Written after years of listening to people in their thirties and forties lament that they wasted their twenties, Meg Jay has written The Defining Decade: Why your twenties matter-and how to make the most of them now to argue that, unlike what everyone says, you shouldn’t waste your twenties. Instead, they are the foundational years of your adult life, and Jay focuses on three sections in particular: Work, Love, and Brain and the Body. With barely more than a year left in my twenties, I certainly haven’t wasted my twenties – I have a good job and I’m married – but I’m also putting off things like buying a house and having kids. And I still don’t really know what I want to do with my life. However, I thought the book could offer some valuable insight or, at least, I could recommend to my sister, who still has much of her twenties left. I’m going to focus on her section on work here, mostly because that’s the section that I connected to the most. However, the other sections are definitely worth reading – in Love, she offers many good suggestions on how to make the most of your dating life, regardless of how soon you want to marry. The last section focuses on fertility and making a broad timeline to make sure that you can do everything you want to in the amount of time you’ve left yourself.
Watching celebrities, media, and tv, one might think that someone in their twenties should be having the “time of her life.” However, Jay, a clinical psychologist focused on adult development, sees mostly twentysomethings (I’m using Jay’s word here) who find this decade to be “paralyzing” and “hard” (p. xiv). Unlike all earlier generations, twentysomethings now have an unprecedented opportunity to not go straight from school to marriage, kids and a nine-to-five job. And yet, with all this freedom comes an “unprecedented amount of uncertainty” (p. xxi). We end up lost, unsure what to do with our lives and often, before we realize it, the twenties are over and whole decade has been wasted. The first area in which the twenties are more important than we think is in our professional careers, which Jay separates into five separate components.
One of the first values of the twenties is that it’s an opportunity to develop identity capital. First described by Erik Erikson in 1950, identity capital is the personal assets (technical skills, communication skills, etc) that you bring to an employer. Spending your twenties in coffee shops or equivalent low-capital-building jobs “signal[s] to future employers a period of lostness” (p. 11). The twenties are also dangerous because we inherently spend most of our time with our strong ties – people who we know well and who are “too similar [to us] to provide more than sympathy” (p. 21). The problem is that most of our professional opportunities come through weak ties – people who we know, but not well.
Jay next tackles the idea of the unthought known, something that her clients already know – on some level – but haven’t admitted to either themselves or to others. Why does the idea remain unknown? It might be because her client just hasn’t realized what they want. However, there’s also a panic that comes with realizing that “my life is up to me.” By keeping the idea unknown, “not knowing what you want to do with your life is a defense against that terror” (p. 33).Once you have a plan, you have to act on it. As one of her clients says, “If I go for it and it fails, I will have spent it. That choice will be gone” (p. 40). How to find the unthought known? Ask yourself what you want to do if you don’t win the lottery (p. 37).
The last two aspects of work that Jay touches on are the influence of Facebook and the need for a customized life. Briefly, Facebook can be terrible for twentysomethings. It allows everyone to present a tailored version of them, so you often only see the happy side of their life. Furthermore, it keeps you posted on far more people than you would normally be able to track. It can feel like everyone is getting married, having a baby, or otherwise doing amazing things that you aren’t. In short, Facebook is a great way to feel inadequate about your life. Finally, for more and more twentysomethings, it’s more and more important to build a customized life. We don’t want a nine-to-five job; we want something unique. And the dread of landing a boring job prevents us from doing anything. However, while it’s easy to know what we don’t want, the challenge is really figuring out what we do want. Jay argues that in order to have a customized life, you need to start with standard parts (she uses a custom bike analogy here, which I actually think works really well).
Is it worth reading? For the most part, I’d say yes. Although I think she did a better job of explaining “why your twenties matter” than giving you concrete plans on how to get there without your own personal therapist, she brings up many ideas that are worth contemplating on your own. Although I didn’t get as much from this book as I was hoping, if you’re in your twenties, you can use her clients’ stories to look for reflections of yourself, which may be enough to trigger a more active approach to the rest of this important decade. If you’re beyond your twenties and still struggling to make a plan, the book is full of reasons to get on it.
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