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2.73k reviews for:
The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now
Meg Jay
3.93 AVERAGE
2.73k reviews for:
The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now
Meg Jay
3.93 AVERAGE
Very good. As a twenty-something reading this has put a lot of things in perspective.
4.5/5 A book full with really helpful moments of honest/tough delivery from someone who understands where you’re coming from and has no intention of letting you stay there.
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Really makes you think. Reading this in mid 20s is a good time for it. Maybe I am underemployed
informative
medium-paced
A good piece of comedy except the author is for real. Read for a very narrow-minded view of traditional, capitalistic expectations.
informative
mysterious
Some helpful ideas, but also some contradictory advice - overall, I took away "seek stability and set yourself up well, but also make time to explore and identify what you want." I found it frustrating that the author placed so much emphasis on self-discipline and foresight in one's twenties while using seemingly endless travel anecdotes to support her claims. The book doesn't really contend with issues of privilege and seems to assume everyone's on equal footing.
4.25 stars ⭐️ this was my first self help book (not my choosing lol) bc patrick brought the book and asked me to read it so i did. it definitely opened my eyes a little more especially bc everyone does now talk abt us being so young in our twenties but how young are we really you know? this book really kinda makes u think and lights a fire under ur ass abt getting ur shit together and owning the process so you can be happy in ur 30s. i think she worded it well that in our 30s, we all expect that it will all magically work out then but none of us want to start the process when we are 30, rather we would like to have done the necessary stuff and be in the happy stable era then. anyways it was a good read, i don’t think i’ll be reading a ton of self help but it was a nice change of pace and definitely made me reflect and hopefully the stuff i took away from the book stays in my brain. def worried abt my quarter life crisis lmao :) anyways yeehaw
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
reflective
Weak ties
"As we look for jobs, relationships, or opportunities of any kind, it is the people we know the least well who will be the most transformative. New things almost always come from outside your inner circle. Twenty-somethings who won't use their weak ties fall behind twenty-somethings like these who have this to say: 'Networking, using contacts, whatever is not a bad thing. I never really was overly worried about it, but I had some friends who were always so stressed about working somewhere where a family member helped them get the job. I work in one of the top three companies in my industry and literally I only know one person who actually got the job without knowing someone. Everyone got it because they know somebody...' People would be surprised at the untapped resources they have. Alumni networks from college and high-school can be really helpful... call or email them for an informational interview."
"If weak ties do favors for us, they start to like us. Then they become even more likely to grant us additional favors in the future. Benjamin Franklin decided that if he wanted to get someone on his side, he ought to ask for a favor and he did. The Benjamin Franklin effect shows that while attitudes influence behavior, behavior can also shape attitudes. If we do a favor for someone, we come to believe we like that person."
Love - An Upmarket Conversation
"Marrying later than the teen years does indeed protect against divorce, but this only holds true until about age 25. After 25, one's age of marriage does not predict divorce. These findings run counter to the notion that it is unquestionably better to postpone marriage as long as you can. Older spouses may be more mature but later marriages has its own challenges."
"Almost overnight, commitments changes from being something for later to being something for yesterday. Marriage goes about being something we will worry about at 30 to being something we want at 30. When then is the time to really think about partnership? This sudden shift can lead to all kinds of trouble."
"My boyfriend tells me he wants to own a house by 35. During another conversation, I told him I want to have my first baby at 32. He told it's not realistic to decide when to have a baby.
'That's going to depend upon where we are in our careers, how much money we have, where we live.' So how can he say he plans to buy a home by a certain age. It's like a double standard and it seems like it's easier to plan our careers and financial stability than to plan our marriages and babies."
"I love my boyfriend and I can only say this to you but I want to marry him. But I feel like I'm not allowed to want that at this point in my life. So we keep taking these breaks to date other people and then we end up talking all the time and getting back together. It's like neither one of us thinks we can say, 'you're it.' Like there's something wrong with that."
