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.” (Location 68)
Then, in the span of one generation, came an enormous cultural shift. User-friendly birth control flooded the market and women flooded the workplace. By the new millennium, only about half of twentysomethings were married by age thirty and even fewer had children, making the twenties a time of newfound freedom. We began to hear that maybe college was too expensive and less necessary, yet graduate school was more necessary, and in either case there was time for “time off.” (Location 94)
Many twentysomethings assume life will come together quickly after thirty, and maybe it will. But it is still going to be a different life. We imagine that if nothing happens in our twenties then everything is still possible in our thirties. 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. (Location 168)
In sections titled “Work,” “Love,” and “The Brain and the Body,” we will learn about four separate—but interwoven—critical periods that unfold across the twentysomething years. In “Work,” we find out why twentysomething jobs are likely the most professionally and economically consequential we will ever have—even though they may not look so good. In “Love,” we will hear why our twentysomething relationship choices may be even more important than those at work. And in “The Brain and the Body,” we will learn how our still-developing twentysomething brains are wiring us to be the adults we will become just as our twentysomething bodies kick off our most fertile years. (Location 199)
WORK (Location 227)
Note: Elso fejezet
Identity capital is our collection of personal assets. It is the repertoire of individual resources that we assemble over time. These are the investments we make in ourselves, the things we do well enough, or long enough, that they become a part of who we are. Some identity capital goes on a résumé, such as degrees, jobs, test scores, and clubs. Other identity capital is more personal, such as how we speak, where we are from, how we solve problems, how we look. Identity capital is how we build ourselves—bit by bit, over time. Most important, identity capital is what we bring to the adult marketplace. It is the currency we use to metaphorically purchase jobs and relationships and other things we want. (Location 274)
was only about twenty-four, I had to tell one adjudicated (Location 313)
The Strength of Weak Ties (Location 423)
not all relationships—or ties—are created equal. Some are weak and some are strong, and the strength of a tie increases with time and experience. The more we have been around someone, the stronger the tie because, likely, we have shared experiences and confidences. In childhood, strong ties are family and best friends. In the twentysomething years, strong ties grow to include the urban tribe, roommates, partners, and other close friends. (Location 439)
Weak ties feel too different or, in some cases, literally too far away to be close friends. But that’s the point. Because they’re not just figures in an already ingrown cluster, weak ties give us access to something fresh. They know things and people that we don’t know. Information and opportunity spread farther and faster through weak ties than through close friends because weak ties have fewer overlapping contacts. Weak ties are like bridges you cannot see all the way across, so there is no telling where they might lead. (Location 454)
When I encourage twentysomethings to draw on the strength of weak ties, there is often a fair amount of resistance: “I hate networking” or “I want to get a job on my own” or “That’s not my style” are common reactions. I get it, but that doesn’t change the fact that, as we look for jobs or relationships or opportunities of any kind, it is the people we know the least well who will be the most transformative. New things almost always come from outside your inner circle. And twentysomethings who won’t use their weak ties fall behind twentysomethings like these, who have this to say: (Location 506)
We imagine that if people like us, then they do us favors because this is how it works in the urban tribe. But the Ben Franklin effect, and subsequent empirical studies, show it works the other way around with people we know less well. If weak ties do favors for us, they start to like us. Then they become even more likely to grant us additional favors in the future. Franklin decided that if he wanted to get someone on his side, he ought to ask for a favor. And he did. The Ben Franklin effect shows that, while attitudes influence behavior, behavior can also shape attitudes. If we do a favor for someone, we come to believe we like that person. This liking leads back to another favor, and so on. (Location 543)
“You know,” Ian continued, “it’s when you ask yourself what you would do with your life if you won the lottery. Then you know what you really want to do.” “That’s not the right question,” I countered. “That’s not about reality. The lottery question might get you thinking about what you would do if talent and money didn’t matter. But they do. The question twentysomethings need to ask themselves is what they would do with their lives if they didn’t win the lottery. What might you be able to do well enough to support the life you want? And what might you enjoy enough that you won’t mind working at it in some form or another for years to come?” (Location 650)
