Baby Boomers and the generations preceding them often started their adult lives around age 20, getting married, starting families, establishing careers, and building a home life. Today’s generations of young adults start their lives much later, believing that they don’t need to start making serious decisions until age thirty, and that their twenties are a time for unencumbered fun.
However, the truth is that a good career and a good relationship don’t magically appear at age thirty. To ensure they will happen for you in your thirties and forties, when you finally feel ready for them, you need to prepare for them in your twenties.
Meg Jay is a clinical psychologist who specializes in helping twenty-somethings figure out their lives. In The Defining Decade, she offers insights to help you take control of your life and pave the way for future happiness in both work and love. Your decisions today can greatly affect your options tomorrow, and she encourages all twenty-somethings to take these years seriously—even while having fun. She walks the reader through how to find success in work and in love, and discusses why twenty-somethings are uniquely positioned to establish their adulthood because of both timing and biology.
To end up in a career you’re happy with down the road, you need to make difficult choices now—and the sooner you start, the better. Without purposeful planning, it’s easy to live day-by-day and put off the difficult tasks of making meaningful career choices. The following guidelines explore ways you can begin to craft a fulfilling work life.
An “identity crisis” is a period of youthful exploration during which a person can collect experiences and try out different paths in life without risk or obligation. It’s an important step toward developing an identity, and it has two main elements: reflection, through which you are thoughtful and aware of your life, and action, through which you collect experiences that help you learn about yourself. This collection of experiences becomes your “identity capital.”
Your identity capital is the collection of things you’ve done long enough or well enough that they become part of who you are. It’s the intangible currency we use to obtain jobs and relationships, and it includes your schools, clubs, jobs, hobbies, degrees, and experiences.
When having an identity crisis, many people focus more on the reflection piece than the action part, but it’s those who strike a good balance between the two who’ll end up with stronger identities and be more satisfied with their lives: better able to manage stress, more in control of their future, and find themselves following more original, unique paths. Seek out opportunities that will give you meaningful experiences you can learn from. Volunteer with a charity, work as an intern in an industry you’re interested in, or take classes in something you might like to pursue.
Your identity, and your identity capital, is determined in large part by the people in your life. Though you may feel most comfortable around people you have strong ties with, it’s your weak ties that are most likely to actually help you move forward in your pursuits. Because those you share strong ties with are so similar to you, they have nothing new to add to your journeys, either in work or love. People with whom you have weak ties, though, can give you access to information and people you don’t otherwise know.
One of the best ways to begin the process of establishing an adult life is to reach out to those weak ties for information and possible opportunities. A great way to approach a weak tie is to ask her for a small, interesting, specific, and easy-to-accomplish favor.
When approaching someone for a favor, whether it be a letter of recommendation, an introduction, or an informational interview, follow a few guidelines:
As a child, you’ve probably been told you can do “anything you want” with your life. In truth, your options are limited. They are determined by your past—who you are, where you’ve come from, and what identity capital you have—and your vision of the future—where you ultimately want to be.
This is not a bad thing. In the face of excessive options, it can feel safer not to make any decision, so that you don’t risk missing out on something better. The best way to move beyond decision-making paralysis is to think honestly about what options are available to you:
Making yourself aware of your true options is the first step towards setting realistic, workable goals: the building blocks of future happiness.
In your twenties, you’ll likely get significant pressure from other people as to what you should do with these years. Instead of getting caught up in what others think you should do, focus on setting realistic, workable goals that make sense for you. Then move toward achieving them in realistic steps.
When creating your goals, keep in mind that a fulfilling adult life has three essential elements:
Start with whichever element you are certain of, or whichever you know you have a specific goal regarding. From there, create goals addressing the other areas that can accommodate your first priority.
Many twenty-somethings resist pursuing a career because they feel doing so would mean giving up their uniqueness; working on a career is conventional and boring, right? However, if you don’t commit to something, your life is far more likely to end up unexceptional and unoriginal.
Just because you are pursuing a career doesn’t mean you are fated to be unoriginal. Treat the process as you would building a custom-made bike: the parts might be common, but the result is an expression of you alone. Collect your own experiences and cobble together a path that is uniquely suited to you.
When you have a resumé with lots of educational credits but little practical experience, it can be difficult to stand out: How do you leverage yourself when you don’t have much leverage? Fortunately, you can solve this problem with a good story.
A good story is a narrative about your interests and talents that shows interviewers a link between your past, present, and future: what you did before, what you want to do now, and what skills you have to get you there. Interviewers know that a person’s goals for the future will change and they don’t expect you to have an exact, definite plan. But they do want to know you have some workable ideas.
We get much less information and training on how to find a long-term partner than we do on how to find a career. And yet, choosing a marriage partner arguably has a more lasting effect on your long-term happiness. Giving the topic serious thought now, in your twenties, will decrease the chances you’ll have to settle later. The following sections are some guidelines that can help you approach the subject mindfully.
When you date down, you date people you’ve outgrown in maturity, experience, and insight, and in doing so, you prevent yourself from finding a person you have a more meaningful connection with. A person often dates down when her identity stories reflect difficulties from her past: Someone who was neglected as a child or bullied as a teen often harbors negative beliefs about herself that cause her to make poor decisions as an adult.
Fortunately, you can change the stories you tell yourself about yourself. Listen carefully to your identity stories and recognize which parts of them come from other people’s judgments, evaluations, and advice. Examine those elements and decide which ones you can disregard. Then find a new story to take its place. If you’ve been raised by emotionally abusive parents, and now find yourself having serial one-night stands, look at who you are now and what you’ve accomplished, and focus on where those traits can lead you.
Relationships are far more likely to be successful if the two people involved are fairly similar in personality. Personality is the overall way you interact with and react to the world: your outlook. It’s not about the experiences you’ve had but how you’ve handled them. It’s not about what you like but why you like it.
The “Big Five” personality model outlines five major personality traits that a person can have. A person has each of these characteristics in either low, medium, or high levels. They are:
There’s no “right” or “wrong” personality on any of these scales, but we are often more compatible with people who lie somewhat near us.
Many young adults think that living with a partner before marriage will allow them to “try out” a marriage before committing and will result in a stronger union. Unfortunately, the statistics don’t back this up: Couples who live together are actually more likely to divorce down the road than those who do not.
