Inside my office, I have seen the bust.
The Great Recession and its continuing aftermath have left many twentysomethings feeling naïve, even devastated. 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.
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. One-third will move in any given year, leaving family and friends and résumés and selves scattered. About one in eight go back home to live with Mom or Dad, at least in part because salaries are down and college debt is up, with the number of students owing more than $40,000 having increased tenfold in the past ten years.
It seems everybody wants to be a twentysomething except for many twentysomethings themselves. All around, “thirty is the new twenty” is starting to get a new reaction: “God, I hope not.”
Every day, I work with twentysomethings who feel horribly deceived by the idea that their twenties would be the best years of their lives. People imagine that to do therapy with twentysomethings is to listen to the adventures and misadventures of carefree people, and there is some of that. But behind closed doors, my clients have unsettling things to say:
| • | I feel like I’m in the middle of the ocean. Like I could swim in any direction but I can’t see land on any side so I don’t know which way to go. |
| • | I feel like I just have to keep hooking up and see what sticks. |
| • | I didn’t know I’d be crying in the bathroom at work every day. |
| • | The twentysomething years are a whole new way of thinking about time. There’s this big chunk of time and a whole bunch of stuff needs to happen somehow. |
| • | My sister is thirty-five and single. I’m terrified that’s going to happen to me. |
| • | I can’t wait to be liberated from my twenties. |
| • | I’d better not still be doing this at thirty. |
| • | Last night I prayed for just one thing in my life to be certain. |
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.
Uncertainty makes people anxious, and distraction is the twenty-first-century opiate of the masses. So twentysomethings like Kate are tempted, and even encouraged, to turn away and be twixters, to close their eyes and hope for the best. A 2011 article in New York magazine arguing that “the kids are actually sort of alright” explained that while today’s twentysomethings face some of the worst economic conditions since World War II, they are optimistic. The article explained that with free music online “you don’t need to have money to buy a huge record collection.” Facebook, Twitter, Google, and free apps “have made life on a small budget a lot more diverting,” it reassures.
There is a saying that “hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper.” While hopefulness is a useful state of mind that may help many downtrodden twentysomethings get out of bed in the morning, at the end of the day they need more than optimism because at the end of their twenties many will want more than diversions and record collections.
I know this because even more compelling than my sessions with struggling twentysomethings are my sessions with the earliest twixters, the now-thirtysomethings and forty-somethings who wish they had done some things differently. I have witnessed the true heartache that accompanies the realization that life is not going to add up. We may hear that thirty is the new twenty, but—recession or not—when it comes to work and love and the brain and the body, forty is definitely not the new thirty.
Many twentysomethings assume life will come together quickly after thirty, and maybe it will. But it is still going to be a different life. We imagine that if nothing happens in our twenties then everything is still possible in our thirties. We think that by avoiding decisions now, we keep all of our options open for later—but not making choices is a choice all the same.
When a lot has been left to do, there is enormous thirty-something pressure to get ahead, get married, pick a city, make money, buy a house, enjoy life, go to graduate school, start a business, get a promotion, save for college and retirement, and have two or three children in a much shorter period of time. Many of these things are incompatible and, as research is just starting to show, simply harder to do all at the same time in our thirties.
Life does not end at thirty, but it does have a categorically different feel. A spotty résumé that used to reflect twentysomething freedom suddenly seems suspect and embarrassing. A good first date leads not so much to romantic fantasies about “The One” as to calculations about the soonest possible time marriage and a baby might happen.
Of course, for many it does happen and, upon the birth of their first child, thirtysomething couples often speak of new purpose and meaning. There can also be a deep and heart-wrenching sense of regret: knowing it will be difficult to provide for their child as they now wish they could; finding that fertility problems or sheer exhaustion stand in the way of the families they now want; realizing they will be nearly sixty when their children go to college and maybe seventy at their weddings; recognizing they may never know their own grandchildren.
Parents like Kate’s are so intent on protecting their kids from their brand of the midlife crisis—their regret over settling down too soon—that these parents fail to see an entirely new midlife crisis is afoot. The postmillennial midlife crisis is figuring out that while we were busy making sure we didn’t miss out on anything, we were setting ourselves up to miss out on some of the most important things of all. It is realizing that doing something later is not automatically the same as doing something better. Too many smart, well-meaning thirty-somethings and fortysomethings grieve a little as they face a lifetime of catching up. They look at themselves—and at me sitting across the room—and say about their twenties, “What was I doing? What was I thinking?”
I urge twentysomethings to reclaim their twenties, their status as adults, and their futures. This book will show them why they should and how they can.
In the pages ahead, I want to convince you that thirty is not the new twenty. Not because twentysomethings don’t or shouldn’t settle down later than their parents did. Most everyone agrees that work and love are happening later at least as much because of economics as because they can. I want to persuade you that thirty is not the new twenty precisely because we settle down later than we used to. What this has done is made the twenties not an irrelevant downtime but a developmental sweet spot that comes only once.
In almost all areas of development, there is what is called a critical period, a time when we are primed for growth and change, when simple exposure can lead to dramatic transformation. Children