If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are. —Charles de Montesquieu, (Location 701)
But different is simple. Like the easiest way to explain black is to call it the opposite of white, often the first thing we know about ourselves is not what we are—it’s what we aren’t. We mark ourselves as not-this or not-that, the way Ian was quick to say he didn’t want to sit at the same desk all day. But self-definition cannot end there. An identity or a career cannot be built around what you don’t want. We have to shift from a negative identity, or a sense of what I’m not, to a positive one, or a sense of what I am. This takes courage. (Location 889)
When I asked what he would like me to say to his son, my client replied, “That you can’t pull some great career out of a hat in your thirties. You’ve got to start in your twenties.” (Location 910)
I asked Ian what a custom bike said about him, compared to a mass-produced one he could buy anywhere, one that might be even easier to maintain. He said the bike represented his feeling that he wanted to be the product of different parts, someone who cannot be defined by a label. Ian’s desire for a custom bike was a sincere reflection of what he wanted for himself. He wanted his life to be singular and complex—and great. But the fact that he was looking for a solution at a store said a lot about how his twenties were coming along. Ian had the right idea but found it easier to customize a bike than a life. (Location 924)
Ian was right. This is how it’s done. This is how it starts. Claiming a career or getting a good job isn’t the end; it’s the beginning. And, then, there is still a lot more to know and a lot more to do. (Location 1009)
LOVE (Location 1011)
others pair with as many people as they can. Pundits (Location 1028)
In my experience, the Age Thirty Deadline is more of an Age Thirty Bait and Switch. Everything that was OK at twenty-nine suddenly feels awful and, in an instant, we feel behind. Almost overnight, commitment changes from being something for later to being something for yesterday. Marriage goes from being something we’ll worry about at thirty to being something we want at thirty. When, then, is the time to really think about partnership? This sudden shift can lead to all kinds of trouble. (Location 1095)
resilient people are usually very likeable. For years, she (Location 1186)
Living together is a good test for marriage. This is a common misperception. Cohabitation in the United States has increased more than 1,500 percent in the past fifty years. In 1960, about 500,000 unmarried couples lived together. Now, the number is almost 8,000,000. (Location 1283)
In a representative nationwide survey, nearly half of twentysomethings agreed with the statement “You would only marry someone if he or she agreed to live together with you first, so that you could find out whether you really got along.” About two-thirds of twentysomethings believe that moving in together before marriage is a good way to avoid divorce. (Location 1289)
But couples who “live together first” are actually less satisfied with their marriages and more likely to divorce than couples who do not. This is what sociologists call the cohabitation effect. (Location 1294)
It is the couples who live together before an engagement who are more likely to experience poorer communication, lower levels of commitment to the relationship, and greater marital instability down the road. (Location 1337)
Jennifer’s reference to quicksand didn’t surprise me. Sliding into cohabitation wouldn’t be a problem if sliding out were as easy. It isn’t. Too often, twentysomethings enter into what they imagine will be low-cost, low-risk living situations only to find themselves unable to get out months or years later. It’s like signing up for a credit card with 0 percent interest for the first year. (Location 1352)
I am not for or against living together, but I am for twentysomethings knowing that, far from safeguarding against divorce, moving in with someone increases your chances of locking in on someone, whether he or she is right for you or not. (Location 1398)
There are also other ways to test a relationship besides moving in, including doing a wider variety of activities together than dating and sex. There are other ways to figure out whether you and your partner are in love, or even in like. (Location 1403)
Twentysomething women and men who are dating down—or working down, for that matter—usually have untold, or at least unedited, stories. These stories originated in old conversations and experiences and, so, they change only through new conversations and new experiences. (Location 1538)
Traveling in a third-world country is the closest thing there is to being married and raising kids. You have glorious hikes and perfect days on the beach. You go on adventures you would never try, or enjoy, alone. But you also can’t get away from each other. Everything is unfamiliar. (Location 1595)
Money is tight or you get robbed. Someone gets sick or sunburned. You get bored. It is harder than you expected, but you are glad you didn’t just sit home. (Location 1597)