The effect seems to be a result of the fact that when people cohabitate, they often end up passively and reactively sliding toward a marriage, rather than proactively deciding on one. This can result in two people getting married for reasons like sunk costs rather than because they are actually right for each other.
Interestingly, the cohabitation effect does not hold for couples who move in together after becoming engaged, most likely because they’ve consciously chosen the marriage rather than slid into it. If you are considering moving in with your partner before marriage, get clear about their long-term goals and commitment level before you move in and keep an eye on the costs of leaving. Make sure the constraints keeping you in the relationship don’t get so burdensome that you would be unable to walk away.
When choosing a life partner, it is easy to forget that the decision involves more than just the two of you; it involves a future family that includes your partner’s family as well as the children you create. The family you create and adopt with your partner will define your life in the decades ahead.
Of course, you shouldn’t settle down with a partner just because you love her parents and siblings. However, you should give your situation serious thought if you are considering settling down with someone from a family you don’t feel comfortable in. Marrying into a family you don’t fit into will affect your happiness down the road. It may also reflect values in your partner you’ve overlooked or convinced yourself not to worry about: emotional distance, for example. Examine these values closely.
This is, again, not to say that you should reject someone based only on her family. But her family must factor into the decision.
Young adults today are putting off marriage not only because of the societal expectation to but also because of a fear of failure. People believe waiting until they are more mature and settled in their careers will prevent them from marrying someone they’ll later grow apart from.
However, delayed marriage is not the protective element against divorce that people imagine it to be. Although marriages between very young partners (like teens) have high rates of divorce, after age 25 the divorce rate stabilizes at around 40 percent. And putting off marriage creates other difficulties and risks:
In your twenties, your brain and body are developing in remarkable ways specifically designed by evolution to prepare you for the rest of your adulthood. This process is unique to this period of your life, and it won’t continue as you age.
Understanding the opportunities and limits of your brain and your body during this decade can help you better anticipate and plan for the future. Some of the steps involved in this process are detailed in the following sections.
During your twenties, your brain undergoes an explosion of neuron development, designed to allow you to master new skills that will help you in your adulthood. This is important because the skills you’ll need to navigate your adulthood are completely different from those you needed in school, which was a structured environment with measurable outcomes and well-defined paths to success.
Twenty-somethings often have a difficult time regulating their emotional responses to interactions with others, at work or in their personal lives. While emotional distress can teach you valuable lessons that you can apply to future situations, if it’s constant, it can lead to depression, anxiety, and a general sense of being out of control.
To get control of your amygdala, reevaluate events by focusing on the facts, instead of the emotions. Examine your fears closely. The consequences you are afraid of are unlikely to be as severe as your emotions are telling you they are. For example, you are unlikely to be fired for small mistakes, and even if you are, you are unlikely to end up in a dead-end job for the rest of your life as a result.
Focusing on the facts of a situation rather than your emotional response to it can lessen, or even prevent, negative feelings from developing.
Real confidence doesn’t come from ignoring your anxiety or from listening to friends and family tell you you’re wonderful. Real confidence comes from the mastery of skills. You will feel authentically confident only when you’ve overcome challenges and accumulated successes.
To become someone who regularly masters skills, you first need to cultivate a “growth mindset” instead of a “fixed mindset.” People with a fixed mindset see their own skills and talents as all-or-nothing propositions: They either have it or they don’t. They’re smart or they’re stupid. People with a growth mindset believe that their own skills and talents are in a constant state of change, and can be improved with practice and knowledge.
You then need to devote about 10,000 hours to learning your skill. Research shows that the best predictor of a person’s success is not innate talent but instead, the amount of time she invests in the endeavor, and consistently, across all kinds of industries from medicine to music, mastery of a skill comes after about 10,000 hours of dedicated practice.
Sometimes a person will try to find a sense of positivity by getting lost in her past—examining her upbringing as a child of divorce or her difficulties in high school, for example. This person might hope that by coming to terms with her past, she can adopt a happier outlook on life that will propel her into adulthood.
However, the best way to break the patterns of the past and cultivate a happy outlook is not through reflection but through action. Actively invest in your adulthood by pursuing opportunities, working toward goals, and achieving small successes along the way, and you’ll find yourself in a better mental space.
Although society may tell you that there will be no great consequences of delaying the start of your family, statistics say otherwise. Putting off starting a family greatly increases the chances of running into fertility issues and increases the likelihood, and the cost, of needing fertility treatments.
Further, even when successful, having kids late has other implications for your family life. It can put stress on a new marriage or a blossoming career, and it might clash with additional caretaking responsibilities you may have for your own parents.
Additionally, as you get older, your priorities are going to change. When you’re forty or fifty, you may very well wish to be able to trade the years you spent on trivial activities in your twenties for more years with your kids—or eventually, with their kids.
In sum, if you think having children may one day be important to you, plan for it in your twenties when you are still in control of the process.
In your twenties, you have what feels like an infinite amount of time with abstract projects like “start a family” and “have a career” but no clear deadlines. It can be all too easy to live in the present and forget to plan for the future. The present feels real; the future feels far away and hypothetical.
But putting off planning carries great risks. The attitude that life-begins-at-thirty might lead you to postpone getting started on things like grad school or relationships, and might then lead to a stressful thirties decade in which you need to do everything at once: go to school while planning a marriage, or graduate and enter the workforce while pregnant.
To start your future-planning, make a timeline. Begin with the end. Think of a goal you’d like and place it on your timeline. Do you want to have your first child by 35? Is it important to you that you’re not working at a coffee shop at age 30?
Work backwards from there. If you want to start a family in your early thirties, what does that mean for your plans to go to law school? Will you be comfortable doing both at the same time? When you write things down on paper, they become more real to you, and you’ll be able to better judge how these events might overlap. You’ll then be more in control of purposefully spacing them out.
As you enter your adult life, you become entirely responsible for your own choices. You no longer have another adult presence figuring out things for you—it’s up to you now to figure out your life.
There’s no magic formula and there are no right or wrong answers on what kind of a life you should live. But there are right and wrong ways to go about establishing that life. Happiness as an older adult starts with the goals you set as a younger adult. It continues to develop as you consciously and intentionally move towards those goals.
