PDF Summary:The Defining Decade, by Meg Jay

Too many young adults have been convinced that their twenties are a “free period” of life, during which none of their choices matter and there are no consequences. The truth is, though, that your twenties are a crucial time in establishing a fulfilling adult life down the road, and throwing them away because of a cultural myth of extended childhood only makes it harder for you to find eventual happiness. Psychologist Meg Jay discusses the ways in which today’s youth have been misled into wasting these important years, and explores how we can make the best of this decade to find success in both work and love.

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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.

Seek a Similar Personality

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:

1. Openness: Are you practical, conventional, skeptical, and reluctant to try new things? Or are you open to new experiences, intellectually creative and curious, adventurous, and insightful?
2. Conscientiousness: Are you easygoing, sometimes careless, spontaneous, and a bit prone to addiction? Or are you disciplined, organized, and responsible?
3. Extraversion: Are you shy, independent, cautious, and recharged by alone time? Or are you outgoing, active, chatty, and energized by others?
4. Agreeableness: Are you combative, suspicious of others, and contrarian? Or are you cooperative, trusting, flexible, and affectionate?
5. Neuroticism: Are you secure in yourself and emotionally resilient? Or are you moody, anxiety-prone, and easily triggered?

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.

Don’t Cohabitate, or Do It Wisely

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.

Pick Your Partner With Your Family in Mind

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.

Don’t Delay Marriage to Prevent Divorce

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:

• As the pool of available singles decreases, the quality of those available may also decrease.
• Older spouses may be more set in their ways and have a more cynical view of love, making it more difficult to establish a healthy and lasting marriage in the first place.
• Delaying marriage exposes you to the risk that at age thirty, you’ll feel immense pressure to partner with someone right now.

Understanding Your Brain and Your Body

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.

Learn New Skills While You Can

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.

Take Control of Your Primitive Brain

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.

Cultivate Real Confidence Through Mastery of Skills

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.

Cultivate a Positive Personality Through Action

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.

Be Aware of Your Body’s Childbearing Limits

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.

Keep Track of the Time

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.

Epilogue: Looking Forward

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.