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

by Meg Jay

I wish I’d been more… I don’t know… intentional.”

Even a new term—amortality—has been coined to describe living the same way, at the same pitch, from our teens until death.

Adults of all ages let what psychologists call “unrealistic optimism”—the idea that nothing bad will ever happen to you—overtake logic and reason.

Uncertainty makes people anxious, and distraction is the twenty-first-century opiate of the masses.

In almost all areas of development, there is what is called a critical period, a time when we are primed for growth and change, when simple exposure can lead to dramatic transformation.

Identity capital is our collection of personal assets. It is the repertoire of individual resources that we assemble over time. These are the investments we make in ourselves, the things we do well enough, or long enough, that they become a part of who we are.

Twentysomethings who take the time to explore and also have the nerve to make commitments along the way construct stronger identities. They have higher self-esteem and are more persevering and realistic. This path to identity is associated with a host of positive outcomes, including a clearer sense of self, greater life satisfaction, better stress management, stronger reasoning, and resistance to conformity—all

Twentysomething unemployment is associated with heavy drinking and depression in middle age even after becoming regularly employed.

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

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.

people are more likely to form close relationships with those most like themselves.

But in-group members share more than slang and vocabulary. They share assumptions about one another and the world.

Unlike restricted speech, which presupposes similarities between the speaker and the listener, elaborated speech does not presume that the listener thinks in the same way or knows the same information.

weak ties promote, and sometimes even force, thoughtful growth and change.

It’s good to be good. There is a “helper’s high” that comes from being generous. In numerous studies, altruism has been linked to happiness, health, and longevity—as long as the help we give is not a burden.

He’d wake up one day in a far-off land, working in a job or living in a place that had nothing at all to do with Ian. He would be a world away from the life he would suddenly realize he wanted.

Unthought knowns are those things we know about ourselves but forget somehow. These are the dreams we have lost sight of or the truths we sense but don’t say out loud. We may be afraid of acknowledging the unthought known to other people because we are afraid of what they might think.

“Not making choices isn’t safe. The consequences are just further away in time,

If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are. —Charles de Montesquieu, writer/philosopher

Working toward our potential becomes what developmental theorist Karen Horney called a search for glory when, somehow, we learn more about what is ideal than about what is real.

Goals direct us from the inside, but shoulds are paralyzing judgments from the outside. Goals feel like authentic dreams while shoulds feel like oppressive obligations. Shoulds set up a false dichotomy between either meeting an ideal or being a failure, between perfection or settling. The tyranny of the should even pits us against our own best interests.

I think the fact that I never felt like I was better than those around me, and that I was just focused on learning and getting results, is what has led me to better and better things

Distinctiveness is a fundamental part of identity

College is done and résumés are fledgling, so the personal narrative is one of the few things currently under our control.

As a twentysomething, life is still more about potential than proof. Those who can tell a good story about who they are and what they want leap over those who can’t.

If the first step in establishing a professional identity is claiming our interests and talents, then the next step is claiming a story about our interests and talents, a narrative we can take with us

a story that balances complexity and cohesion is, frankly, diagnostic.

because while schools and companies want originality and creativity, they want communication and reasoning even more.

Interviewers want to hear a reasonable story about the past, present, and future. How does what you did before relate to what you want to do now, and how might that get you to what you want to do next? Everyone realizes most applicants don’t actually know what their careers will look like. Even the ones who think they do often change their minds.

With one decision you choose your partner in all adult things. Money, work, lifestyle, family, health, leisure, retirement, and even death become a three-legged race. Almost every aspect of your life will be intertwined with almost every aspect of your partner’s life.

But doing something later is not necessarily the same as doing something better.

Older spouses may be more mature, but later marriage has its own challenges. Rather than growing together while their twentysomething selves are still forming, partners who marry older may be more set in their ways. And a series of low-commitment, possibly destructive relationships can create bad habits and erode faith in love. And even though searching may help you find a better partner, the pool of available singles shallows over time, perhaps in more ways than one.

Besides, like with work, good relationships don’t just appear when we’re ready. It may take a few thoughtful tries before we know what love and commitment really are.

YAVIS—young, attractive, verbal, intelligent, and successful—and

Western culture is generally individualistic, prizing independence and self-fulfillment in almost all areas.

Cohabitation in the United States has increased more than 1,500 percent in the past fifty years. In 1960, about 500,000 unmarried couples lived together. Now, the number is almost 8,000,000. About half of twentysomethings will live with a romantic partner at least once during their twentysomething years. More than half of all marriages will be preceded by cohabitation. This shift has largely been attributed to the sexual revolution and the availability of birth control, and certainly the economics of young adulthood play a role.

But couples who “live together first” are actually less satisfied with their marriages and more likely to divorce than couples who do not. This is what sociologists call the cohabitation effect.

“sliding, not deciding.” Moving from dating to sleeping over to sleeping over a lot to cohabitation can be a gradual slope, one not marked by rings or ceremonies or sometimes even a conversation. Couples often bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean.

Couples who live together before marriage but after becoming engaged, who combine their lives after making a clear and public commitment, are not any more likely to have distressed or dissolved marriages than couples who do not cohabitate before marriage.

It is the couples who live together before being clearly and mutually committed to each other who are more likely to experience poorer communication, lower levels of commitment to the relationship, and greater marital instability down the road. Multiple studies have shown that these couples are less dedicated before, and even after, marriage. This has been found to be especially true for men.

a 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of Americans saw cohabitation as a step toward marriage. This shared and serious view of cohabitation may go a long way toward further attenuating the cohabitation effect because the most recent research suggests that serial cohabitors, couples with different levels of commitment, and those who use cohabitation as a test are most at risk for the cohabitation effect.

researchers also recommend getting clear on each person’s commitment level before you move in.

The most difficult thing to cure is the Patient’s attempt at self-cure. Very few lives are perfect and, because young people are generally resilient, many bounce back from difficulties with their own solutions in place. They may be outdated, imperfect solutions, but they are solutions nonetheless—ones that usually resist dismantling.

it is often the case that we like or dislike people because of the way their extremes compare to our own.

Neuroticism, or the tendency to be anxious, stressed, critical, and moody, is far more predictive of relationship unhappiness and dissolution than is personality dissimilarity.

Anxiety and judgments about these differences then lead to criticism and contempt, two leading relationship killers

Friends can form a culture of criticism where differences are seen as deficiencies.”

We now know that the brain develops from bottom to top and from back to front. This order reflects the evolutionary age of the areas of the brain. The oldest parts of the brain—the ones also present in our ancient ancestors and animal cousins—develop first, at the base of the brain near the spine. They control breathing, senses, emotions, sex, pleasure, sleep, hunger and thirst, or the “animal propensities” left intact after Phineas Gage’s injury. Roughly speaking, these areas are what we consider to be the emotional brain.

we now know that the frontal lobe does not fully mature until sometime between the ages of twenty and thirty.

“survival of the busiest.”