Don’t try to avoid the years ahead—they’re coming whether you’re ready or not. Invest in them now, when it can still make a meaningful difference.
Baby Boomers and the generations preceding them often started their adult lives around age 20 by getting married, starting families, establishing careers, and building a home life. The subsequent generations brought with them enormous cultural changes. As birth control became common and women went to work in much greater numbers, people began to put off marriage. Then, a cultural fascination with the youthfulness of the twenties, along with a misunderstanding of the process of “finding oneself,” encouraged people to put off starting a meaningful career.
People began to think of their twenties as a “free period” between childhood and adulthood, where choices, or the lack thereof, have no lasting impact on a person’s long-term happiness. The idea that “thirty-is-the-new-twenty” became popular, convincing generations of young adults that they don’t need to start making serious decisions until age thirty, and that their twenties are a time for unencumbered fun.
Unfortunately, this idea is a myth, and its widespread acceptance has led generations of young adults to trivialize and squander their twenties, which, it turns out, is a critical decade for establishing future success and happiness both professionally and personally. As a result, we are now seeing many twenty-somethings who feel lost, as well as thirty- and forty-somethings who regret the time they wasted and now feel left behind.
The truth is, a good career and a good relationship don’t magically appear at age thirty. To ensure they will happen for you in your thirties and forties, when you finally feel ready for them, you need to set the groundwork in your twenties.
Meg Jay is a clinical psychologist who specializes in helping twenty-somethings figure out their lives. In The Defining Decade, she offers insights to help you take control of your life and pave the way for future happiness in both work and love. Your decisions today can greatly affect your options tomorrow, and she encourages all twenty-somethings to take these years seriously—even while having fun. She walks the reader through how to find success in work and in love, and discusses why twenty-somethings are uniquely positioned to establish their adulthood because of both timing and biology.
At one point or another, the vast majority of twenty-somethings have been unemployed or underemployed, working at low-skilled jobs they are highly overqualified for. This is sometimes necessary; forces beyond their control might compel them to, and oftentimes these jobs are a means to an end—a source of cash during grad school, for example.
But it is easy to fall into a trap of living day-by-day, spending long periods of time in low-end jobs and delaying meaningful career choices. Unfortunately, this is a poor strategy for long-term happiness. Research shows that chronically underemployed people are more depressed than their peers, and unemployment in a person’s twenties is a strong predictor of future depression and drinking problems, even after that person becomes employed.
Extended periods of voluntary underemployment and unemployment can also do lasting harm to a person’s career prospects and future happiness. A delay in starting a career can permanently depress long-term wages, as the majority of lifetime wage growth typically happens during the first ten years of a career, before responsibilities like families and mortgages prevent a person from pursuing opportunities that would increase her salary like higher education or cross-country moves.
To find yourself in a meaningful career in your thirties and beyond, you must make purposeful career choices in your twenties. Do so by approaching your life mindfully and accumulating helpful experiences:
We’ll explore each of these ideas below.
All too often, twenty-somethings, feeling lost, retreat into reflection as they try to figure out who they are and by extension, what they should be doing with their lives. This is all part of a classic “identity crisis,” and it’s an important step towards developing your long-term identity. However, reflection is only half the formula for having a successful identity crisis. The other, equally important, piece is experience.
Erik Erickson, a German psychoanalyst, coined the term “identity crisis” in 1950. He encouraged a period of youthful exploration during which a person could collect experiences and try out different paths in life without risk or obligation. The concept has evolved since its inception and is today understood very differently from what Erickson intended.
Very often, people misconstrue the idea of “not committing to a path” as “not exploring any path.” They end up then squandering their twenties in a so-called “Starbucks phase,” during which they hold a series of uninspiring dead-ends jobs, or no job at all, while spending their time in unproductive pursuits like partying, when they should be spending these years collecting instructive experiences.
While having your identity crisis, you need to be not only reflecting on your life but also actively accumulating experiences that will form your “identity capital”: the sum of your personal resources. Your identity capital is the collection of things you’ve done long enough or well enough that they become part of who you are. It’s the intangible currency we use to obtain jobs and relationships. It includes quantifiable measurements like your schools, clubs, jobs, hobbies, and degrees. It also includes more unquantifiable things like your temperament, how you approach problems, and how you present yourself to the world through your clothes, your vocabulary, and your personality.
There’s a difference between an entry-level job at a coffee shop and an entry-level job at a film production company, and during your twenties you must actively build your identity capital by seeking out meaningful opportunities rather than place-holding ones. Volunteer with a charity, work as an intern in an industry you’re interested in, or take classes in something you might like to pursue. Avoid unmeaningful experiences that won’t teach you anything and won’t help you build skills.
Twenty-somethings who strike this balance between action and reflection spend their identity crisis accumulating interesting experiences while they are thinking about their path. These people construct stronger identities and end up more satisfied with their lives: better able to manage stress, more in control of their future, and living more original, unique lives.
You don’t exist in a vacuum, and a large piece of your identity, and your identity capital, is determined by the people in your life. Some of your personal ties are stronger than others. You have strong ties to those you spend a lot of time with or have known for many years. In childhood these include family and long-time friends. In your twenties these grow to embrace roommates, partners, and other close friends: your so-called “urban tribe.”
You have weak ties to people you’ve met infrequently or who are connected to you through a mutual friend. These might be a colleague from a different department, a neighbor you rarely see, a former employer, or a friend-of-a-friend you keep meaning to get in touch with.
Though you feel more comfortable around your strong ties, the people with whom you have weak ties are most likely to help you move forward in your pursuits. This is because your strong ties are like you: They think like you, have similar life experiences, or are from the same places. Therefore, they have little to add to your journey, either in work or love. They know the same things and the same people you know. Your strong ties can also prevent you from moving forward by lulling you into a sense of behavioral complacency. These people love you as you are and give you no incentive to conduct yourself in a more professional or presentable manner.
However, your weak ties can give you access to information and people you don’t otherwise know. Interacting with your weak ties encourages you to behave more professionally: You must organize your thoughts more clearly and use more formal vocabulary than you would around someone with whom you are intimately comfortable. Consequently, you are encouraged to act more mindfully and reflectively. An extraordinary number of jobs are found through a network of weak ties, rather than an ad.