Eli and his girlfriend needed to be “in like.” By this I mean two things: being alike in ways that matter and genuinely liking who the other person is. Often these go hand in hand. That is because the more similar two people are, the more they are able to understand each other. Each appreciates how the other acts and how he or she goes about the day, and this forestalls an incredible amount of friction. Two people who are similar are going to have the same reactions to a rainy day, a new car, a long vacation, an anniversary, a Sunday morning, and a big party. (Location 1604)
addiction disciplined, efficient, organized, responsible, dutiful, self-directed, (Location 1661)
be high or low or in the middle of the dimensions of the Big Five, it is often the case that we like or dislike people because of the way their extremes compare to our own. (Location 1673)
Note: Big 5 konyvjelzozve keresd meg
Sometimes dating or married couples decide to split because things change—someone cheated or had to move—but, more often, people split up because things don’t change. It is far more common to hear couples say that, in retrospect, the differences were there all along. (Location 1687)
Neuroticism, or the tendency to be anxious, stressed, critical, and moody, is far more predictive of relationship unhappiness and dissolution than is personality dissimilarity. While personality similarity can help the years run smoothly, any two people will be different in some way or another. How a person responds to these differences can be more important than the differences themselves. To a person who runs high in Neuroticism, differences are seen in a negative light. Anxiety and judgments about these differences then lead to criticism and contempt, two leading relationship killers. (Location 1720)
“I think it’s easy to surround yourself with friends who are just like you. As a group, you may decide everyone else is doing it wrong. Friends can form a culture of criticism where differences are seen as deficiencies.” (Location 1752)
“Then how can I ever choose someone?” “The same way you make any decision. You weigh the evidence and you listen to yourself. The trick for you is going to be to listen to what matters, not to every single thing that makes you dissatisfied or anxious.” (Location 1765)
THE BRAIN AND THE BODY (Location 1793)
we now know that the frontal lobe does not fully mature until sometime between the ages of twenty and thirty. In our twenties, the pleasure-seeking, emotional brain is ready to go while the forward-thinking (Location 1845)
The frontal lobe doesn’t just allow us to coolly solve the problem of what exactly we should do with our lives. Adult dilemmas—which job to take, where to live, whom to partner with, or when to start a family—don’t have right answers. (Location 1854)
Forward thinking doesn’t just come with age. It comes with practice and experience. That’s why some twenty-two-year-olds are incredibly self-possessed, future-oriented people who already know how to face the unknown, while some thirty-four-year-olds still have brains that run the other way. To make sense of how people can develop so differently, it helps to know the rest of the story of Phineas Gage. (Location 1860)
The post-twentysomething brain is still plastic, of course, but the opportunity is that never again in our lifetime will the brain offer up countless new connections and see what we make of them. Never again will we be so quick to learn new things. Never again will it be so easy to become the people we hope to be. The risk is that we may not act now. (Location 1906)
Twentysomethings who use their brains by engaging with good jobs and real relationships are learning the language of adulthood just when their brains are primed to learn it. In the chapters ahead, we will see how they learn to calm themselves down at work and in love, and this brings mastery and success. (Location 1911)
The twenties are, indeed, the time to get busy. It’s forward thinking for an uncertain age. (Location 1918)
Twentysomethings and their active amygdalae often want to change their feelings by changing their jobs. They quit work that becomes messy or unpleasant, or they storm in and complain to their bosses’ bosses, not realizing that their bosses’ bosses’ amygdalae are unlikely to be as worked up as their own. (Location 2033)
When Danielle called her mother, she was doing what psychologists call “borrowing an ego.” She was reaching out in a moment of need and letting someone else’s frontal lobe do the work. We all need to do that sometimes, but if we externalize our distress too much, we don’t learn to handle bad days on our own. We don’t practice soothing ourselves just when our brains are in the best position to pick up new skills. We don’t learn how to calm ourselves down, and this in and of itself undermines confidence. (Location 2070)
With every week, work was a bit less dramatic. When things went wrong, which they still did all the time, Danielle didn’t feel as judged. She realized that there was a difference between having a feeling and acting on it. Now when she felt anxious or incompetent, she calmed herself with what had gone well. (Location 2178)
