Your twenties matter. Eighty percent of life’s most defining moments take place by age thirty-five. Two-thirds of lifetime wage growth happens in the first ten years of a career. More than half of us are married, or dating, or living with our future partner, by age thirty. Personality changes more during our twenties than at any time before or after. The brain caps off its last growth spurt in the twenties. Female fertility peaks at age twenty-eight.
To a great extent, our lives are decided by far-reaching twentysomething moments we may not realize are happening at all.
Twentysomethings are more educated than ever before, but a smaller percentage find work after college. Many entry-level jobs have gone overseas making it more difficult for twentysomethings to gain a foothold at home. With a contracting economy and a growing population, unemployment is at its highest in decades. An unpaid internship is the new starter job. About a quarter of twentysomethings are out of work and another quarter work only part-time. Twentysomethings who do have paying jobs earn less than their 1970s counterparts when adjusted for inflation.
There are fifty million twentysomethings in the United States, most of whom are living with a staggering, unprecedented amount of uncertainty. Many have no idea what they will be doing, where they will be living, or who they will be with in two or even ten years. They don’t know when they will be happy or when they will be able to pay their bills. They wonder if they should be photographers or lawyers or designers or bankers. They don’t know whether they are a few dates or many years from a meaningful relationship. They worry about whether they will have families and whether their marriages will last. Most simply, they don’t know if their lives will work out and they don’t know what to do.
The twenties are that critical period of adulthood. These are the years when it will be easiest to start the lives we want. And no matter what we do, the twenties are an inflection point—the great reorganization—a time when the experiences we have disproportionately influence the adult lives we will lead.
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.
About two-thirds of lifetime wage growth happens in the first ten years of a career. After that, families and mortgages get in the way of higher degrees and cross-country moves, and salaries rise more slowly. As a twentysomething, it may feel like there are decades ahead to earn more and more but the latest data from the US Census Bureau shows that, on average, salaries peak—and plateau—in our forties
“Maybe I should wait for something better to come along?” Helen questioned. “But something better doesn’t just come along. One good piece of capital is how you get to better,” I said.
The one thing I have learned is that you can’t think your way through life. The only way to figure out what to do is to do—something.
Helen’s life got going when she used the bits of capital she had to get the next piece of capital she wanted—and
The urban tribe may bring us soup when we are sick, but it is the people we hardly know—those who never make it into our tribe—who will swiftly and dramatically change our lives for the better.
Surveying workers in a Boston suburb who had recently changed jobs, Granovetter found it wasn’t close friends and family—presumably those most invested in helping—who were the most valuable during the job hunt. Rather, more than three-quarters of new jobs had come from leads from contacts who were seen only “occasionally” or “rarely.” This finding led Granovetter to write a groundbreaking paper titled “The Strength of Weak Ties” about the unique value of people we do not know well.
Our strong ties feel comfortable and familiar but, other than support, they may have little to offer. They are usually too similar—even too similarly stuck—to provide more than sympathy. They often don’t know any more about jobs or relationships than we do.
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, on the other hand, force us to communicate from a place of difference, to use what is called elaborated speech. Unlike restricted speech, which presupposes similarities between the speaker and the listener, elaborated speech does not presume that the listener thinks in the same way or knows the same information. We need to be more thorough when we talk to weak ties, and this requires more organization and reflection.
Look through and see where people work. If there is someone who does something you want to do, call or e-mail them for an “informational interview.” That is what everybody ultimately does.
Ironically, being enmeshed with a group can actually enhance feelings of alienation, because we—and our tribe—become insular and detached.
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.
There is a “helper’s high” that comes from being generous. In numerous studies, altruism has been linked to happiness, health, and longevity—as long as the help we give is not a burden. Most people remember starting out themselves, being helped by those who were further along. Because of this, there is a reserve of goodwill toward twentysomethings. Part of aging well is helping others, and twentysomethings who turn to weak ties for help give them a chance to do good and feel good—unless what they ask for is overwhelming.
I would advise the same approach today as you ask your own weak ties for letters of recommendation, suggestions or introductions, or well-planned informational interviews: Make yourself interesting. Make yourself relevant. Do your homework so you know precisely what you want or need. Then, respectfully, ask for it. Some weak ties will say no. More than you think will say yes.
There is a certain terror that goes along with saying “My life is up to me.” It is scary to realize there’s no magic, you can’t just wait around, no one can really rescue you, and you have to do something. Not knowing what you want to do with your life—or not at least having some ideas about what to do next—is a defense against that terror. It is a resistance to admitting that the possibilities are not endless.