People often feel uncomfortable asking for help from weak ties. They’d prefer to get a job on their own, or they don’t feel “networking” fits with who they are. But because new opportunities almost always come from outside your circle of close contacts, it’s important to reach out. Ignoring the potential of weak ties can only shut you off from opportunities.
Fortunately, you have human nature on your side: People naturally like to help other people. Humans have an innate tendency towards altruism. Studies show that acting altruistically leads to health, happiness, and longevity. In short, it feels nice to act nice.
Additionally, when someone does you a favor, she’s far more likely to do you another in the future. This is because of another quirk of human nature: Behavior shapes attitudes. When someone helps you, her brain tells her she likes you and she’s inclined to help you again.
A great way to approach a weak tie is to ask her for a small, interesting, specific, and easy-to-accomplish favor. Ben Franklin outlined this idea in his autobiography. He wanted to foster a connection with a certain politician. Instead of trying to win him over by acting servile or overly complimentary, he asked him if he could borrow a specific book he’d discovered the politician owned. The politician sent it over, and after that, took Franklin under his wing and helped his career for years afterwards.
The important elements of Franklin’s request were:
When approaching your weak tie, whether it be for a letter of recommendation, introduction, or informational interview, follow Franklin’s structure:
Cultivating weak ties is a great way to expand the set of potential options available to you. As we’ll explore in the next section, you can’t make choices if you don’t have options.
As a child, you’ve probably been told you can do “anything you want” with your life. Whether or not that was true when you were a kid, it’s most definitely not true when you’re an adult. Your choices are actually quite limited. The options you have before you are determined by your past—who you are, where you’ve come from, and what identity capital you have—and your vision of the future—where you ultimately want to be.
But this shouldn’t upset you; it's actually a good thing. It is far easier to choose among a few options than infinite options. Having too many options often leads to anxiety. When faced with infinite choices, the pressure to make the best choice over all the others is overwhelming and results in paralysis. In the face of excessive options, it can feel safer not to make any decision, so that you don’t risk missing out on something better.
In one revealing study, researchers set up sampling tables in two grocery stores. The first offered samples of six different jams, and the second offered twenty four. While the twenty-four-sample table attracted more attention, the six-flavor table resulted in far more sales (30 percent as opposed to only three percent).
The best way to move beyond decision-making paralysis is to think honestly about what options are available to you. Make a list of the realistic options you have based on your experience, education, strengths, interests, and goals. Maybe you decide you could either continue working at the coffee shop, go to art school, take a job as an administrative assistant, or travel through South America until your savings are exhausted. Examine these options rationally. Which will lead you to a place you’d like to see yourself in ten or twenty years? Which are maybe just another excuse to put off committing to adulthood?
Making yourself aware of your true options is the first step towards setting realistic, workable goals: the building blocks of future happiness.
The goals you set today will structure your life in the years to come. In your twenties, it can be hard to chart a path forward because there are no ready-made maps outlining what you should do with your life as there were in college.
In college you had a limited set of classes you could take and you knew exactly what you needed to do to succeed in them. Once you leave college, the map disappears and you need to start thinking about what you “should” be doing with your life. College had easy benchmarks that you could measure yourself against to see if you were doing what you “should” be doing. After college, though, those benchmarks disappear and it’s difficult to know what standards to judge yourself against.
Because your life is so wide open during these years, you’ll likely get significant pressure from friends, family, or social media as to what you should do with it. These are “shoulds,” and they can push you in one of two ways:
It’s easy to mistake other people’s “shoulds” for your goals, but resist the urge. “Goals” are not “shoulds.” Goals come from inside us; shoulds are pressures from others. Goals feel like dreams that would truly make us happy; shoulds feel like obligations. Goals can be worked toward and can evolve as we gain more understanding; shoulds are a cut-and-dried choice between perfection and failure.
Instead of getting caught up in what others think you should do, set practical, workable goals that make sense for you. Then move toward achieving them in realistic steps. Keep in mind a few guidelines:
When crafting your goals, focus on these three essential elements; these are what lead to a fulfilling adult life:
Start with whichever element you are certain of, or whichever you know you have a specific goal regarding. From there, create goals addressing the other areas that can accommodate your first priority. For example, maybe you know you’d like to move back to your hometown but you’re not as clear on the other pieces. Start with the hometown piece, then figure out how you can adjust your career to fit, leaving room for a potential relationship.
Many twenty-somethings get caught up in a particular “should” of their own, namely, that their life should be as unique, original, and interesting as is humanly possible. When you have such a lofty goal but no specific plan to achieve it, you are likely to resist choosing any career out of the fear that doing so would mean giving up your potential uniqueness. Building a career isn’t original, after all. It’s something everyone is expected to do, and doing it can feel like selling out to convention.
However, while committing to a path might feel like a surrender of your specialness, the reality is the opposite: If you don’t commit to something, your life will end up unexceptional and unoriginal. Fortunately, you can build yourself a unique and fascinating life out of the same building blocks of experience that everyone else does. Treat the process as you would building a custom-made bike: The parts might be the same ones everyone uses, but the result is an expression of you alone.
Your particular life will be original because of the specific set of experiences you choose to piece together. But until you start collecting the pieces, you can’t form the path.
Once you’ve committed to the idea of getting some practical experience, another problem emerges. How do you get a job with no experience to sell yourself with? How do you set yourself apart from all the other twenty-somethings looking for the same opportunities and sporting the same education-filled, experience-shy resumés? How do you leverage yourself with no leverage?
Coming out of college, your resumé is going to look very much like everyone else’s: emphasizing your educational credentials while short on experience. Fortunately, you can stand out with a good story. A story is a narrative about your interests and talents. When you’re in your twenties, and life is more about potential than experience, a good story is weighted far more than it will be later in life.
Your story must not be too simple or too complex. Stories that are too simple make you seem inexperienced and immature, but too complex and you seem disorganized. A story shows interviewers a link between your past, present, and future. Prospective employers want to know:
For example, if you worked for your school’s newspaper, examine what you loved about that and how it relates to the position you’re going for now. What was a specific aspect of that project or a unique skill you mastered that will help you achieve your five-year goal?
Interviewers know that a person’s goals for the future will change, and they don’t expect you to have an exact, definite plan. Nor do they expect you to gush that you plan to work at that particular company for the next twenty years because they know that’s unlikely. But they do want to see that you can connect your past to a reasonable vision for the future.
