When Kate graduated from college, she had hoped to experience the expansiveness of the twentysomething years, something she was strongly encouraged to do by her parents. Her mother and father married just out of college because they wanted to go to Europe together and, in the early 1970s, this was not condoned by either of their families. They honeymooned in Italy and came back pregnant. Kate’s dad put his accounting degree to work while Kate’s mom got busy raising four kids, of whom Kate was the youngest. So far, Kate had spent her own twenties trying to make up for what her parents missed. She thought she was supposed to be having the time of her life but mostly she felt stressed and anxious. “My twenties are paralyzing,” she said. “No one told me it would be this hard.”
Kate filled her mind with twentysomething drama to distract herself from the real state of her life, and she seemed to want the same for her therapy hours. 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. “Thirty is the new twenty,” she said. 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. I interrupted stories about the latest hookup to ask about the status of her driver’s license and her job search. 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. I told Kate that while most therapists would agree with Socrates that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” a lesser-known quote by American psychologist Sheldon Kopp might be more important here: “The unlived life is not worth examining.”
I explained it would be irresponsible of me to sit quietly while I watched the most foundational years of Kate’s life go parading by. It would be reckless for us to focus on Kate’s past when I knew her future was in danger. It seemed unfair to talk about her weekends when it was her weekdays that made her so unhappy. I also genuinely felt that Kate’s relationship with her father could not change until she had something new to bring to it.
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. Another brought along her fiancé. 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. Most of the jobs (and the men) didn’t seem interesting. The ones that did she was starting to doubt she could get. Kate went to bed feeling vaguely betrayed.
In my office, she said, “My twenties are more than half over. Sitting at that restaurant, I realized I didn’t have anything to show for myself. No real résumé. No relationship. I don’t even know what I’m doing in this town.” She reached for a tissue and broke into tears. “I really got kicked by the notion that getting clear on your path was overrated. I wish I’d been more . . . I don’t know . . . intentional.”
It wasn’t too late for Kate, but she did need to get going. By the time Kate’s therapy ended, she had her own apartment, a driver’s license, a boyfriend with some potential, and a job as a fund-raiser for a nonprofit. Even her relationship with her father was improving. In our last sessions together, Kate thanked me for helping her catch up. She said she finally felt like she was living her life “in real time.”
The twentysomething years are real time and ought to be lived that way. A thirty-is-the-new-twenty culture has told us that the twenties don’t matter. Freud once said, “Love and work, work and love . . . that’s all there is,” and these things take shape later than they used to.
When Kate’s parents were in their twenties, the average twenty-one-year-old was married and caring for a new baby. 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. In those days, the median home price in the United States was $17,000. 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. We began to hear that maybe college was too expensive and less necessary, yet graduate school was more necessary, and in either case there was time for “time off.”
For hundreds of years, twentysomethings moved directly from being sons and daughters to being husbands and wives, but within just a few decades a new developmental period opened up. Waking up every day somewhere between their childhood homes and their own mortgages, twentysomethings like Kate weren’t sure what to make of the time.
Almost by definition, the twenties became a betwixt-and-between time. A 2001 article in the Economist introduced the “Bridget Jones Economy” and a 2005 cover of Time ran with a headline “Meet the Twixters,” both of which informed us that the twenties were now disposable years lubricated by disposable income. By 2007, 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. This so-called changing timetable for adulthood has demoted twentysomethings to “not-quite-adults” just when they need to engage the most. 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. We are led to believe the twentysomething years don’t matter, yet, with the glamorization of and near obsession with the twenties, there is little to remind us that anything else ever will. 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. Start-ups imagined slick websites would generate money and demand; individuals failed to consider the fat and calories that went along with supersizing fast food; homeowners banked on ever-appreciating homes; financial managers envisioned markets always on the rise. Adults of all ages let what psychologists call “unrealistic optimism”—the