The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now

by Meg Jay

It may sound counterintuitive, but most twentysomethings feel relieved, and even empowered, when someone has the courage to strike up a conversation with the parts of themselves, and the parts of reality, that they are afraid to talk about. In my experience, clients—and readers—don’t fear being asked the tough questions; what they really fear is that they won’t be asked the tough questions. When twentysomethings hear what I have to say, the most common reaction is not “I can’t believe you said that.” It’s “Why didn’t someone tell me all this sooner?”

Your twenties matter. Eighty percent of life’s most defining moments take place by age thirty-five. Your earning power is decided in your first ten years of work. More than half of us are married, or dating or living with our future partner, by age thirty. Your brain and your personality change more during your twenties than at any time before or after. Your social network is about as big as it is ever going to get. Your defining decade coincides with your peak childbearing years. Meanwhile, your twenties are the most uncertain years you will ever know.

As a twentysomething, the wind isn’t always—or often—going to be at your back, and so many men and women want good information about how to move ahead.

with 80 percent of life’s most defining moments taking place by age thirty-five.

As thirtysomethings and beyond, we often either continue with, or correct for, the moves we have made so far.

You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today. And then one day you find, ten years has got behind you. —David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright of Pink Floyd, “Time”

I told Kate that while most therapists would agree with Socrates that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” a lesser-known quote by American psychologist Sheldon Kopp might be more important here: “The unlived life is not worth examining.”

by. It would be reckless for us to focus on Kate’s past when I knew her future was in danger.

fokus ke masa depan aja intinya cenah don't longing for the past..

Freud once said, “Love and work, work and love… that’s all there is,” and, it’s true, these things take shape later than they used to.

Almost by definition, at the turn of the century, the twenties became a betwixt-and-between time.

that the twenties were now disposable years lubricated by disposable income.

lmaoooooo

In 2007, in the New York Times, the twenties were dubbed “the odyssey years,” or a time meant for wandering. Journalists and researchers everywhere began to refer to twentysomethings with silly nicknames such as kidults, pre-adults, and adultescents. Some say the twentysomething years are an extended adolescence while others call them an emerging adulthood. This so-called changing timetable for adulthood has demoted twentysomethings to “not-quite-adults” just when they need to engage the most.

The young look older and the old look younger, collapsing the adult life span into one long twentysomething ride.

Meanwhile, the world of work has officially been disrupted, which means there are more choices but more confusion too. Because short-term work has replaced long-term careers, the average twentysomething will have about a handful of jobs in their twenties alone. Young adults are more educated and engaged than ever before, but, dishearteningly, their first jobs out of school may not even require a college degree.

The world feels bigger as young adults move around and encounter what are called “large world problems,” or those for which there are no right answers. There is no way to be sure about where to live, what to do for work, or when, whether, how, or with whom to partner. What’s worse is that the underlying existential questions—“Will I be successful? Will I be alone? Will I be loved? Will I be happy? Will my life have meaning? Will things work out for me?”—may go unanswered for a decade or more.

Even as they feel pressured to get out there and live their best lives, many are unsure about whether their government—or their planet—will survive.

But not making choices is a choice all the same.

I want to persuade you that thirty is not the new twenty precisely because we settle down later than we used to.

What we hear less about is that there’s such a thing as adult development, and our twenties are that critical period of adulthood. They, too, are a time when we are primed for growth and change, when simple exposure can lead to dramatic transformation. They are a time when ordinary day-to-day life has an inordinate impact on who we will become.

Identity capital is our stock of personal assets. It is how we add value to who we are, and it is what we have to show for how we have spent our time. These are the investments we make in ourselves, or the things we do well enough or long enough that they become a part of who we are.

Some identity capital—such as degrees or jobs or test scores or clubs—goes on a résumé. Other identity capital is more personal.

lives that are all capital and no crisis—all work and no exploration—feel rigid and conventional.

“But I’m free!” “How are you free? You have free time during the day when most everyone you know is working. You’re living on the edge of poverty. You can’t do anything with that time.”

course, but their earning power was largely decided in those first ten years of work. How? Because those steep learning curves that often go along with twentysomething work then translate into steep earning curves as we age. What this means is that your twenties are the time for that cross-country job or that graduate degree or that start-up you want to try.

