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

by Meg Jay

Twentysomethings are adults too, and they deserve a seat at the table in a conversation about their own lives.

Today’s twentysomethings may be pegged as oversharers, but what they post on Instagram and Snapchat is far more curated than what they say in my office.

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.

Your earning power is decided in your first ten years of work.

Your brain and your personality change more during your twenties than at any time before or after.

Your defining decade coincides with your peak childbearing years. Meanwhile, your twenties are the most unce...

We may own homes or have other responsibilities that make it difficult to change course. As thirtysomethings and beyond, we often either continue with, or correct for, the moves we have made so far.

You are somewhere in your defining decade. That means your life is being decided by twentysomething moments you may not realize are happening at all.

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.”

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

Most have spent their lives in school, which means that, for as long as they can remember, life has been divided into semester-sized chunks. Their days were scheduled, and there were syllabi that spelled out exactly how to get an A or a B. Then somewhere around the age of twenty, life opens up, and the syllabi are gone. There are no more sheets of paper to tell you what to do every day, and no more grades to let you know where you stand.

Social media may make the twenties look overwhelmingly, well, social, but with all the comings and goings related to instability at work, research suggests that our twenties are one of the loneliest times of life.

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.

Times can be tough for twentysomethings, not just because of their “large world problems” but because of ...

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.

Some wonder if it makes sense to bring children into the world anymore.

I feel like I’m in the middle of the ocean. Like I could swim in any direction but I can’t see land so I don’t know which way to go.

I am constantly comparing myself to people with much better lives.

I feel like I have to go online for attention as proof that I’m desirable.

While hopefulness is a useful state of mind that may help many downtrodden twentysomethings get out of bed in the morning, at the end of the day they need more than optimism, because at the end of their twenties many will want more than diversions and record collections.

We think that by avoiding decisions now, we keep all of our options open for later. But not making choices is a choice all the same.

When a lot has been left to do, there is enormous thirtysomething pressure to get ahead,

There can also be a deep and heart-wrenching sense of regret: discovering they can’t have the careers they now want; knowing it will be difficult to provide for their child as they now wish they could; finding that fertility problems or sheer exhaustion stand in the way of the families they now long for; realizing they will be nearly sixty when their children go to college and maybe seventy at their weddings; recognizing they may never know their own grandchildren.

The postmillennial midlife crisis isn’t buying a red sports car. It is figuring out that while we were busy making sure we didn’t miss out on anything, we were setting ourselves up to miss out on some of the most important things of all.

It is realizing that doing something later is not automatically the same as ...

thirty is not the new twenty precisely because we settle down later than we used to.

What this has done is made the twenties not an irrelevant downtime but a developmental sweet spot that comes only once.

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.

Researchers who have looked at how people resolve identity crises have found that lives that are all capital and no crisis—all work and no exploration—feel rigid and conventional.

They work at jobs they are overqualified for or they work only part-time—often for good reason.

While these sorts of jobs can be fun, they also signal to future employers a period of lostness.

The longer it takes to get our footing in work—whatever sort of work we think we might want—the more likely we are to become, as one journalist put it, “different and damaged.”

I have watched smart, interesting twentysomethings avoid “real jobs” in the “real world” only to drag themselves through years of underemployment, all the while becoming too tired and too alienated to look for something that might actually make them happy.

Workers in the study did not earn their highest salaries in their twenties, of course, but their earning power was largely decided in those first ten years of work.

those steep learning curves that often go along with twentysomething work then translate into steep earning curves as we age.

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

I would never have believed it, and it’s probably not the best thing to tell someone still in school, but not one person has asked for my GPA since I graduated.

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.

“the urban tribe.” What he was describing was the makeshift family that has come to the fore as young adults spend more years on their own. Essentially the college buddies of the twentysomething years, these are the friends who reply to our texts and who make it to our gatherings and birthday parties. These are the good souls who give us rides to the airport or to music festivals. These are the people we meet up with on the weekend to vent about bad dates over burritos and beer—or to talk about mean bosses over kale and kombucha.

Sometimes, during these difficult and defining years, it can even be lifesaving to have a group to call our own.

With all the attention paid to the urban tribe, however, many twentysomethings have limited themselves to huddling together with the same few people. 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.

According to Granovetter, not all relationships—or ties—are the same. Some are weak and some are strong, and the strength of a tie increases with time and experience.

In childhood, strong ties are best friends and family. In our twenties, strong ties come to include the urban tribe.

Weak ties, on the other hand, are people we have met—or are connected to somehow—but d...

Weak ties are anyone and everyone who is not, currently, a strong tie.

“similarity breeds connection.”

Birds of a feather flock together, as they say, because of what is called homophily, or “love of the same.” From the schoolyard to the boardroom, people are more likely to form close relationships with those most like themselves. As a result, a cluster of strong ties—such as the urban tribe—is typically an incestuous, homogeneous group.