Picking Your Family
"There are two paths to being smart and charming when you are young. Life has been good or life has been bad. When life has been good, maybe someone goes to see a therapist for a while because some isolated thing is not currently going well. Most likely the difficulty will be resolved quickly and the client will be on his way. When life has been bad, someone goes to see a therapist because even though things look pretty on the outside, they feel horrible on the inside...What results is a therapy where the client's image gets in the way of the help that he or she needs. The client has come to focus on what has not gone well, but the therapist is blinded by what has. Too often being successful when you are young is about survival. Some people are good at hiding their troubles. They are good at falling up."
"How can you be so ambitious about work, but so unambitious about relationships?"
the cohabitation effect
"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....
research shows that the cohabitation effect is not fully explained by individual characteristics such as religion, education, or politics.... 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. They do not suffer from the cohabitation effect... It is the couples who live together before an engagement who are more likely to experience poorer communication, lower levels of commitment to the relationship, and greater marital instability down the road."
Lock-in
"Lock-in is the decreased likelihood to search for other options, or change to another option, once an investment in something has been made. But even a minimal investment can lead to lock-in, especially when we are faced with switching costs."
On Dating Down
"Twentysomething women and men who are dating down—or working down, for that matter—usually have untold, or at least unedited, stories. These stories originated in old conversations and experiences and, so, they change only through new conversations and new experiences"
"I saw her as a person who had been made to feel “too much” and “less-than” all at the same time.
Being in like
"What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility."
—Leo Tolstoy, writer
"Over some months, in a roundabout way, Eli spoke of his own reservations about his girlfriend: She didn’t laugh much, she focused endlessly on her dissertation rather than going out and doing things, she seemed somewhat subdued. It bothered Eli that when they went to see his
family, it took her a while to feel at ease with everyone and, even when she did, she rarely joined in on the big laughs or the intensely competitive board games. He thought maybe she was depressed.
"When Eli said something critical about his girlfriend, he quickly undid it, softening any remark by reminding me how sweet she was. He worried about hurting her feelings even
though she could not hear us. Eli and his girlfriend had gotten together quickly, having sex and setting a routine before they really got to know each other. Clearly there was intimacy and loyalty, but I don’t think they liked each other very much. From what I could tell, Eli’s girlfriend spent her therapy hours being concerned about who Eli was, and I know that Eli spent his therapy hours reluctantly having second thoughts about her. He wanted to be with someone who liked to be playful
and someone who enjoyed going out and having fun with family and friends. He imagined someone who woke up happy and headed out to the park for a run."
"Eli and his girlfriend were not a particularly good match, but this was not clear to them. They were both good-looking. They were both Jewish and Democrats. They had the same friends and good sex, and the rest they worked around. Both were kindhearted people who wanted to be in a relationship, and they avoided conflict to keep each other happy. Meanwhile, his faithfulness verged on obedience, and her steadiness could be seen as doggedness."
"Eli and his girlfriend needed to be “in like.” By this I mean two things: being
alike in ways that matter and genuinely liking who the other person is. Often these go hand in hand. That is because the more similar two people are, the more they are able to understand each other. Each appreciates how the other acts and how he or she goes about the day, and this forestalls an incredible amount of friction. Two people who are similar are going to have the same reactions to a rainy day, a new car, a long vacation, an anniversary, a Sunday morning, and a big party.
"We sometimes hear that opposites attract, and maybe they do for a hookup. More often, similarity is the essence of compatibility. Studies have repeatedly found that couples who are similar in areas such as socioeconomic status, education, age, ethnicity, religion, attractiveness, attitudes, values, and intelligence are more likely to be satisfied with their relationships and are less likely to seek divorce."
"The problem is, while people are good at matching themselves and others on relatively obvious criteria, such as age and education, it turns out that these qualities are what researchers call “deal breakers, not match makers.”
The Big Five
"When and if you commit, chances are that you will choose someone who is similar to you in ways that are convenient. But long-term relationships are inevitably inconvenient. the more similar your
personalities, the smoother things may be. And for all of the ways you may not be like someone you love, by knowing something about his or her personality you have the opportunity to be more understanding about why he or she does the very different (or annoying) things that he or she does. That goes a long way toward bridging differences, and that’s important too."
