-
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.
记得见我第一位心理咨询顾客时，
我才
20
多岁。
当时我是
Be
rkeley
临床
心理学
在读博士生。
我的第一位顾客是名叫
Alex
的女性
，
26
岁。
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.
< br>第一次见面
Alex
穿着牛仔裤和宽松上衣走进来，她一
下子栽进我办公室的沙发上，踢掉脚
上的平底鞋，
跟我说她想谈
谈男生的问题。
当时我听到这个之后松了一口气。
因为我同学的
第一个顾客是纵火犯，
而我的顾客却是一个
20
出头想谈谈男生的女孩。
我觉得我可以搞定。
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.
但是我没有搞定。
Alex
不断地讲有趣的事
情，而我只能简单地点头认同她所说的，很自然
地就陷入了附和的状态。
later, marriage
happened later, kids happened later, even death
happened later. Twentysomethings
like
Alex and I had nothing but time.
Alex
说：
“30
岁是一个新的
< br>20
岁
”
。没错，我告诉她
“
你是对的
”
。工
作还早，结婚还早，生
孩子还早，甚至死亡也早着呢。像
Ale
x
和我这样
20
多岁的人，什么都没有
但时间多的是。
But before long, my
supervisor pushed me to push Alex about her love
life. I pushed back. I said,
knucklehead
, but
it's not like she's going to marry
the
guy.
best time to work on Alex's
marriage is before she has one.
但不久之后，我的导师就要我向
Alex
的感情生活施
压。我反驳说：
“
当然她现在正在和别人
交往，她现在和一个傻瓜男生睡觉，但看样子她不会和他结婚的。
”
< br>
而我的导师说：
“
不着
急，她也许会和下一个结婚。但修复
Alex
婚姻的最好时期是她还没拥有婚姻的时期。
”
That's what psychologists call an
new 20. Yes, people settle down later
than they used to, but that didn't make Alex's 20s
a
developmental downtime.
这就
是
心理学
家说的
“
顿悟时刻
”
。
正是那个时候我意识
到，
30
岁不是一个新的
20
岁。
的确，
和以前的人相比，
< br>现在人们更晚才安定下来，
但是这不代表
Alex
就能长期处于
20
多岁的状
< br>态。
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.
更晚安定下来，
应该使
Alex
的
20
多岁成为发展的黄金时段，
而
我们却坐在那里忽视这个发
展的时机。从那时起我意识到这种善意的忽视确实是个问题，
它不仅给
Alex
本身和她的感
情生活
带来不良后果，而且影响到处
20
多岁的人的事业、家庭和未来
。
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.
现在在美国，
20
多岁的人有五千万，也就是
15%
的人口，或者可以说所有人口，因为所有
成年人都要经历他们的
20
多岁。
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.
如果你现在
20
多岁，请举手。我很想看到有
20
多岁的人在这里。哦，很好。如果你和
20
多岁的人一起工作，
你喜欢
20
多岁的
人，
你因为
20
多岁的人辗转难眠，我
想看到你们。
很
棒，看来
20
多岁的人确实很受重视。
So I
specialize in twentysomethings
bec
ause 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.
因此我专门研究
20
多岁的人，
因为我坚信这五千万的
20
多岁的人，
每一个人都应该去了解
那些
心理学
家、社会学家、神经学家和生育专家已经知道的事实：你的
20
多岁是极简单却
极具变化的时期之一。你
20
多岁的时光决定了你的事业、爱情、幸福甚至整个世界。<
/p>
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
这不是我的看法。这些是事实。我们知道
80%
决定你生活
的时刻发生在
35
岁之前。这就意
味着
你生活的重要决定、经历和突然的领悟，有八成是在你
30
多岁
之前发生的。
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.
那些超过
40
岁的朋友不要惊慌，
我想这群人会没事的。
我们
知道职业生涯的前
10
年对你将
来的收
入有重大影响。我们知道到了
30
岁的时候，超过半数的美国人
会结婚或者和未来的
另一半同居或者约会。
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.
我们知道人在
< br>20
多岁的时候大脑停止第二次也是最后一次重组，以适应成年世界的快速发
育阶段。这就意味着不管你想怎样改变自己，现在就是时间改变了。我们知道在
20
多岁的
时候，性格的改变多于生命中任何时期。
我们也知道女性的最佳生育时期在
28
岁的时候达
到顶峰，
35
岁之后生育变得困难。
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
bec
ome.
所以你的
20
多岁正是了解你自身和选择的时期。
当我们想
到孩童的成长时，
我们都知道
1-5
岁
是大脑学习语言和感知的重要时期。
这个时期，
日常的普通生活
都会对你的未来道路影响
巨大。
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.
但是我们却很
少听到成年发展期，
而我们的
20
多岁
正是成年发展期的关键。
但是
20
多岁
的
人却听不到这些，报纸讨论的只是成年年龄界线的变更。
Researchers call the 20s an extended
adolescence
. Journalists
coin silly nicknames for
twentysomethings like
actually the defining decade of
adulthood.
研究者称
20
多岁是延长的青春期。
记者就引用傻傻的外号称呼
20
多岁的人，
比如
“twixters”
(twenty-mixters)
和
“kidults”(kid
-adults)
。
这是真的。作为一种文化，我们的忽视的正是对成
年起到决定性作用的十年（从
20
岁到
30
岁）。
Leonard
Bernstein said that to achieve
gre
at 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,
person of his
urgency and ambition, and absolutely nothing
happens.
雷昂纳德
·
伯恩斯
坦说过：要想取得成就，你需要一个计划和紧迫的时间。这是大实话啊！
所以当你拍着一
个
20
多岁的人的脑袋，跟他说，
“<
/p>
你有额外的
10
年去开始你的生活
”
，
你觉
得这改变了
什么？什么都没改变。
你只是夺走了那个人的紧迫感和雄心壮志，
绝对没有改变
什么。
And
then every day, smart, interesting
twentysomethings like you or like your sons and
daughters
come into my office and say
things like this:
relationship doesn't
count. I'm just killing time.
started on
a career by the time I'm 30, I'll be
fine.
然后每天，那些聪明有趣的
20
多岁的人就像你们和你们的儿子女儿一样，走入我的办公室
开始说：
“
我知道我的男朋友对我不够好，
< br>但是我们的关系不算数。
我只是在消磨时光而已。
”
或者说
“
每个人都告诉我只要能在
30
岁的时候开始我的事业，这就足够了。
”<
/p>
But then it starts to sound
like this:
myself. I had a better
ré
sumé
the day after I
graduated from college.
like this:
fun, but then sometime around 30 it was
like the music turned off and everybody started
sitting
down.
但是实际听上去却是：
“
我马上就要三十了，却根本就没有东西展示。我只是在大学毕业时
有过一份最漂亮的简历。
”
或是这样：<
/p>
“
我
20
多岁时
的约会就像找凳子。
每个人都绕着凳子
跑，随便玩一玩，但是快
30
的时候就像音乐停止了，所有人开始坐下。
I didn't want to be the only one
left standing up, so sometimes I think I married
my husband
bec
ause he was
the closest chair to me at 30.
that.
Okay, now that sounds a little flip, but make no
mistake, the stakes are very high.
我不想成为那唯一站着的人，所以有时候我会想我和我丈夫之所以会结婚，是因为在我
30
岁的时候，他是当时离我最近的那张凳子。在场的
< br>20
多岁的人呐，千万不要这样做。这个
做法听起来有点
轻率，但是不要犯错，因为风险很高。