Being confused about choices is nothing more than hoping that maybe there is a way to get through life without taking charge.
“Twentysomethings hear they are standing in front of a boundless array of choices. Being told you can do anything or go anywhere is like being in the ocean you described. It’s like standing in front of the twenty-four-flavor table. But I have yet to meet a twentysomething who has twenty-four truly viable options. Each person is choosing from his or her own six-flavor table, at best.”
Unthought knowns are those things we know about ourselves but forget somehow. These are the dreams we have lost sight of or the truths we sense but don’t say out loud. We may be afraid of acknowledging the unthought known to other people because we are afraid of what they might think. Even more often, we fear what the unthought known will then mean for ourselves and our lives.
“Not making choices isn’t safe. The consequences are just further away in time, like in your thirties or forties.”
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.
Some twentysomethings dream too small, not understanding that their twentysomething choices matter and are, in fact, shaping the years ahead. Others dream too big, fueled more by fantasies about limitless possibilities than by experience. Part of realizing our potential is recognizing how our particular gifts and limitations fit with the world around us. We realize where our authentic potential actually lies.
Scrambling after ideals, we become alienated from what is true about ourselves and the world.
Any search for glory is propelled by what Horney called the tyranny of the should. Listening to Talia talk, it was difficult not to notice the “shoulds” and “supposed to’s” that littered her sentences: Work should be Wow! She should be in graduate school. Her life should look better than it did.
Goals direct us from the inside, but shoulds are paralyzing judgments from the outside. Goals feel like authentic dreams while shoulds feel like oppressive obligations. Shoulds set up a false dichotomy between either meeting an ideal or being a failure, between perfection or settling. The tyranny of the should even pits us against
Twentysomethings who don’t get started wind up with blank résumés and out-of-touch lives only to settle far more down the road. What’s so original about that?”
Ian could imagine building a life one job or one piece of capital at a time. It seemed less conforming—and less terrifying—than feeling like his next move would decide the one way his life was going to be forever.
As a twentysomething, life is still more about potential than proof. Those who can tell a good story about who they are and what they want leap over those who can’t.
The most recent studies show that marrying later than the teen years does indeed protect against divorce, but this only holds true until about age twenty-five. After twenty-five, one’s age at marriage does not predict divorce. These findings run counter to the notion that it is unquestionably better to postpone marriage as long as you can.
When people meet my two children for the first time, they sometimes say, “King’s choice!” This is because I happened to have a boy and a girl and so, if I were a king, I would have a son to carry on the empire and a daughter to marry off to a neighboring country where I hoped to gain favor. It is strange to have that image invoked about two twenty-first-century children who will likely grow up and lead their lives as they choose. Plus, I bristle a little at the thought of my daughter’s wedding being a business deal. But the expression also reminds me that, for many centuries, marriage was about bridging families.
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.
Jennifer was talking about what is known as “sliding, not deciding.” Moving from dating to sleeping over to sleeping over a lot to cohabitation can be a gradual slope, one not marked by rings or ceremonies or sometimes even a conversation.
It is the couples who live together before being clearly and mutually committed to each other who are more likely to experience poorer communication, lower levels of commitment to the relationship, and greater marital instability down the road.
What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.
We sometimes hear that opposites attract, and maybe they do for a hookup. More often, similarity is the essence of compatibility. Studies have repeatedly found that couples who are similar in areas such as socioeconomic status, education, age, ethnicity, religion, attractiveness, attitudes, values, and intelligence are more likely to be satisfied with their relationships and are less likely to seek divorce.
necessarily make us happy. One match maker to consider is personality. Some research tells us that, especially in young couples, the more similar two people’s personalities are, the more likely they are to be satisfied with their relationship. Yet personality is how dating, and even married, couples tend to be least alike. The likely reason for this is, unlike deal breakers, personality is less obvious and not as easy to categorize. Personality is not about what we have done or even about what we like. It is about how we are in the world, and this infuses everything we do.
Consider that where we are on the Big Five is about 50 percent inherited. This means that you came into this world with roughly half of who you are already in place, because of genes, prenatal influences, and other biological factors. While you learn to interact with the world somewhat differently as experiences make their mark, personality remains relatively stable over time.
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
Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.
We now know that the brain develops from bottom to top and from back to front. This order reflects the evolutionary age of the areas of the brain. The oldest parts of the brain—the ones also present in our ancient ancestors and animal cousins—develop first, at the base of the brain near the spine. They control breathing, senses, emotions, sex, pleasure, sleep, hunger and thirst, or the “animal propensities” left intact after Phineas Gage’s injury. Roughly speaking, these areas are what we consider to be the emotional brain.