Being on the high end of the Neuroticism dimension is toxic for relationships. Neuroticism, or the tendency to be anxious, stressed, critical, and moody, is far more predictive of relationship unhappiness and dissolution than is personality dissimilarity. While personality similarity can help the years run smoothly, any two people will be different in some way or another. How a person responds to these differences can be more important than the differences themselves. To a person who runs high in Neuroticism, differences are seen in a negative light. Anxiety and judgments about these differences then lead to criticism and contempt, two leading relationship
killers."
Calm Yourself
"Compared to older adults, they find negative information—the bad news—
more memorable than positive information—or the good news. MRI studies show that
twentysomething brains simply react more strongly to negative information than do the brains of older adults. There is more activity in the amygdala—the seat of the emotional brain. When twentysomethings have their competence criticized, they become anxious and angry. They are tempted to march in and take action. They generate negative feelings toward others and obsess about the why: 'Why did my boss say that? Why doesn’t my boss like me?' Taking work so intensely
personally can make a forty-hour workweek long indeed"
“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.” - William James
"'But those phone calls are robbing you of the opportunity to calm yourself
down.' When Danielle called her mother, she was doing what psychologists call 'borrowing an ego.' She was reaching out in a moment of need and letting someone else’s frontal lobe do the work. We all need to do that sometimes, but if we externalize our distress too much, we don’t learn to handle bad days on our own. We don’t practice soothing ourselves just when our brains are in the best position to pick up new skills. We don’t learn how to calm ourselves down, and this in and of itself undermines confidence."
Outside In
"Confidence doesn’t come from the inside out. It moves from the outside in. People feel less anxious—and more confident—on the inside when they can point to things they have done well on the outside. Fake confidence comes from stuffing our self-doubt. Empty confidence comes from parental platitudes on our lunch hour. Real confidence comes from mastery experiences, which are actual, lived moments of success, especially when things seem difficult. Whether we are talking about love or work, the confidence that overrides insecurity comes from experience. There is no other way."
"They feel threatened by hard work, fearing it means they don’t have it after all. Struggle means being a have-not."
Getting Along and Getting Ahead
"A great relationship or a job to be proud of may seem elusive, but just working toward these things makes us happier."
"Even simply having goals can make us happier and more confident—both now and later. In one study that followed nearly five hundred young adults from college to the mid-thirties, increased goal-setting in the twenties led to greater purpose, mastery, agency, and well-being in the thirties. Goals are how we declare who we are and who we want to be. They are how we structure our years and our lives. Goals have been called the building blocks of adult personality, and it is worth considering that who you will be in your thirties and beyond is being built out of the goals you are setting for yourself today."
Every Body
"What I can’t figure out, and what I feel like I am grieving a little, is why I spent so many years on nothing. So many years doing things and hanging out with people that don’t even rate a memory. For what? I had a good time in my twenties, but did I need to do all that for eight years? Lying there in the MRI, it was like I traded five years of partying or hanging out in coffee shops for five more years I could have had with my son if I’d grown up sooner. Why didn’t someone drop the manners and tell me I was wasting my life?"
Do the Math
"Be ruled by time, the wisest counselor of all." —Plutarch, historian
"To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time."—Leonard Bernstein, composer
"Twentysomethings are especially prone to present bias. Their brains are still developing the forward thinking it takes to anticipate consequences and plan for the future. And when they do turn to close friends or older others with nervous questions about their lives, they often receive pats on the head and stock phrases like 'It’ll work out. You have all the time in the world.' At the same time, twentysomething exploits are met with more enthusiastic clichés, such as 'You’re only young once' or 'Have fun while you can.' These messages encourage risk-taking and what one researcher calls 'now-or-never behaviors' that don’t actually make us happy for long: partying, multiple sex partners, blowing off responsibilities, being lazy, not having a real job. Again and again, twentysomethings hear they have infinite time for the dreaded adult things but so little time for the purportedly good stuff. This makes living in the present easy. It’s connecting the present with the future that takes work."
