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Why 30 is not the new 20
Meg Jay
About
the Talk
Clinical
psychologist Meg Jay has a bold message for
twentysomethings:
Contrary to popular
belief, your 20s are not a throwaway decade. In
this
provocative talk, Jay says that
just because marriage, work and kids are
happening later in life, doesn’t mean
you can’t start planning now. She
gives
3 pieces of advice for how twentysomethings can
re-claim
adulthood in the defining
decade of their lives.
About the Speaker
In her book
twentysomethings
feel trivialized during what is actually the most
transformative
—
and defining
—
period of our
adult lives.
About the
Transcript
When I was in my
20s, I saw my very first psychotherapy client. I
was a
Ph.D. student in clinical
psychology at Berkeley. She was a 26-year-old
woman named Alex. Now Alex walked into
her first session wearing
jeans and a
big slouchy top, and she dropped onto the couch in
my office
and kicked off her flats and
told me she was there to talk about guy
problems. Now when I heard this, I was
so relieved. My classmate got an
arsonist for her first client.
(Laughter) And I got a twentysomething who
wanted to talk about boys. This I
thought I could handle.
But I didn't handle it. With the funny
stories that Alex would bring to
session, it was easy for me just to nod
my head while we kicked the can
down
the road.
could tell, she was right.
Work happened later, marriage happened later,
kids happened later, even death
happened later. Twentysomethings like
Alex and I had nothing but time.
But before long, my
supervisor pushed me to push Alex about her love
life. I pushed back.
I said,
it's not like she's
going to marry the guy.
And
then my supervisor said,
Besides, the
best time to work on Alex's marriage is before she
has one.
That's what
psychologists call an
realized, 30 is
not the new 20. Yes, people settle down later than
they
used to, but that didn't make
Alex's 20s a developmental downtime. That
made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet
spot, and we were sitting there
blowing
it. That was when I realized that this sort of
benign neglect was a
real problem, and
it had real consequences, not just for Alex and
her love
life but for the careers and
the families and the futures of
twentysomethings everywhere.
There are 50 million
twentysomethings in the United States right now.
We're talking about 15 percent of the
population, or 100 percent if you
consider that no one's getting through
adulthood without going through
their
20s first.
Raise your hand
if you're in your 20s. I really want to see some
twentysomethings here. Oh, yay! Y'all's
awesome. If you work with
twentysomethings, you love a
twentysomething, you're losing sleep over
twentysomethings, I want to see
—
Okay. Awesome,
twentysomethings
really matter.
So I specialize in
twentysomethings because I believe that every
single
one of those 50 million
twentysomethings deserves to know what
psychologists, sociologists,
neurologists and fertility specialists already
know: that claiming your 20s is one of
the simplest, yet most
transformative,
things you can do for work, for love, for your
happiness,
maybe even for the world.
This is not my opinion.
These are the facts. We know that 80 percent of
life's most defining moments take place
by age 35. That means that eight
out of
10 of the decisions and experiences and
your life what it is will have happened
by your mid-30s. People who are
over
40, don't panic. This crowd is going to be fine, I
think. We know that
the first 10 years
of a career has an exponential impact on how much
money you're going to earn. We know
that more than half of Americans
are
married or are living with or dating their future
partner by 30. We
know that the brain
caps off its second and last growth spurt in your
20s
as it rewires itself for adulthood,
which means that whatever it is you
want to change about yourself, now is
the time to change it. We know
that
personality changes more during your 20s than at
any other time in
life, and we know
that female fertility peaks at age 28, and things
get
tricky after age 35. So your 20s
are the time to educate yourself about
your body and your options.
So when we think about child
development, we all know that the first five
years are a critical period for
language and attachment in the brain. It's a
time when your ordinary, day-to-day
life has an inordinate impact on who
you will become. But what we hear less
about is that there's such a thing
as
adult development, and our 20s are that critical
period of adult
development.
But this isn't what
twentysomethings are hearing. Newspapers talk
about
the changing timetable of
adulthood. Researchers call the 20s an extended
adolescence. Journalists coin silly
nicknames for twentysomethings like
actually the defining decade
of adulthood.
Leonard
Bernstein said that to achieve great things, you
need a plan and
not quite enough time.
Isn't that true? So what do you think happens
when you pat a twentysomething on the
head and you say,
extra years to start
your life
person of his urgency and
ambition, and absolutely nothing happens.
And then every day, smart,
interesting twentysomethings like you or like
your sons and daughters come into my
office and say things like this:
know
my boyfriend's no good for me, but this
relationship doesn't count.
I'm just
killing time.
started on a career by the
time I'm 30, I'll be fine.