The most forward part of the brain—literally and figuratively—is the frontal lobe, located just behind the forehead. The most recent part of the brain to have evolved in humans, it is also the final area of the brain to mature in each individual. Nicknamed the “executive functioning center” and the “seat of civilization,” the frontal lobe is where reason and judgment reside. It is where rational thoughts balance, and regulate, the feelings and impulses of the emotional brain.
From MRI scans of healthy adolescents and twentysomethings, 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 frontal lobe is still a work in progress.
Being smart in school is about how well you solve problems that have correct answers and clear time limits. But being a forward-thinking adult is about how you think and act even (and especially) in uncertain situations.
In the first eighteen months of life, the brain experiences its first growth spurt, producing far more neurons than it can use. The infant brain overprepares, readying itself for whatever life brings, such as to speak any language within earshot.
Most of the thousands of new connections that sprout in adolescence do so in the frontal lobe and, again, the brain overprepares—but, this time, for the uncertainty of adult life.
As “neurons that fire together, wire together”, the jobs we have and the company we keep are rewiring our frontal lobes—and these same frontal lobes are, in turn, making our decisions in the office and on Saturday nights. Back and forth it goes, as work and love and the brain knit together in the twenties to make us into the adults we want to be in our thirties and beyond.
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.
Twentysomethings take these difficult moments particularly hard. Compared to older adults, they find negative information—the bad news—more memorable than positive information—or the good news. MRI studies show that twentysomething brains simply react more strongly to negative information than do the brains of older adults. There is more activity in the amygdala—the seat of the emotional brain.
“The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.” Knowing what to overlook is one way that older adults are typically wiser than young adults. With age comes what is known as a positivity effect. We become more interested in positive information, and our brains react less strongly to what negative information we do encounter.
Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl describes our attitudes and reactions as being the last of our human freedoms. Danielle may not have had control over every situation at work, but she could control how she interpreted them and how she reacted to them. She could get out of her amygdala and put her frontal lobe to work.
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.
Inaction breeds fear and doubt. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.
Danielle’s idea that people were innately confident on the job, or they weren’t, is called a fixed mindset. We can have fixed mindsets about different things—intelligence, athletic ability, social savvy, thinness—but, whatever the case, a fixed mindset is a way of thinking in black and white.
Those who use what is called a growth mindset believe that people can change, that success is something to be achieved. Maybe it’s not the case that any person can be anything, but it is still true that within certain parameters, people can learn and grow.
Confidence doesn’t come from the inside out. It moves from the outside in. People feel less anxious—and more confident—on the inside when they can point to things they have done well on the outside.
Real confidence comes from mastery experiences, which are actual, lived moments of success, especially when things seem difficult. Whether we are talking about love or work, the confidence that overrides insecurity comes from experience. There is no other way.
No matter what word you use, confidence is trusting yourself to get the job done—whether that job is public speaking, sales, teaching, or being an assistant—and that trust only comes from having gotten the job done many times before.
Whether, after thirty, we can expect to change a bit or not at all, what all sides of the post-thirty debate have recently come to agree on is something that many clinicians have known all along: Our personalities change more during the twentysomething years than at any time before or after.
Sam and I talked about a Pew Research Center study showing that, contrary to what movies and blogs may lead us to believe, employed twentysomethings are happier than unemployed twentysomethings.
And, for the first time in history, Women outnumber men in the workplace, which means that more women—and men—are balancing work and family.
Fertility, or the ability to reproduce, peaks for women during the late twentysomething years. Biologically speaking, the twenties will be the easiest time to have a baby for most women. 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.
At forty, couples who need fertility treatments will pay an average of $100,000 for one live birth. By age forty-two, the average cost goes up to about $300,000 for a baby. Even if money isn’t an obstacle, nature may still be. Fertility treatments fail more than they succeed. Past age thirty-five, intrauterine insemination—or the “turkey baster method” in which sperm is inserted into the female reproductive tract—has a 90 to 95 percent failure rate. In vitro fertilization—“IVF” or “in vitro,” when sperm and egg are united outside the body and implanted in the uterus—succeeds only about 10 to 20 percent of the time.
What I can’t figure out, and what I feel like I am grieving a little, is why I spent so many years on nothing. So many years doing things and hanging out with people that don’t even rate a memory. For what? I had a good time in my twenties, but did I need to do all that for eight years? Lying there in the MRI, it was like I traded five years of partying or hanging out in coffee shops for five more years I could have had with my son if I’d grown up sooner. Why didn’t someone drop the manners and tell me I was wasting my life?
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.