"Many cultures make use of memento mori to remind us of our mortality, the skeletons and dying flowers often represented in art or on display in the marketplace. In past centuries, it was common to sit for portraits while holding a dead rose or to carry a watch shaped like a skull in order to signify time running out. In my practice, I notice that many twentysomethings—especially those who surround themselves with other twentysomethings—have trouble anticipating life. They need memento vivi—or ways to remember they are going to live. They need something to remind them that life is going to continue on past their twenties, and that it might even be great."
"I thought if I didn’t participate in adulthood, time would stop. But it didn’t. It just kept going. People around me kept going. Now I see I need to get going—and keep going. I try to plan things in the future to work toward—5K runs or my summer internship—so I keep practicing being more future-oriented.
"Plus, my best friend here is a med resident. She’s thirty-three—five years older than me almost exactly—and we talk about twenty million times a day. It’s crazy to me that she is out
of her twenties and yet where she is and what she is doing with her life don’t seem too far away from where I am. It just makes me realize that my twenties are going to fly by, so I kind of want to make sure I take the time to experience this sort of unencumbered, unattached few years that I have here. That being said, I’m glad to be in school and I’m even working in a legal clinic in town. Actually, I’m thrilled to have health insurance and a 401(k). I want to enjoy my twenties but I want the happy ending too."
"How do you get the happy ending? John Irving ought to know. One of my favorite authors, Irving writes these multigenerational epics of fiction that somehow work out in the end. How does he do it? He says, “I always begin with the last sentence; then I work my way backwards, through the plot, to where the story should begin.” That sounds like a lot of work, especially compared to the fantasy that great writers sit down and just go where the story takes them. Irving lets us know that good stories, and happy endings, are more intentional than that."
"In one way or another, almost every twentysomething client I have wonders, “Will things work out for me?” The uncertainty behind that question is what makes twentysomething life so difficult, but it is also what makes twentysomething action so possible and so necessary. It’s unsettling to not know the future and, in a way, even more daunting to consider that what we are doing with our twentysomething lives might be determining it. It is almost a relief to imagine that these years aren’t real, that twentysomething jobs and relationships don’t count. But a career spent studying adult development tells me this is far from true. And years of listening closely to
clients and students tells me that, deep down, twentysomethings want to be taken seriously, and they want their lives to be taken seriously. They want to know that what they do matters—and it does. There is no formula for a good life, and there is no right or wrong life. But there are choices and consequences, so it seems only fair that twentysomethings know about the ones that lie ahead. That way, the future feels good when you finally get there. The nicest part about getting older is
knowing how your life worked out, especially if you like what you wake up to every day. If you are paying attention to your life as a twentysomething, the real glory days are still to come."
"As I gathered up my maps and turned to go, I hesitated and asked the ranger, 'Am I going to make it?' He looked at me and said, 'You haven’t decided yet.'
"As we look for jobs, relationships, or opportunities of any kind, it is the people we know the least well who will be the most transformative. New things almost always come from outside your inner circle. Twenty-somethings who won't use their weak ties fall behind twenty-somethings like these who have this to say: 'Networking, using contacts, whatever is not a bad thing. I never really was overly worried about it, but I had some friends who were always so stressed about working somewhere where a family member helped them get the job. I work in one of the top three companies in my industry and literally I only know one person who actually got the job without knowing someone. Everyone got it because they know somebody...' People would be surprised at the untapped resources they have. Alumni networks from college and high-school can be really helpful... call or email them for an informational interview."
"If weak ties do favors for us, they start to like us. Then they become even more likely to grant us additional favors in the future. Benjamin Franklin decided that if he wanted to get someone on his side, he ought to ask for a favor and he did. The Benjamin Franklin effect shows that while attitudes influence behavior, behavior can also shape attitudes. If we do a favor for someone, we come to believe we like that person."
Love - An Upmarket Conversation
"Marrying later than the teen years does indeed protect against divorce, but this only holds true until about age 25. After 25, one's age of marriage does not predict divorce. These findings run counter to the notion that it is unquestionably better to postpone marriage as long as you can. Older spouses may be more mature but later marriages has its own challenges."
