Dr. Meg Jay is a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with 20-somethings. She wrote a book called The Defining Decade: Why Your 20s Matter and How to Make the Most of Them Now. In this episode, Dr. Jay talks about why 30 isn t the new 20 and what you can do now in your 20s to make the most of your adult life.
00:00:52.280Welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:55.440While I'm excited about today's episode,
00:00:56.720If you've been following our website for a while now,
00:00:59.460you may have seen us reference a book called
00:01:01.780The Defining Decade, Why Your 20s Matter and How to Make the Most of Them Now.
00:01:05.980It was written by a clinical psychologist named Dr. Meg Jay out of the University of Virginia.
00:01:10.920And Dr. Jay specializes in working with 20-somethings, 20-year-olds.
00:01:15.200And I know a lot of you who are listening to the podcast are in that age bracket.
00:01:18.340And the book is basically about the observations and research that has shown that 20-year-olds these days have a lot of anxieties, concerns, worries.
00:01:29.160And those worries and concerns come from treating your 20s as an extended adolescence instead of treating them as the time to launch yourself into adulthood.
00:01:39.020A lot of people these days say that, you know, 30 is the new 20, that when adulthood doesn't begin until you're 30, you can kind of not worry about your 20s.
00:01:49.020But the research has shown that that's not the case.
00:01:52.220There are a lot of advantages to your 20s.
00:01:55.460And if you don't take advantage of them now, there'll be some consequences later on in life.
00:02:01.220So in her book, she talks about those issues and concerns.
00:02:04.980But she also talks about things that 20-year-olds can do now to ensure that they have a fulfilling and enriched career, relationships, and adult life.
00:02:56.640Why do you call it the defining decade?
00:02:59.820I mean, it is the foundation for your adult life, which is why I like to work with that age group, because you can do a lot of good for people getting in on the action early.
00:04:02.180I mean, most people would agree they're in charge of their lives.
00:04:05.580They get to choose where they live, what they do, all that.
00:04:08.500And most people would agree that's pretty much what an adult sounds like.
00:04:11.700You don't have to do all of those things or in any certain order or in any certain way.
00:04:15.520But roughly that's what adulthood looks like.
00:04:18.720But now a lot of those milestones in terms of having a clearly defined career or owning a home or an apartment or partnering with someone or having kids,
00:04:28.300these things happen now later than they used to.
00:04:31.280And that's for a lot of good reasons, because we have birth control now, because women are working now, unfortunately, because the economy is not so great now.
00:04:41.540And so a lot of the kind of classic adult moves don't happen at 21 anymore.
00:04:53.280It just depends on what you make of the 20s in terms of the years leading up to that, that, fortunately, the downside of adult milestones happening a bit later is that people start to feel like their 20s don't count and that they're not relevant to adulthood,
00:05:11.420when really they remain developmentally a sweet spot.
00:05:31.320So most of my hours are spent behind closed doors with 20-somethings and 30-somethings hearing about how their lives are going and how they're not going.
00:08:07.340But the difficulty is that puts the burden on the individual to figure out, So what do I do now?
00:08:13.340And that makes people feel overwhelmed and anxious.
00:08:16.820And when people feel anxious, they like to avoid the things that make them feel anxious.
00:08:20.460So they go, Ugh, I'm not going to think about that now.
00:08:23.840I'm going to distract myself or kill time or, you know, whatever their habit may be to kick that can a little further down the road.
00:08:33.660And I imagine there's also a feeling of not only anxiety and a sense of being overwhelmed, but I'm sure there's, like, an immense amount of pressure, too, as you approach 30.
00:08:49.960I mean, and you feel like you have to, like, do all these things in a short amount of time.
00:08:54.120Yes, and so, you know, and necessity is the mother of invention.
00:09:00.840So, I mean, that's kind of, I mean, I think a feeling of urgency is good.
00:09:07.060But many 20-somethings, I mean, I've seen this so many times that the early 20-somethings in my office are stressed and anxious but avoidant.
00:09:18.600And then by the time they're in their later 20s, they're stressed and anxious and panicked because they can't avoid anymore.
00:09:28.840And so what I try to do is to help 20-somethings of all ages just go ahead and engage with what's making them anxious.
00:09:37.860It doesn't mean you have to have a desk job or a briefcase tomorrow, but it just means to take up intentionally what you think you might like out of adulthood.
00:09:47.220As scary as that may be, you can do it one step at a time, but just to really start to look at it instead of just postpone and then later feel like you may not have the time to get the life you want.
00:10:00.700So you devoted an entire section, which I thought was completely fascinating, about sort of like the neuroscience behind the 20-something brain.
00:10:09.740And this is actually kind of a new discovery because we thought that there was like a child brain and an adult brain and that was it.
00:10:26.580So we used to think that the brain was mostly fully baked by about eight or so years old, and that's because it had reached most of its volume in terms of the brain size.
00:10:39.960But as science became more sophisticated and we weren't just looking at brain volume, we were looking at connections in the brain, what actually happens in the brain,
00:10:48.260scientists discovered – not me, I was not one of those researchers – but researchers discovered that the brain goes through two critical periods of growth.
00:10:58.080One is in the first five years of life, so zero to five.
