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

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For Jay and Hazel

This book is about my work with twentysomethings, as a clinical psychologist in private practice in Charlottesville, Virginia, and as a clinical professor at the University of Virginia, and previously as a clinician in Berkeley, California, and a lecturer at University of California, Berkeley. Throughout these pages, I do my best to tell the personal, and sometimes poignant, stories of the clients and students who taught me about the twentysomething years. To protect their privacy, I have changed their names and the details of their lives. In many cases, I have created composites from those with similar experiences and with whom I had similar sessions and conversations. I hope every twentysomething who reads this book sees him- or herself in the stories I include, but a resemblance to any particular twentysomething is coincidental.

I n a rare study of life-span development, examined dozens of life stories, written by prominent, successful people toward the end of their lives. They were interested in autobiographically consequential experiences, or the circumstances and people that had the strongest influence on how life unfolded thereafter. While important events took place from birth until death, those that determined the years ahead were most heavily concentrated during the twentysomething years.

It would make sense that as we leave home or college and become more independent there is a burst of self-creation, a time when what we do determines who we will become. It might even seem like adulthood is one long stretch of autobiographically consequential experiencesthat the older we get, the more we direct our own lives. This is not true.

In our thirties, consequential experiences start to slow. School will be over or nearly so. We will have invested time in careers or made the choice not to. We, or our friends, may be in relationships and starting families. We may own homes or have other responsibilities that make it difficult to change directions. With about 80 percent of lifes most significant events taking place by age thirty-five, as thirtysomethings and beyond we largely either continue with, or correct for, the moves we made during our twentysomething years.

The deceptive irony is that our twentysomething years may not feel all that consequential. It is easy to imagine that lifes significant experiences begin with big moments and exciting encounters, but this is not how it happens.

Researchers in this same study found that most of the substantial and lasting eventsthose that led to career success, family fortune, personal bliss, or lack thereofdeveloped across days or weeks or months with little immediate dramatic effect. The importance of these experiences was not necessarily clear at the time but, in retrospect, the subjects recognized that these events had sharply defined their futures. To a great extent, our lives are decided by far-reaching twentysomething moments we may not realize are happening at all.

This book is about recognizing those defining twentysomething moments. Its about why your twenties matter, and how to make the most of them now.

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain

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

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and
Richard Wright of Pink Floyd, Time

Almost invariably, growth and development has whats called a critical period. Theres a particular period of maturation in which, with external stimulation of the appropriate kind, the capacity will pretty suddenly develop and mature. Before that and later than that, its either harder or impossible.

Noam Chomsky, linguist

W hen Kate started therapy, she had been waiting tables and livingand fightingwith her parents for more than a year. Her father called to schedule her first appointment, and both of them presumed that father-daughter issues would come quickly to the fore. But what most struck me about Kate was that her twentysomething years were wasting away. Having grown up in New York City, at age twenty-six and now living in Virginia, she still did not have a drivers license, despite the fact that this limited her employment opportunities and made her feel like a passenger in her own life. Not unrelated to this, Kate was often late to our appointments.

When Kate graduated from college, she had hoped to experience the expansiveness of the twentysomething years, something she was strongly encouraged to do by her parents. Her mother and father married just out of college because they wanted to go to Europe together and, in the early 1970s, this was not condoned by either of their families. They honeymooned in Italy and came back pregnant. Kates dad put his accounting degree to work while Kates mom got busy raising four kids, of whom Kate was the youngest. So far, Kate had spent her own twenties trying to make up for what her parents missed. She thought she was supposed to be having the time of her life but mostly she felt stressed and anxious. My twenties are paralyzing, she said. No one told me it would be this hard.

Kate filled her mind with twentysomething drama to distract herself from the real state of her life, and she seemed to want the same for her therapy hours. When she came to sessions, she kicked off her Toms, hiked up her jeans, and caught me up on the weekend. Our conversations often went multimedia as she pulled up e-mails and photos to show me, and texts chirped into our sessions with late-breaking news. Somewhere between the weekend updates, I found out the following: She thought she might like to work in fund-raising, and she hoped to figure out what she wanted to do by age thirty. Thirty is the new twenty, she said. This was my cue.

I am too passionate about the twenties to let Kate, or any other twentysomething, waste his or her time. As a clinical psychologist who specializes in adult development, I have seen countless twentysomethings spend too many years living without perspective. What is worse are the tears shed by thirtysomethings and fortysomethings because they are now paying a steep priceprofessionally, romantically, economically, reproductivelyfor a lack of vision in their twenties. I liked Kate and wanted to help her so I insisted she be on time for sessions. I interrupted stories about the latest hookup to ask about the status of her drivers license and her job search. Perhaps most important, Kate and I debated about what therapyand her twentieswas supposed to be about.

Kate wondered aloud whether she ought to spend a few years in therapy figuring out her relationship with her father or whether she should use that money and time on a Eurail pass to search for who she was. I voted for neither. 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.