"Almost overnight, commitments changes from being something for later to being something for yesterday. Marriage goes about being something we will worry about at 30 to being something we want at 30. When then is the time to really think about partnership? This sudden shift can lead to all kinds of trouble."
"My boyfriend tells me he wants to own a house by 35. During another conversation, I told him I want to have my first baby at 32. He told it's not realistic to decide when to have a baby.
'That's going to depend upon where we are in our careers, how much money we have, where we live.' So how can he say he plans to buy a home by a certain age. It's like a double standard and it seems like it's easier to plan our careers and financial stability than to plan our marriages and babies."
"I love my boyfriend and I can only say this to you but I want to marry him. But I feel like I'm not allowed to want that at this point in my life. So we keep taking these breaks to date other people and then we end up talking all the time and getting back together. It's like neither one of us thinks we can say, 'you're it.' Like there's something wrong with that."
Picking Your Family
"There are two paths to being smart and charming when you are young. Life has been good or life has been bad. When life has been good, maybe someone goes to see a therapist for a while because some isolated thing is not currently going well. Most likely the difficulty will be resolved quickly and the client will be on his way. When life has been bad, someone goes to see a therapist because even though things look pretty on the outside, they feel horrible on the inside...What results is a therapy where the client's image gets in the way of the help that he or she needs. The client has come to focus on what has not gone well, but the therapist is blinded by what has. Too often being successful when you are young is about survival. Some people are good at hiding their troubles. They are good at falling up."
"How can you be so ambitious about work, but so unambitious about relationships?"
the cohabitation effect
"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....
research shows that the cohabitation effect is not fully explained by individual characteristics such as religion, education, or politics.... 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. They do not suffer from the cohabitation effect... It is the couples who live together before an engagement who are more likely to experience poorer communication, lower levels of commitment to the relationship, and greater marital instability down the road."
Lock-in
"Lock-in is the decreased likelihood to search for other options, or change to another option, once an investment in something has been made. But even a minimal investment can lead to lock-in, especially when we are faced with switching costs."
On Dating Down
"Twentysomething women and men who are dating down—or working down, for that matter—usually have untold, or at least unedited, stories. These stories originated in old conversations and experiences and, so, they change only through new conversations and new experiences"
"I saw her as a person who had been made to feel “too much” and “less-than” all at the same time.
Being in like
"What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility."
—Leo Tolstoy, writer
"Over some months, in a roundabout way, Eli spoke of his own reservations about his girlfriend: She didn’t laugh much, she focused endlessly on her dissertation rather than going out and doing things, she seemed somewhat subdued. It bothered Eli that when they went to see his
family, it took her a while to feel at ease with everyone and, even when she did, she rarely joined in on the big laughs or the intensely competitive board games. He thought maybe she was depressed.
"When Eli said something critical about his girlfriend, he quickly undid it, softening any remark by reminding me how sweet she was. He worried about hurting her feelings even
though she could not hear us. Eli and his girlfriend had gotten together quickly, having sex and setting a routine before they really got to know each other. Clearly there was intimacy and loyalty, but I don’t think they liked each other very much. From what I could tell, Eli’s girlfriend spent her therapy hours being concerned about who Eli was, and I know that Eli spent his therapy hours reluctantly having second thoughts about her. He wanted to be with someone who liked to be playful
and someone who enjoyed going out and having fun with family and friends. He imagined someone who woke up happy and headed out to the park for a run."
"Eli and his girlfriend were not a particularly good match, but this was not clear to them. They were both good-looking. They were both Jewish and Democrats. They had the same friends and good sex, and the rest they worked around. Both were kindhearted people who wanted to be in a relationship, and they avoided conflict to keep each other happy. Meanwhile, his faithfulness verged on obedience, and her steadiness could be seen as doggedness."
