The twenties are that critical period of adulthood.
These are the years when it will be easiest to start the lives we want. And no matter what we do, the twenties are an inflection point—the great reorganization—a time when the experiences we have disproportionately influence the adult lives we will lead.
In sections titled “Work,” “Love,” and “The Brain and the Body,” we will learn about four separate—but interwoven—critical periods that unfold across the twentysomething years. In “Work,” we find out why twentysomething jobs are likely the most professionally and economically consequential we will ever have—even though they may not look so good. In “Love,” we will hear why our twentysomething relationship choices may be even more important than those at work. And in “The Brain and the Body,” we will learn how our still-developing twentysomething brains are wiring us to be the adults we will become just as our twentysomething bodies kick off our most fertile years.
Journalists may throw their hands up with headlines that read “What Is It About Twentysomethings?” and “Why Won’t They Just Grow Up?,” but the twenties aren’t a mystery. We do know how the twenties work, and twentysomethings everywhere deserve to know it too.
In the chapters ahead, I blend the latest research on adult development with the previously untold stories of my clients and students. I will share what psychologists, sociologists, neurologists, economists, human resources executives, and reproductive specialists know about the unique power of the twentysomething years and how they shape our lives. Along the way, I challenge some media-driven misconceptions about the twenties, and show how common wisdom about the twentysomething years is often wrong.
We will find out why it’s the people we hardly know, and not our closest friends, who will improve our lives most dramatically. We will learn how joining the world of work makes us feel better, not worse. We will hear why living together may not be the best way to test a relationship. We will learn how our personalities change more during our twenties than at any time before or after. We will see how we do pick our families, and not just our friends. We will understand how confidence grows not from the inside out, but from the outside in. We will hear how the stories we tell about ourselves affect whom we date and what jobs we get. We will start with why “Who am I?” is a question best answered not with a protracted identity crisis, but with one or two good pieces of something called identity capital.
Not long ago, twentysomethings like Kate’s parents walked down the aisle before they thought through who they were. They made life’s biggest decisions before their brains knew how to make them. Now twenty-first-century twentysomethings have the opportunity to build the lives they want—ones in which work, love, the brain and the body might all be in on it together. But this doesn’t just happen with age, or optimism. It takes, as Kate said, intentionality, and some good information, or we will miss it. And for too long, good information has been hard to find.
A colleague of mine likes to say that twentysomethings are like airplanes, planes just leaving New York City bound for somewhere west. Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in either Seattle or San Diego. But once a plane is nearly in San Diego, only a big detour will redirect it to the northwest.
Likewise, in the twentysomething years, even a small shift can radically change where we end up in our thirties and beyond. The twenties are an up-in-the-air and turbulent time, but if we can figure out how to navigate, even a little bit at a time, we can get further, faster, than at any other stage in life. It is a pivotal time when the things we do—and the things we don’t do—will have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come.
So let’s get going. The time is now.
WORK
Identity Capital
Adults don’t emerge. They’re made.
—Kay Hymowitz, social commentator
We are born not all at once, but by bits.
—Mary Antin, writer
Helen came to therapy because she was “having an identity crisis.” She moved from nanny job to yoga retreat and back again as she waited for what she called “that lightning bolt of intuition.” Helen always seemed dressed for an exercise class whether she was going to one or not and, for a time, her casual lifestyle was the envy of friends who had gone straight to the “real world,” or its runner-up, graduate school. She came, she went. She enjoyed life for a while.
But before long, Helen’s inner search for self became torturous. At twenty-seven, she felt as though the very friends who used to covet her adventures now pitied her. They were moving forward while she was pushing other people’s babies around town in strollers.
Helen’s parents had been specific about what college should be about: Tri-Delt and pre-med. All this despite the fact that Helen was a talented photographer who not-so-secretly wanted to major in art—and was not at all the sorority type. From her first semester, Helen hated pre-med classes and did poorly in them. She envied the interesting reading her friends were doing and grabbed every opportunity for artsy extracurriculars. After two years of suffering through biology requirements and packing her spare time with what she really enjoyed, Helen changed her major to art. Her parents said, “What are you going to do with that?”
After graduation, Helen tried her hand at freelance photography. Once the unpredictability of work began to affect her ability to pay her cell-phone bill, the life of an artist lost its luster. Without a pre-med degree, a clear future as a photographer, or even decent grades from college, Helen saw no way to move ahead. She wanted to stay in photography but wasn’t sure how. She started nannying, the checks flowed under the table, the years ticked by, and her parents said, “We told you so.”
Now Helen hoped that the right retreat or the right conversation in therapy or with friends might reveal, once and for all, who she was. Then, she said, she could get started on a life. I told her I wasn’t so sure, and that an extended period of navel-gazing is usually counterproductive for twentysomethings.
“But this is what I’m supposed to be doing,” Helen said.
“What is?” I asked.
“Having my crisis,” she replied.
“Says who?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Everybody. Books.”
“I think you’re misunderstanding what an identity crisis is and how you move out of one,” I said. “Have you ever heard of Erik Erikson?”
Erik Salomonsen was a blond-haired German boy, born to a dark-haired mother and to a father he never knew. On Erik’s third birthday, his mother married a local pediatrician who adopted Erik, making him Erik Homburger. They raised him in the Jewish tradition. At temple, Erik was teased for his fair complexion. At school, he was teased for being Jewish. Erik often felt confused about who he was.
After high school, Erik hoped to become an artist. He traveled around Europe, taking art classes and sometimes sleeping under bridges. At twenty-five, he returned to Germany and worked as an art teacher, studied Montessori education, got married, and started a family. After teaching the children of some very prominent psychoanalysts, Erik was analyzed by Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna, and he went on to earn a degree in psychoanalysis.
In his thirties, Erik moved his family to the United States, where he became a famed psychoanalyst and developmental theorist. He taught at Harvard, Yale, and Berkeley and wrote several books before winning a Pulitzer Prize. Hinting at his feelings of fatherlessness and his status as a self-made man, he changed his name to Erik Erikson, meaning “Erik, son of himself.” Erik Erikson is best known for coining the term “identity crisis.” It was 1950.
Despite being a product of the twentieth