Your weak ties are people with whom you share a distant or occasional connection. These are the people who are most likely to help move your career or love life forward, since they can introduce you to information, opportunities, and people you would not otherwise have had access to. A great way to approach a weak tie and open a connection is to ask for a small, interesting, specific, and easy-to-accomplish favor.
Think of two or three people you consider weak ties that could possibly provide you with an opportunity. An old roommate? A former professor? Your local council person?
For each of these people, think of a way you could open a connection. What specific, easily-resolved favor could you ask of them that could introduce you to new information or opportunities?
The options you have before you at any given moment are determined by your past—who you are, where you’ve come from, and what identity capital you have—and your vision of the future—where you ultimately want to be.
Make a list of five realistic options you have based on your experience, education, strengths, interests, and goals. (These could be career options or options related to another major life choice.)
Go through your list and evaluate each one against your vision for yourself in the future. Think through what it will take to accomplish each goal, how much time it would take, and where each will lead.
Of your now-examined list, pick just one or two options. Compare and contrast them. Make note of your emotional response to each and examine that response—is it excitement? Anxiety? A little of both? Write down your reactions and continue to reflect on them over the next few days.
Planning for a career has a different status in our culture than does planning for a marriage. Having a specific and measurable career plan is socially acceptable and admired by many. To help you plan a career, you have a wide variety of resources available to you, including books, classes, counselors, and consultants.
Having a specific and measurable marriage plan is not as socially acceptable. It is often mocked. And there are far fewer resources available to help you; universities don't offer classes on it and unless you go “downmarket” to talk shows where marriage is more commonly discussed, there’s not a lot of public discussion about it.
And yet, choosing a marriage partner arguably has a far more lasting effect on your long-term happiness. You can revise your career many times over the course of your life, but your life partner is far less modifiable. You can’t just leave a marriage like you can leave a bad job; after divorce, you may be permanently linked to your ex both financially and logistically through children or other ties.
Furthermore, though they may not openly admit it, and while it’s not often acknowledged in pop culture, young adults do generally want to get married. In the United States, about half of young adults marry by age 30, 75 percent by age 35, and by age forty, 85 percent are married.
While it might not be politically correct to be strategic about finding a relationship, as it violates the ideal of having a relationship find you, unexpectedly and uncontrollably, the truth is being strategic is very important. Give it serious thought now, in your twenties, so you don’t find yourself settling later. There are some guidelines that can help you approach the subject mindfully and purposefully:
Dating down means dating a person you would have dated in a previous period of your life, when you were less mature and less developed. When you date people you’ve outgrown in maturity, experience, and insight, you prevent yourself from finding a person you have a more meaningful connection with.
Often, a person dates down when she holds negative beliefs about herself leftover from childhood influences. Her identity stories reflect difficulties from her past. For example, someone who was neglected as a child might have a low opinion of her own worth. She might consequently date people with lower career ambitions with whom she doesn’t share a stimulating intellectual connection, because of a mistaken belief that she’s lucky to have anyone at all.
We start to form our identity stories in adolescence. These stories are born of our experiences and take shape according to how we think other people see us. When they are negative stories, they can stop us from carrying through on our long-term goals. However, when our identity stories are positive, they can inspire and guide us.
Fortunately, you can change the stories you tell yourself about yourself. When you feel yourself making a mistake you know you’ll later regret, pause. Take notice of what is driving that decision. Listen carefully to your identity stories and recognize which parts of them come from other people’s judgments, evaluations, and advice. Examine those elements and decide which ones you can disregard. Then find a new story to take its place.
When you stop acting reactively to unconscious beliefs, you can slow down and allow yourself room to closely examine how those beliefs are influencing your decisions. For example, someone who was raised by emotionally abusive parents and bullied as a teen might find herself, in her twenties, having serial one-night stands. Until she stops and confronts the identity stories that are driving her, she’s unlikely to take control of her romantic life. But once she interrupts her habits of reaction and consciously acknowledges the childhood voices in her head, she can start to see that she no longer has to give those voices power. She can think about what she truly wants out of a relationship and start acting more purposefully towards that goal.
In your twenties, your childhood experiences no longer have to define you. Confront your past and then look forward to your future: Look at who you are now and what you’ve accomplished, and focus on where those traits can lead you.
Relationships are far more likely to be successful if the two people involved genuinely like each other and are fairly similar in personality. The first element, liking a person, is very often caused by the second, being alike. It is often said that opposites attract, and to some degree and in some situations, that is true. But similarities are a stronger predictor of marital success. The trick is knowing which similarities to worry about.
Many couples are similar to each other in things they could list on paper: religion, education, attractiveness, age, politics, and socio-economic background. But while traits like this can help you weed out partners who would be unsuitable for easy-to-spot reasons (for example, maybe it’s important to you to raise your children Jewish; a prospective partner from a different religion might be a non-starter), they don’t guarantee happiness. There are plenty of divorces among couples who share many of these kinds of similarities.
It is far more important to be well matched in personality. Research shows the more similar two people’s personalities are, the happier they are likely to be with their relationship. Personality is the overall way you interact with and react to the world: your outlook. It’s not about the experiences you’ve had but how you’ve handled them. It’s not about what you like but why you like it.
The “Big Five” personality model outlines five major personality traits that a person can have. A person has each of these characteristics in either low, medium, or high levels. They are:
There’s no “right” or “wrong” personality on any of these scales, but we are often more compatible with people who lie somewhat near us. A tendency to see the world in similar ways not only prevents conflict from developing between you but also enables you to face the challenges that life will throw at you as a team.
More often than not, the reason a couple ends up separating is because of personality differences that on reflection were there all along. If one person is gregarious and loves being around people, but her partner is reserved and hates parties, they might be regularly annoyed by the other’s choices: The outgoing one may be irritated that her partner wants to stay in and rent a movie rather than checking out that new bar, and the reserved one may think the outgoing one has her priorities wrong. Though they may match in other areas—they may both be very agreeable, for example—if they are different enough that their interests and hobbies don’t generally overlap, there’s a high likelihood they won’t last.