Twentysomethings who think they have until later to leave unemployment or underemployment behind miss out on moving ahead while they are still traveling light.

I always advise twentysomethings to take the job with the most identity capital.

No one I know really knew what they wanted to do when they graduated. What people are doing now is usually not something that they’d ever even heard of in undergrad.

The one thing I have learned is that you can’t think your way through life. The only way to figure out what to do is to do—something.

This is a problem because, while the urban tribe may be the most supportive figures in our twenties, they are not the most transformative. The urban tribe may bring us soup when we are sick, but it is the people we hardly know—those who never make it into our tribe—who will swiftly and dramatically change our lives for the better.

The strength of weak ties isn’t nepotism.

The strength of weak ties is the science of how information spreads. It is about how people who do deserve chances or opportunities let other people help them find those chances or opportunities.

I would advise the same approach today as you ask your own weak ties for letters of recommendation, suggestions or introductions, or informational interviews: Make yourself relevant.

So—even and especially as we job-hop and move cross-country and change roommates and spend our weekends about town—now is the time to be connecting, not just with the same people having the same conversations about how work is lame or how there are no good men out there, but with those who might see things a little differently.

In your twenties and beyond, it is the people you know the least well who may be positioned to do you the most good. And remember, it’s good to be good. Weak ties are the people who can change your life for the better—both right now and in the years to come—if you have the courage to know what you want.

Ian told me his twentysomething years were like being in the middle of the ocean, like he was in this vast, unmarked body of water. Because he couldn’t see land in any direction, he didn’t know which way to swim. He felt overwhelmed by the prospect that he could go “anywhere” or do “anything.” He was paralyzed by the fact that he didn’t know which of the “anywheres” or “anythings” would work out. Tired and hopeless at age twenty-five, Ian said he felt like he was treading water to stay alive.

Twentysomethings like Ian were raised on good intentions and abstract commands—such as “Follow your dreams!” or “Reach for the stars!”—but they often don’t know much about how to get these things done. They don’t know how to get what they want or, sometimes, even what they want.

Life isn’t limitless, and neither was Ian. Twentysomethings often say they wish they had fewer choices but, at the moment, Ian didn’t have as many choices as he’d heard he did. And the longer he waited to get going, the fewer his options were going to be.

psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls “the unthought known.” Unthought knowns are those things we know about ourselves but forget somehow. They are the dreams we have lost sight of or the truths we sense but don’t say out loud.

making a choice about something is when the real uncertainty begins. The more terrifying kind of uncertainty is wanting something but not knowing how to get it.

it feels easier not to know, not to choose, and not to do. But it isn’t.

“Not making choices isn’t safe,” I countered. “The consequences are just further away in time, like in your thirties or forties.”

I don’t know how to get an A in my twenties. I feel like I am failing for the first time.” “What would an A in your twenties even mean?”

Upward social comparisons are when we compare our lives to those who have—or who seem to have—better ones.

“comparing other people’s outsides to our insides.”

But because we all aren’t acorns and won’t all be oaks, there is bound to be confusion about what exactly growing toward our potential means.

reaching your potential isn’t even something that usually happens in your twenties—it happens in your thirties or forties or fifties. And starting that process often means doing what doesn’t look so good,

I told her that an adult life is built not out of eating, praying, and loving but out of person, place, and thing: who we are with, where we live, and what we do for a living. We start our lives with whichever of these we know something about.

An identity or a career cannot be built around what you don’t want. We have to shift from a negative identity, or a sense of what I’m not, to a positive one, or a sense of what I am. This takes courage. A braver form of self-definition dares to be affirmative. Ian needed to move from talking about what he wasn’t going to do to talking about what he was going to do. “Being against something is easy,” I said. “What are you for?”

Saying yes to one concrete thing felt like saying no to an interesting or limitless life. In fact, it’s the other way around. If Ian didn’t say yes to something, his life was going to become uninteresting and limited.

“That you can’t pull some great career out of a hat in your thirties. You’ve got to start in your twenties.”