Some declines in fertility begin at about thirty and at thirty-five, a woman’s ability to become pregnant and carry a baby to term drops considerably. At forty, fertility plummets. This is because of two age-related changes that every woman can expect across her thirties and forties: Egg quality decreases and the endocrine system, which regulates hormones and tells the body how to proceed with a pregnancy, becomes less effective. With these changes, pregnancy becomes less likely and miscarriage becomes more likely. Lower-quality eggs have trouble implanting and maturing. Even good eggs can be derailed by hormones gone awry. (Location 2378)
Fertility may seem like a women’s issue, but as more couples have their first child in their thirties and forties, timing affects everybody. Not included in the statistics above are the countless men and women, straight and gay, who did have children in their thirties and forties but who were surprised by how difficult the process turned out to be. What fertility specialists don’t hear about—and psychologists do—is how modern marriages and partnerships are affected by later childbearing and child rearing. (Location 2419)
There is something profoundly sad about seeing an eighty-year-old grandmother come to the hospital to meet a grandchild. It is crushing to realize there won’t be many sunny days at the lake with Grandpa or holidays spent in Grandma’s loving presence. It feels almost wrong to look at our children and wonder how long they will have their grandparents in their lives—or even how long they will have us. (Location 2443)
We would rather have $100 this month than $150 next month. We choose the chocolate cake and the new outfit now and face the gym and the credit card bill later. This isn’t a twentysomething tendency. It’s a human tendency, one that underpins addiction, procrastination, health, oil consumption, and, yes, saving for retirement. It is often difficult to imagine and give weight to things that will happen down the line. (Location 2506)
At the same time, twentysomething exploits are met with more enthusiastic clichés, such as “You’re only young once” or “Have fun while you can.” These messages encourage risk-taking and what one researcher calls “now-or-never behaviors” that don’t actually make us happy for long: partying, multiple sex partners, blowing off responsibilities, being lazy, not having a real job. Again and again, twentysomethings hear they have infinite time for the dreaded adult things but so little time for the purportedly good stuff. This makes living in the present easy. It’s connecting the present with the future that takes work. (Location 2512)
Many cultures make use of memento mori to remind us of our mortality, the skeletons and dying flowers often represented in art or on display in the marketplace. In past centuries, it was common to sit for portraits while holding a dead rose or to carry a watch shaped like a skull in order to signify time running out. In my practice, I notice that many twentysomethings—especially those who surround themselves with other twentysomethings—have trouble anticipating life. They need memento vivi—or ways to remember they are going to live. They need something to remind them that life is going to continue on past their twenties, and that it might even be great. (Location 2529)
“There is a big difference between having a life in your thirties and starting a life in your thirties.” (Location 2557)
Rachel had heard that “people do things later than they used to,” but what this really meant for her twenties was unclear. Once she could envision what she wanted her thirtysomething life to look like, what to do with the twentysomething years became more urgent and more defined. A timeline may not be a virtual reality chamber, but it can help our brains see time for what it really is: limited. It can give us a reason to get up in the morning and get going. (Location 2593)
Most twentysomethings can’t write the last sentence of their lives, but when pressed, they usually can identify things they want in their thirties or forties or sixties—or things they don’t want—and work backward from there. This is how you have your own multigenerational epic with a happy ending. This is how you live your life in real time. (Location 2614)
It is almost a relief to imagine that these years aren’t real, that twentysomething jobs and relationships don’t count. But a career spent studying adult development tells me this is far from true. And years of listening closely to clients and students tells me that, deep down, twentysomethings want to be taken seriously, and they want their lives to be taken seriously. They want to know that what they do matters—and it does. (Location 2630)
He looked at me and said, “You haven’t decided yet.” At the time, I thought this man was not a particularly good backcountry ranger. Now I have to laugh. He was telling me what I say to my twentysomething clients every day, what this book has been all about. The future isn’t written in the stars. There are no guarantees. So claim your adulthood. Be intentional. Get to work. Pick your family. Do the math. Make your own certainty. Don’t be defined by what you didn’t know or didn’t do. You are deciding your life right now. (Location 2644)