This doesn’t mean you should look for someone with an identical personality to yours, or that you should automatically reject a person because she differs significantly on one or more of these scales. While you don’t want to choose a person with a vastly different outlook on life, there are advantages to partnering with someone who’s a bit different from you. Differences can be helpful when your marriage progresses to the point where it includes other people, such as children. A diversity of interests and skills can be helpful and keep life interesting.
Further, there will always be at least some personality differences. How you handle them and whether or not you can reconcile them amicably are stronger predictors of long-term marital happiness than whether or not you both match perfectly on each of the Big Five traits.
Many young adults think that living with a partner before marriage will allow them to “try out” a marriage before committing and will result in a stronger union. Unfortunately, the statistics don’t back this up: Couples who live together are more likely to divorce down the road than those who do not. This is called the “cohabitation effect” and it has baffled researchers for years.
Some researchers theorize that those who cohabitate may be less conventional and open to divorce in the first place, but the cohabitation effect appears to be true regardless of religion, education, or political leanings. The effect seems to be more a result of the fact that when people cohabitate, they often end up passively and reactively sliding toward a marriage, rather than proactively deciding on one. When this happens, a couple often ends up staying together because of sunk costs and ultimately separates because they never truly understood a marital relationship or they were never right for each other in the first place.
When two people decide to move in together, it’s often touted as an easy solution to short-term challenges like rent. Moving in together seems fun and cost-effective, and feels like an easily-escapable arrangement, unlike marriage. And it might be, at first. But after combining lives for a while, leaving the situation can actually feel quite difficult, and a couple may feel it’s easier to stay in a relationship because of the sunk costs of the arrangement.
When you make an initial investment in a relationship, the “switching costs” feel hypothetical and far away. But after some time passes, the costs feel bigger and more real. You may have shared pets, passwords, and finances that are harder to walk away from. This is known as “consumer lock-in,” and it describes the fact that people are less likely to look for other options once they’ve made an investment in a first option.
You also may be older, and the idea of starting over can feel more daunting at 32 than it felt at 27. Instead of cutting your losses, you may opt for marriage because it feels like it makes sense given the investments you’ve already made in the relationship. In a word, you feel stuck.
People often move in together under the pretense that they are giving marriage a trial run, but in truth, a live-in relationship has little resemblance to a marriage. Stresses like mortgages, pregnancies, child-rearing, holidays with in-laws, college and retirement plans, and bills often don’t exist during cohabitation but can destroy a marriage. Once a relationship transforms from live-in to married, these stresses can break it.
Often people slide from dating to sleeping over to moving in without fully examining the relationship. The process is driven by short-term impulses—fun weekends, cool friends, good sex, shared rent—that may not have been what either one would have looked for in a long-term partner.
Because cohabitation feels more easily escapable than marriage, both men and women agree that they have lower standards for a live-in partner than for a spouse. Interestingly, the cohabitation effect does not hold for couples who move in together after becoming engaged. These couples are as likely to stay together as are couples who don’t cohabitate before marriage. The effect seems to be entirely caused by people moving in with right-now partners who end up becoming, unintentionally, more permanent partners, for the wrong reasons.
This is not to say you should absolutely not cohabitate before marriage, but if you are considering doing so, don’t make the decision lightly:
When choosing a life partner, it is easy to forget that the decision involves more than just the two of you. Western culture prizes independence and often glosses over the fact that in picking a spouse, you are creating a future family. This family will include not only your future children but also your new in-laws and extended family.
When you don’t fully consider the impact this new family will have on your future happiness, you risk setting yourself up for difficulties. The family you create and adopt with your partner will define your life in the decades ahead.
Of course, you shouldn’t settle down with a partner just because you love her parents and siblings. Your relationship with your partner always has to come first. However, you should give your situation serious thought if you are considering settling down with someone from a family you don’t feel comfortable in. Marrying into a family you don’t fit into might make your life miserable in the future and may also reflect values in your partner you’ve overlooked. Maybe you meet your partner’s family and discover they’re unaffectionate and distant. You may find this explains some of your partner’s behavior, and you might decide this is not how you envision your own future family.
This is, again, not to say that you should reject someone based only on her family. But her family must factor into the decision.
If you yourself come from a difficult family background, this decision is even more important, and because you don’t have stable family experiences to draw from, it’s often more difficult. If you are one of these people, you now have an opportunity to create a family environment for yourself that you may once have thought was unobtainable. Examine consciously and thoroughly the kind of family life you envision for yourself in ten and twenty years. Being explicit with yourself about your goals will prevent you from choosing a partner reactively and allowing yourself to fall into the family patterns you would like to evade.
Young adults today are putting off marriage not only because of the societal expectation to but also because of a fear of failure. Divorce looms large in the minds of today’s twenty-somethings. About half of all young adults are children of divorce, and the other half knows someone who is. Everyone acknowledges how difficult divorce can be and how negatively it can affect the lives of any children involved, and everyone wants—rightly so—to avoid that fate.
People have concluded that delaying marriage is a good way to lessen the risk of eventual divorce. They believe waiting until they are more mature and settled in their careers will prevent them from marrying someone they’ll later grow apart from. However, delayed marriage is not the protective element that people imagine it to be. Although marriages between very young partners (especially teens) have high rates of divorce, after age 25 the divorce rate stabilizes at around 40 percent.
Additionally, putting off marriage creates other difficulties and risks:
Relationships are far more likely to be successful if the two people involved genuinely like each other and are fairly similar in personality. The “Big Five” personality model outlines five major personality traits that a person can have. A person has each of these characteristics in either low, medium, or high levels. They are: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Write down where on the scale of each trait you lie. Are you low, high, or in the middle for each of these characteristics?
Examine your current relationship or think of a previous one. Is or was your partner close to you on any of these? Where did you differ and to what degree?
How did any personality differences cause conflict between you?
Did any of your other characteristics, maybe ones for which you were both similar, help you get through that conflict? If not, how did you resolve it? Or not?
As should now be clear, your twenties are a unique decade during which you’ll have opportunities you won’t encounter again. Many of these are available simply because the world is very open to you during this time. But timing is not the only reason your twenties are so full of potential. In your twenties, your brain and body are developing in remarkable ways specifically designed by evolution to prepare you for the rest of your adulthood.
