Why your twenties matter pdf

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She thought she was supposed to be having the time of her life but mostly she felt stressed and anxious. When she came to sessions, she kicked off her Toms, hiked up her jeans, and caught me up on the weekend. Our conversations often went multimedia as she pulled up e-mails and photos to show me, and texts chirped into our sessions with late-breaking news. Somewhere between the weekend updates, I found out the following: She thought she might like to work in fund-raising, and she hoped to figure out what she wanted to do by age thirty.

This was my cue. I am too passionate about the twenties to let Kate, or any other twentysomething, waste his or her time. As a clinical psychologist who specializes in adult development, I have seen countless twentysomethings spend too many years living without perspective. What is worse are the tears shed by thirtysomethings and fortysomethings because they are now paying a steep price —professionally, romantically, economically, reproductively—for a lack of vision in their twenties.

I liked Kate and wanted to help her so I insisted she be on time for sessions. Perhaps most important, Kate and I debated about what therapy—and her twenties—was supposed to be about. Kate wondered aloud whether she ought to spend a few years in therapy figuring out her relationship with her father or whether she should use that money and time on a Eurail pass to search for who she was.

I voted for neither. It seemed unfair to talk about her weekends when it was her weekdays that made her so unhappy. Not long after these conversations, Kate dropped onto the couch in my office. Uncharacteristically teary and agitated, she stared out the window and bounced her legs nervously as she told me about Sunday brunch with four friends from college.

Two were in town for a conference. One had just returned from recording lullabies in Greece for her dissertation research. As the group sat at their table, Kate looked around and felt behind. She wanted what her friends had—a job or a purpose or a boyfriend—so she spent the rest of the day looking for leads on Craigslist. The ones that did she was starting to doubt she could get. Kate went to bed feeling vaguely betrayed.

No relationship. Even her relationship with her father was improving. In our last sessions together, Kate thanked me for helping her catch up. School ended with high school or maybe college, and young parents focused on making money and keeping house. Because one income was typically enough to support a family, men worked but two-thirds of women did not. The men and women who did work could expect to stay in the same field for life.

Divorce and the Pill were just becoming mainstream. Then, in the span of one generation, came an enormous cultural shift. User- friendly birth control flooded the market and women flooded the workplace.

By the new millennium, only about half of twentysomethings were married by age thirty and even fewer had children, making the twenties a time of newfound freedom. Almost by definition, the twenties became a betwixt-and-between time. By , the twenties were dubbed the odyssey years, a time meant for wandering. And journalists and researchers everywhere began to refer to twentysomethings with silly nicknames such as kidults, pre-adults, and adultescents.

Some say the twentysomething years are an extended adolescence while others call them an emerging adulthood. Twentysomethings like Kate have been caught in a swirl of hype and misunderstanding, much of which has trivialized what is actually the most defining decade of our adult lives. Yet even as we dismiss the twentysomething years, we fetishize them.

The twentysomething years have never been more in the zeitgeist. Popular culture has an almost obsessive focus on the twenties such that these freebie years appear to be all that exist. Child celebrities and everyday kids spend their youth acting twenty, while mature adults and the Real Housewives dress, and are sculpted, to look twenty-nine. The young look older and the old look younger, collapsing the adult lifespan into one long twentysomething ride.

Even a new term—amortality—has been coined to describe living the same way, at the same pitch, from our teens until death. This is a contradictory and dangerous message. This causes too many men and women to squander the most transformative years of their adult lives, only to pay the price in decades to come. Our cultural attitude toward the twenties is something like good old American irrational exuberance.

Twenty-first-century twentysomethings have grown up alongside the dot-com craze, the supersize years, the housing bubble, and the Wall Street boom. Adults of all backgrounds failed to do the math.

Now twentysomethings have been set up to be another bubble ready to burst. Inside my office, I have seen the bust. 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 s counterparts when adjusted for inflation. Because short-term work has replaced long-term careers in our country, as jobs come and go so do twentysomethings themselves. The average twentysomething will have more than a handful of jobs in their twenties alone.

It seems everybody wants to be a twentysomething except for many twentysomethings themselves.