"Eli and his girlfriend needed to be “in like.” By this I mean two things: being
alike in ways that matter and genuinely liking who the other person is. Often these go hand in hand. That is because the more similar two people are, the more they are able to understand each other. Each appreciates how the other acts and how he or she goes about the day, and this forestalls an incredible amount of friction. Two people who are similar are going to have the same reactions to a rainy day, a new car, a long vacation, an anniversary, a Sunday morning, and a big party.
"We sometimes hear that opposites attract, and maybe they do for a hookup. More often, similarity is the essence of compatibility. Studies have repeatedly found that couples who are similar in areas such as socioeconomic status, education, age, ethnicity, religion, attractiveness, attitudes, values, and intelligence are more likely to be satisfied with their relationships and are less likely to seek divorce."
"The problem is, while people are good at matching themselves and others on relatively obvious criteria, such as age and education, it turns out that these qualities are what researchers call “deal breakers, not match makers.”
The Big Five
"When and if you commit, chances are that you will choose someone who is similar to you in ways that are convenient. But long-term relationships are inevitably inconvenient. the more similar your
personalities, the smoother things may be. And for all of the ways you may not be like someone you love, by knowing something about his or her personality you have the opportunity to be more understanding about why he or she does the very different (or annoying) things that he or she does. That goes a long way toward bridging differences, and that’s important too."
Being on the high end of the Neuroticism dimension is toxic for relationships. Neuroticism, or the tendency to be anxious, stressed, critical, and moody, is far more predictive of relationship unhappiness and dissolution than is personality dissimilarity. While personality similarity can help the years run smoothly, any two people will be different in some way or another. How a person responds to these differences can be more important than the differences themselves. To a person who runs high in Neuroticism, differences are seen in a negative light. Anxiety and judgments about these differences then lead to criticism and contempt, two leading relationship
killers."
Calm Yourself
"Compared to older adults, they find negative information—the bad news—
more memorable than positive information—or the good news. MRI studies show that
twentysomething brains simply react more strongly to negative information than do the brains of older adults. There is more activity in the amygdala—the seat of the emotional brain. When twentysomethings have their competence criticized, they become anxious and angry. They are tempted to march in and take action. They generate negative feelings toward others and obsess about the why: 'Why did my boss say that? Why doesn’t my boss like me?' Taking work so intensely
personally can make a forty-hour workweek long indeed"
“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.” - William James
"'But those phone calls are robbing you of the opportunity to calm yourself
down.' When Danielle called her mother, she was doing what psychologists call 'borrowing an ego.' She was reaching out in a moment of need and letting someone else’s frontal lobe do the work. We all need to do that sometimes, but if we externalize our distress too much, we don’t learn to handle bad days on our own. We don’t practice soothing ourselves just when our brains are in the best position to pick up new skills. We don’t learn how to calm ourselves down, and this in and of itself undermines confidence."
Outside In
"Confidence doesn’t come from the inside out. It moves from the outside in. People feel less anxious—and more confident—on the inside when they can point to things they have done well on the outside. Fake confidence comes from stuffing our self-doubt. Empty confidence comes from parental platitudes on our lunch hour. Real confidence comes from mastery experiences, which are actual, lived moments of success, especially when things seem difficult. Whether we are talking about love or work, the confidence that overrides insecurity comes from experience. There is no other way."
"They feel threatened by hard work, fearing it means they don’t have it after all. Struggle means being a have-not."
Getting Along and Getting Ahead
"A great relationship or a job to be proud of may seem elusive, but just working toward these things makes us happier."
"Even simply having goals can make us happier and more confident—both now and later. In one study that followed nearly five hundred young adults from college to the mid-thirties, increased goal-setting in the twenties led to greater purpose, mastery, agency, and well-being in the thirties. Goals are how we declare who we are and who we want to be. They are how we structure our years and our lives. Goals have been called the building blocks of adult personality, and it is worth considering that who you will be in your thirties and beyond is being built out of the goals you are setting for yourself today."