Understanding both the opportunities and limits of your brain and your body during this decade can help you better anticipate and plan for the future. Here are some of the steps involved in this process:
In your twenties, your brain goes through a period of massive neuron production, one of two major growth spurts in your life. The first growth spurt is during your toddlerhood, and prepares you for all you are about to learn in childhood. The second starts in adolescence and continues through your twenties, preparing you for adulthood.
Because of this, your twenty-something brain is incredibly plastic and open to learning, and the experiences you have in your twenties will shape how you approach the rest of your life:
Many twenty-somethings find this learning process difficult because very often, the skills they now need are completely different from the ones they’ve practiced and honed during school. They find their old skill sets are no longer enough to ensure success in life. School problems had right-or-wrong answers and defined time limits. Adult problems are not as clear-cut. There’s no one right answer for who to partner with, what career to pursue, or when to start a family. There will be pros and cons to each of these decisions, and navigating them requires you to juggle complexity in a way you didn’t need to when you had the more solid road map of schoolwork.
Fortunately, your brain is remarkably adept at mastering these skills during this period of your life. However, despite its strengths at this time, your brain has a shortcoming: Some parts are developing faster than others. This uneven progression is part of the reason many twenty-somethings have difficulty planning for the future.
The frontal lobe—the part of the brain that was last to evolve and is responsible for reason, judgment, and long-term planning—only fully matures as we approach age thirty. Therefore, in your twenties, your more primitive, emotion-driven brain is fully operational while your more temperate, forward-thinking brain is not yet fully functional.
In fact, twenty-somethings often share characteristics of people who’ve had trauma-induced frontal lobe damage: These people become reckless rather than thoughtful and often make decisions that work against their long-term interests. They have trouble planning for the future or seeing the specific steps needed to achieve a goal.
Luckily, we are not bound to the whims of our primitive brain while our frontal lobe takes its sweet time maturing. In fact, practicing adult skills helps your frontal lobe develop properly.
Twenty-somethings often have a difficult time regulating their emotional responses to interactions at work and in their personal lives. This is partly because the emotional-regulation parts of the brain are still developing, and until they’re fully established, young adults are still very much at the mercy of their primitive brains’ instincts.
Our brains are built to detect novelties because they might be either threats or opportunities. We remember surprising moments strongly because they help us learn to survive. For example, people will remember with clarity their first date with their eventual partner, or the time they sent a snide email to the wrong person.
In your twenties, your brain also reacts much more strongly and emotionally to surprises, especially when they are negative, than it will when you are older. MRI scans reveal that the brains of twenty-somethings are far more active in the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, than those of older adults when presented with negative stimuli.
The effects of this can be both good and bad. While emotional distress can teach you valuable lessons that you can apply to future situations, if distress is constant, it can lead to depression, anxiety, and a general sense of being out of control. Twenty-somethings often react to this emotional distress by trying to escape the cause of it, leading them to leave a difficult job or a relationship that isn’t perfect.
This is not a good long-term strategy. The difficult parts of a job are typically inherent in entry level positions. Leaving a job before you’ve moved beyond the difficult parts might mean you end up in a series of entry-level positions, each one filled with difficult parts. Additionally, while you should definitely leave any relationship that has serious problems, there are times when your emotional reaction might be inappropriately scaled to the actual issue, and you risk leaving a relationship with potential.
A better strategy is to train your frontal lobe to take control of your amygdala. You may not have much control over the events of your day, but you can have control over how you react to them.
Reevaluate events by focusing on the facts of them, instead of the emotions:
Reach out to friends or loved ones for help if you need it, but don’t rely on them for their assistance in getting through difficult times. Asking someone for emotional support on a regular basis means you are borrowing her frontal lobe instead of developing your own.
Real confidence doesn’t come from ignoring your anxiety or listening to friends and family tell you you’re wonderful. Real confidence comes from mastering skills, overcoming challenges, failing sometimes, and accumulating successes. You can’t bypass this process by hiding out in an easy job. Mastering easy skills will give you a fragile confidence that’s readily shattered at the first sign of stress. Genuine confidence comes from overcoming genuine challenges.
To become someone who regularly masters skills:
To truly be open to the opportunities you’ll find in your twenties, adopt a “growth” mindset, rather than a “fixed” mindset, to better equip yourself to get the most out of your challenges.
People with growth mindsets believe that their own skills and talents are in a constant state of change, and can be improved with practice and knowledge. This attitude makes them view failures as opportunities to learn and grow. They approach challenges by working harder or trying new strategies, and are more likely to come out of a challenging situation with confidence and enthusiasm.
People with fixed mindsets see their own skills and talents as all-or-nothing propositions: they either have it or they don’t. They’re smart or they’re stupid. This attitude leads them to avoid struggle, as struggle is a sign that they don’t have “it,” whatever “it” is in that particular situation. People with fixed mindsets give up more quickly when challenged with difficult tasks and see challenges and failures with distress and shame.
People with growth mindsets react better to challenges and setbacks than do people with “fixed” mindsets and are better able to acquire new skills. They generally outperform people with fixed mindsets and have rosier outlooks on life and work.
(Shortform note: To learn how to develop a growth mindset, read our summary of Grit.)
Research shows that the best predictor of a person’s success is not innate talent but instead, the amount of time she invests in the endeavor. Consistently, across all kinds of industries from medicine to music, mastery of a skill comes after about 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. At 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year, this means five years.
Often, twenty-somethings are unprepared for this truth, expecting to start a job and immediately be not only good at it but also openly appreciated for it. This disconnect between expectations and reality leads to anxiety and causes many twenty-somethings to abandon their pursuits too soon because they are discouraged by their lack of mastery.
(Shortform note: For further exploration of skills development, read our summary of Peak.)
Don’t discount the work you’ve already put into a pursuit. Take stock of how long you’ve been working at something and calculate how much longer it will take before you can start feeling mastery of it. Being aware of the process will help you not get discouraged by it because of unrealistic expectations.
In our twenties, our personalities can change more significantly than at any other time in our lives before or after. Although we often think of childhood or adolescence as the time when personalities are formed, it’s the decade of the twenties when we really start to become the people we’ll remain for the rest of our lives.