00:11:02.240And you hear about that a lot of that's when kids – you've got to learn to talk zero to five or it's going to be very difficult to do that after.
00:11:11.520That's when a lot of early development really is laid down in those first five years.
00:11:19.960And then people thought that just mostly grew from there.
00:11:23.660But they found out that the brain actually went through another critical period of growth, so another big explosion of neural connections in the teen and 20-something years.
00:11:36.760So somewhere around ages 15 to 20, there's an explosion of connections in the brain, which actually leads to a bit of a temporarily entangled mess.
00:11:48.540But ultimately, through pruning, you have kind of a new brain.
00:11:55.020Your brain is wiring itself to be an adult.
00:11:58.060And a lot of the action shifts from the more emotion-driven parts of the brain to the more reason-driven parts of the brain, such as the frontal lobe.
00:12:07.060So this is still going on in your 20s, and this is new to 20-somethings, this shift to frontal lobe thinking.
00:12:16.560So what your frontal lobe does is that's a part of your brain that thinks about time, and it thinks about probability, and it thinks about uncertainty.
00:12:25.720So this is new for 20-somethings, to not just think about the now, but also think about the later, to not just think about black and white answers, but okay, what about all those questions that don't have black and white answers, like what am I going to do with my life, where should I live, what kind of person is for me?
00:12:45.940I mean, these are really questions that they're gray areas.
00:12:50.980They're based on probabilities, not on guarantees.
00:12:53.620So that's all new thinking for 20-somethings.
00:12:57.540Now, some people hear that science, and they think, oh, well, I'll wait until I'm 30 to do something because my brain will be fully clicked on then.
00:13:05.700But that's actually not how it works, that you get better at thinking in gray areas and at thinking about the future and planning for the future if you practice that, and your 20-something brain wants to practice that.
00:13:24.040So, you know, 20-somethings in general are very uncomfortable with uncertainty.
00:13:29.680They're very uncomfortable with gray areas.
00:13:31.760They feel overwhelmed about the future, and usually by your 30s, hopefully, you've engaged with that enough or you've practiced that enough that you start to be able to do that with a little bit less stress.
00:13:45.260So I think you talk a lot about in your book how, you mentioned it just a minute ago, how 20-somethings are very, they have a present bias.
00:13:54.080I mean, how does that kind of shoot 20-somethings in the foot later on?
00:13:57.020Yeah, well, you know, so if we go back to what the frontal lobe is doing, so it's thinking about time and probability and uncertainty.
00:14:06.620So these are new concepts, really, for 20-somethings.
00:14:12.000I mean, who mostly have gone through life with semester-sized chunk living.
00:14:18.060So this is a different way of thinking.
00:14:20.460So they're more prone to cognitive errors that we make at all ages.
00:14:23.560But two of the cognitive errors, one is present bias, and that is I'm going to go with what makes me happy now, and I'll worry about later, later.
00:14:32.660One reason that they're so prone to doing that is they're also prone to optimism bias, and that's the idea that nothing bad is ever going to happen to me.
00:14:40.300So what happens is 20-somethings are, you know, without slowing down and really forcing themselves to think about the future and really think things through,
00:14:52.620they have a tendency to make short-sighted work or love decisions that may not have legs because their minds are very present-oriented, and they're very optimistic.
00:15:03.440It's hard for them to imagine that the choices they make today might hurt tomorrow.
00:15:07.260Okay, so let's talk – I mean, this is a podcast, a website kind of geared more towards men.
00:17:49.280I mean, it's the same thing, but in a different way.
00:17:51.960I think all, you know, a million years ago, Freud said, love and work, work and love, that's all there is.
00:17:57.640And, of course, there's more to life than that.
00:18:00.580But mostly, that's what my clients want to talk about, work and love.
00:18:05.480And for women, it's different because they feel, you know, a modern woman, and I would count myself among them, feel like I could have a rocking career, I could choose to stay home and be super mom, maybe I'll do both.
00:18:22.480And I think that I have a lot of ways I could go with this and not disappoint anyone.
00:18:27.240And I don't think, as much as we like to say that, you know, I don't know that there's no gender bias anymore, I don't think men have quite those same choices, that they feel a lot more burdened by the need to work.
00:18:46.340They know that they need to work to be, or they feel that they need to work and to be successful, to kind of be respected as men.
00:18:54.660They fear that they're going to work and one day be responsible for a whole gaggle of people, like a partner and children, and that that's a very real possibility.
00:19:07.040Whereas I think most women don't go into work thinking, gosh, one day I might have to support five people.
00:19:12.900But that 20 people feel afraid that that's going to happen to them, that they may not have the equal partner that they're hoping for.
00:19:22.780So work has a very different kind of pressure to it because they feel especially stressed about finding something good, finding something successful, but also wanting to find something that they enjoy.
00:19:39.400So it feels a lot less of a choice for men and still a lot more of a cultural imperative.
00:19:48.220In terms of relationships, you know, the 20-something men I work with want relationships more than we give them credit for.
00:19:57.360But they're not really sure if they have what 20-something women want, that they see images in the media about 20-something superwomen who have it all, want it all, are doing it all.
00:20:09.780And they feel like, well, I'm not there yet.
00:20:12.360I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to measure up.
00:20:17.460And I hear about that a lot in my office.
00:20:20.020We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
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