Every Body
"What I can’t figure out, and what I feel like I am grieving a little, is why I spent so many years on nothing. So many years doing things and hanging out with people that don’t even rate a memory. For what? I had a good time in my twenties, but did I need to do all that for eight years? Lying there in the MRI, it was like I traded five years of partying or hanging out in coffee shops for five more years I could have had with my son if I’d grown up sooner. Why didn’t someone drop the manners and tell me I was wasting my life?"
Do the Math
"Be ruled by time, the wisest counselor of all." —Plutarch, historian
"To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time."—Leonard Bernstein, composer
"Twentysomethings are especially prone to present bias. Their brains are still developing the forward thinking it takes to anticipate consequences and plan for the future. And when they do turn to close friends or older others with nervous questions about their lives, they often receive pats on the head and stock phrases like 'It’ll work out. You have all the time in the world.' At the same time, twentysomething exploits are met with more enthusiastic clichés, such as 'You’re only young once' or 'Have fun while you can.' These messages encourage risk-taking and what one researcher calls 'now-or-never behaviors' that don’t actually make us happy for long: partying, multiple sex partners, blowing off responsibilities, being lazy, not having a real job. Again and again, twentysomethings hear they have infinite time for the dreaded adult things but so little time for the purportedly good stuff. This makes living in the present easy. It’s connecting the present with the future that takes work."
"Many cultures make use of memento mori to remind us of our mortality, the skeletons and dying flowers often represented in art or on display in the marketplace. In past centuries, it was common to sit for portraits while holding a dead rose or to carry a watch shaped like a skull in order to signify time running out. In my practice, I notice that many twentysomethings—especially those who surround themselves with other twentysomethings—have trouble anticipating life. They need memento vivi—or ways to remember they are going to live. They need something to remind them that life is going to continue on past their twenties, and that it might even be great."
"I thought if I didn’t participate in adulthood, time would stop. But it didn’t. It just kept going. People around me kept going. Now I see I need to get going—and keep going. I try to plan things in the future to work toward—5K runs or my summer internship—so I keep practicing being more future-oriented.
"Plus, my best friend here is a med resident. She’s thirty-three—five years older than me almost exactly—and we talk about twenty million times a day. It’s crazy to me that she is out
of her twenties and yet where she is and what she is doing with her life don’t seem too far away from where I am. It just makes me realize that my twenties are going to fly by, so I kind of want to make sure I take the time to experience this sort of unencumbered, unattached few years that I have here. That being said, I’m glad to be in school and I’m even working in a legal clinic in town. Actually, I’m thrilled to have health insurance and a 401(k). I want to enjoy my twenties but I want the happy ending too."
"How do you get the happy ending? John Irving ought to know. One of my favorite authors, Irving writes these multigenerational epics of fiction that somehow work out in the end. How does he do it? He says, “I always begin with the last sentence; then I work my way backwards, through the plot, to where the story should begin.” That sounds like a lot of work, especially compared to the fantasy that great writers sit down and just go where the story takes them. Irving lets us know that good stories, and happy endings, are more intentional than that."
"In one way or another, almost every twentysomething client I have wonders, “Will things work out for me?” The uncertainty behind that question is what makes twentysomething life so difficult, but it is also what makes twentysomething action so possible and so necessary. It’s unsettling to not know the future and, in a way, even more daunting to consider that what we are doing with our twentysomething lives might be determining it. It is almost a relief to imagine that these years aren’t real, that twentysomething jobs and relationships don’t count. But a career spent studying adult development tells me this is far from true. And years of listening closely to
clients and students tells me that, deep down, twentysomethings want to be taken seriously, and they want their lives to be taken seriously. They want to know that what they do matters—and it does. There is no formula for a good life, and there is no right or wrong life. But there are choices and consequences, so it seems only fair that twentysomethings know about the ones that lie ahead. That way, the future feels good when you finally get there. The nicest part about getting older is
knowing how your life worked out, especially if you like what you wake up to every day. If you are paying attention to your life as a twentysomething, the real glory days are still to come."
"As I gathered up my maps and turned to go, I hesitated and asked the ranger, 'Am I going to make it?' He looked at me and said, 'You haven’t decided yet.'