technological innovations, scientific breakthroughs, data analytics from every pore from every species on the planet – what more could we possibly need for us all to be prosperous, cared for, happy and in peace?”
“What are you chasing?” she asks. “And if you’re not chasing, but discovering—exploring all of that infinite potential you hold inside, for the simple pleasure of truly getting to know who you are and what this great big beautiful universe is—then are you ever really ‘done’?”
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