Navigating life transitions is a process of constantly balancing internal and external factors, such as close relationships but also broader social and political forces. This balancing act is explored here by timely glimpses into participants’ daily lives and the temporal shifts that mark specific life stages and transitions, whether studying, work, parenting or desires that shape life choices and possibilities now or in the future. While these important aspects could each be an individual theme, we chose to display them together since cohort data often represent these simply as a statistical representation such as ‘level of education’ or ‘socioeconomic status’. By doing so, we see what the complexity and individual character of life circumstances mean to participants and how these may look or be imagined entirely different in one, five- or ten-years’ time.