During their twenties, it’s not unusual for people to change from shy to confident or depressed to happy. Studies show that very often, life starts to feel better as you move through your twenties. As you grow into adulthood, you’ll get better at regulating your emotions, become more socially competent and responsible, and start to feel more agreeable about life in general. Because these changes happen when long-term careers and relationships are forming, they can greatly affect the trajectory of your life, and because your personality is so plastic during these years, you have an excellent opportunity to adopt a permanent, positive outlook on life.
Sometimes a person will try to find positivity by getting lost in her past—examining her upbringing as a child of divorce or her difficulties in high school, for example. This person might hope that by coming to terms with her past, she can adopt a happier outlook on life that will propel her into adulthood. While you definitely should examine the influences that made you who you are, dwelling on them isn’t going to ultimately move you forward, and a positive outlook, rather than being a prerequisite for adulthood, is often a product of it.
The best way to break the patterns of the past and cultivate a happy outlook is not through reflection but through action. By actively investing in your adulthood—pursuing opportunities, gaining experience, and achieving small successes along the way—you will craft a satisfying future.
Just the process of making goals can make you happier. When a person is purposefully working toward goals, she’s happier even if she doesn’t immediately succeed at the goals. The process itself gives her a sense of purpose. Twenty-somethings who feel even a small amount of personal or financial success feel more positive and confident than those who don’t. In contrast, twenty-somethings who don’t feel they are making progress toward a goal often feel stressed and alienated.
As people marry later, more couples are having their first child in their thirties and even forties. People often justify their decision to put off childbearing by pointing to celebrities or friends who have started families late. But anecdotal stories of success are not representative of the true difficulty that couples face when they try to start families late.
Putting off starting a family greatly increases the chances of running into fertility issues. Having sex around the time of ovulation has about a 20 to 25 percent success rate of conception up until around age 35. Then the rate starts to drop, until it’s only five percent at age 40 and two percent at age 42.
If you need fertility treatments, they are expensive, and get more so as you age. Because older couples need more treatments on average per successful birth, a twenty-something couple may pay $25,000 for a baby but a couple in their mid-forties can expect to pay around $300,000—if they can find someone to treat them at all. Many fertility clinics will not treat women over 40 as the low rate of success brings down the rates the clinic can advertise.
Aging issues affect both men and women. Researchers find that older sperm is associated with neurocognitive problems in children like autism and schizophrenia.
Further, even when successful, having kids late can be difficult in other ways. The pressure to have kids when your time is running out can be an enormous stress on a marriage, particularly a new one. Then, if you want multiple children and you have back-to-back pregnancies to squeeze them in, you’ll end up with multiple very-young children, yet another stress.
Additionally, you may find yourself caught up in raising young kids just when your career starts hitting its stride. And, you might end up caring for your children just when you need to start caring for your own parents.
Finally, as you get older, your priorities are going to change. When you’re forty or fifty, you may very well wish to trade the years you spent on trivial activities in your twenties for more years with your kids, or eventually, with their kids. You also may wish that your kids could know your parents better as grandparents. If your parents had you in their late thirties and you have kids in your late thirties, your parents could very well be in their mid-seventies when your children are born. Their relationship as grandparents will inevitably be limited.
In sum, don’t fall into the trap that so many do, swayed by cultural myths of late-life fertility. If you think having children may one day be important to you, start to plan for it in your twenties, when you are still in control of the process.
The way time passes changes once we leave school. In school, time is clearly delineated into semester-sized pieces with well-defined projects and deadlines. In the real world, there’s just one big chunk of time with large, abstract projects like “start a family” or “have a career,” but no clear deadlines. It can be disorienting, and the lack of regular deadlines can lead people to live day-by-day and lose track of time. Day-by-day can easily turn into year-by-year.
“Present bias” also encourages twenty-somethings to put off planning for the future. People are inclined to favor the rewards of today over the promises of tomorrow. The present feels real, the future feels abstract.
Further, twenty-somethings are often actively encouraged to think only of the present with cultural messages like “You’re only young once,” or “You have all the time in the world.”
But delaying your future-planning carries great risks. The attitude that “life begins at thirty” might lead you to postpone getting started on major milestones, and might then lead to a very stressful thirties decade in which you need to do everything at once: go to school while planning a marriage, or graduate and enter the workforce while pregnant.
Get started on your future-planning by making an actual, physical timeline.
Real confidence comes from the mastery of skills. You will not feel authentically confident until you’ve overcome challenges and accumulated successes. You’ll become a master of your skills only after devoting about 10,000 hours to practicing them.
Think of a skill you’ve either already started or would like to start. It can be anything you’re interested in: artistic talent or a business skill, a medical pursuit or a legal endeavor. What challenges might it present to you that will leave you feeling accomplished once you’ve resolved them?
Calculate how long it will take you to reach the 10,000-hour mark of mastery at the rate you currently practice this skill. Figure out how many hours you’ve already dedicated to it. Subtract the second from the first: How much longer do you need to invest in this to become a master of it? Is it a reasonable goal?
If it’s not a reasonable goal, think about why not. How could you alter either the skill or the process to make your goal achievable?
What are some steps you could take to begin mastering this skill?
The attitude that life-begins-at-thirty might lead you to postpone getting started on major milestones, and might then lead to a very stressful thirties decade in which you need to do everything at once.
Brainstorm the important milestones you envision for your future. Include goals from both your professional and personal life. What are the major events you want to happen in the next decade? Grad school? Job? Marriage? Kids?
From your list, pick the three to five goals that are most important to you. Examine them and think about how much lead time you’d need to accomplish each one. Be aware of any that you would prefer not to do simultaneously (for example, would you be comfortable starting a new job while also starting a family?).
Create a timeline. Start with the end: Decide when you’d like to hit your prioritized milestones and work backwards from there to plot out the path to achieving them.
As you enter your adult life, you become entirely responsible for your own choices. You no longer have another adult figuring out things for you—it’s up to you now to figure out your life. There’s no magic formula and there’s no right or wrong answers on what kind of a life you should live. But there are right and wrong ways to go about establishing that life. Happiness as an older adult starts with the goals you set as a younger adult. It continues to develop as you consciously and intentionally move towards those goals.
Make choices. Opt for action. Don’t try to avoid the years ahead—you can’t. They’re coming whether you’re ready or not. Invest in them now, when it can still make a meaningful difference, so you’re not playing catch-up later.
Take your twenties seriously: You are crafting your life.