From The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now
In the 21st-century, careers and lives don’t roll off an assembly line. We have to put the pieces together ourselves.
When we make choices, we open ourselves up to hard work and failure and heartbreak, so sometimes it feels easier to not to know, not to choose, and not to do. But it isn’t.
With all the attention paid to the urban tribe, however, many twentysomethings have limited themselves to huddling together with like-minded peers. Some are in almost constant contact with the same few people. But while the urban tribe helps us survive, it does not help us thrive. 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.
"I wish I had experimented—with work—in a way I feel I can’t right now at almost thirty. I felt a lot of internal pressure to figure it out, but all the thinking I did was really debilitating and unproductive."
“So, you’re the Outward Bound girl!” For years to come, even on residency interviews, I spent most of the time answering questions about what happened when kids ran away in the wilderness or whether it was safe to swim in a river with alligators ... Identities and careers are made not out of college majors and GPAs but out of a couple of door-opening pieces of identity capital.
“How are you free? You have free time during the day when most everyone you know is working. You’re living on the edge of poverty. You can’t do anything with that time.”
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 the things Helen wanted.
I told her I wasn’t so sure, and that an extended period of navel-gazing is usually counterproductive for twentysomethings.
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.
Uncertainty makes people anxious, and distraction is the twenty-first-century opiate of the masses. So twentysomethings like Kate are tempted, and even encouraged, to turn away and be twixters, to close their eyes and hope for the best.
...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.”
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 price...
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”