translator: joseph genireviewer: morton bast when i was in my 20s, i saw my very first psychotherapy client. i was a ph.d. studentin clinical psychology at berkeley. she was a 26-year-old woman named alex. now alex walked into her first sessionwearing jeans and a big slouchy top, and she droppedonto the couch in my office and kicked off her flats and told me she was thereto talk about guy problems.
now when i heard this, i was so relieved. my classmate got an arsonistfor her first client. (laughter) and i got a twentysomethingwho wanted to talk about boys. this i thought i could handle. but i didn't handle it. with the funny storiesthat alex would bring to session, it was easy for me just to nod my head while we kicked the can down the road.
"thirty's the new 20," alex would say, and as far as i could tell, she was right. work happened later,marriage happened later, kids happened later,even death happened later. twentysomethings like alex and ihad nothing but time. but before long, my supervisor pushed meto push alex about her love life. i pushed back. i said, "sure, she's dating down, she's sleeping with a knucklehead,
but it's not like she's goingto marry the guy." and then my supervisor said, "not yet, but she might marrythe next one. besides, the best timeto work on alex's marriage is before she has one." that's what psychologistscall an "aha!" moment. that was the moment i realized,30 is not the new 20. yes, people settle down laterthan they used to, but that didn't make alex's 20sa developmental downtime.
that made alex's 20sa developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there, blowing it. that was when i realizedthat this sort of benign neglect was a real problem,and it had real consequences, not just for alex and her love life but for the careersand the families and the futures of twentysomethings everywhere. there are 50 million twentysomethingsin the united states right now. we're talking about 15 percentof the population,
or 100 percent if you consider that no one's getting through adulthoodwithout going through their 20s first. raise your hand if you're in your 20s. i really want to seesome twentysomethings here. oh, yay! you are all awesome. if you work with twentysomethings,you love a twentysomething, you're losing sleepover twentysomethings, i want to see — okay. awesome,twentysomethings really matter. so, i specialize in twentysomethingsbecause i believe
that every single one of those50 million twentysomethings deserves to know what psychologists, sociologists, neurologistsand fertility specialists already know: that claiming your 20sis one of the simplest, yet most transformative, things you can do for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for the world. this is not my opinion.
these are the facts. we know that 80 percentof life's most defining moments take place by age 35. that means that eight out of 10 of the decisions and experiencesand "aha!" moments that make your life what it is will have happened by your mid-30s. people who are over 40, don't panic. this crowd is going to be fine, i think.
we know that the first10 years of a career has an exponential impacton how much money you're going to earn. we know that more than half of americans are married or are living with or datingtheir future partner by 30. we know that the brain caps off its second and lastgrowth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood, which means that whatever it is you wantto change about yourself, now is the time to change it.
we know that personalitychanges more during your 20s than at any other time in life, and we know that female fertilitypeaks at age 28, and things get tricky after age 35. so your 20s are the timeto educate yourself about your body and your options. so when we think about child development, we all know that the firstfive years are a critical period for language and attachment in the brain.
it's a time when your ordinary,day-to-day life has an inordinate impacton who you will become. but what we hear less aboutis that there's such a thing as adult development, and our 20s are that critical periodof adult development. but this isn't whattwentysomethings are hearing. newspapers talk about the changingtimetable of adulthood. researchers call the 20san extended adolescence. journalists coin silly nicknamesfor twentysomethings
like "twixters" and "kidults." (laughing) it's true! as a culture, we have trivialized what is actuallythe defining decade of adulthood. leonard bernstein saidthat to achieve great things, you need a plan and not quite enough time. (laughing) isn't that true? so what do you think happens when you pat a twentysomethingon the head and you say,
"you have 10 extra yearsto start your life"? nothing happens. you have robbed that personof his urgency and ambition, and absolutely nothing happens. and then every day, smart,interesting twentysomethings like you or like your sons and daughters come into my officeand say things like this: "i know my boyfriend's no good for me, but this relationship doesn't count.i'm just killing time."
or they say, "everybody saysas long as i get started on a career by the timei'm 30, i'll be fine." but then it starts to sound like this: "my 20s are almost over,and i have nothing to show for myself. i had a better rã©sumã© the dayafter i graduated from college." and then it starts to sound like this: "dating in my 20s was like musical chairs. everybody was running aroundand having fun, but then sometime around 30it was like the music turned off
and everybody started sitting down. i didn't want to bethe only one left standing up, so sometimes i think i married my husband because he was the closestchair to me at 30." where are the twentysomethings here? do not do that. okay, now that sounds a little flip,but make no mistake, the stakes are very high. when a lot has been pushed to your 30s,
there is enormous thirtysomething pressure to jump-start a career,pick a city, partner up, and have two or three kidsin a much shorter period of time. many of these things are incompatible, and as research is just starting to show, simply harder and more stressful to doall at once in our 30s. the post-millennial midlife crisisisn't buying a red sports car. it's realizing you can't havethat career you now want. it's realizing you can't havethat child you now want,
or you can't give your child a sibling. too many thirtysomethingsand fortysomethings look at themselves, and at me,sitting across the room, and say about their 20s, "what was i doing? what was i thinking?" i want to change what twentysomethingsare doing and thinking. here's a story about how that can go. it's a story about a woman named emma. at 25, emma came to my office
because she was, in her words,having an identity crisis. she said she thought she mightlike to work in art or entertainment, but she hadn't decided yet, so she'd spent the last few yearswaiting tables instead. because it was cheaper,she lived with a boyfriend who displayed his tempermore than his ambition. and as hard as her 20s were, her early life had been even harder. she often cried in our sessions,
but then would collect herself by saying, "you can't pick your family,but you can pick your friends." well one day, emma comes inand she hangs her head in her lap, and she sobbed for most of the hour. she'd just bought a new address book, and she'd spent the morningfilling in her many contacts, but then she'd been leftstaring at that empty blank that comes after the words "in case of emergency, please call ..."
she was nearly hystericalwhen she looked at me and said, "who's going to be there for meif i get in a car wreck? who's going to take care of meif i have cancer?" now in that moment,it took everything i had not to say, "i will." but what emma needed wasn't some therapistwho really, really cared. emma needed a better life,and i knew this was her chance. i had learned too muchsince i first worked with alex to just sit therewhile emma's defining decade
went parading by. so over the next weeks and months, i told emma three things that every twentysomething,male or female, deserves to hear. first, i told emma to forgetabout having an identity crisis and get some identity capital. by "get identity capital," i mean do somethingthat adds value to who you are.
do something that's an investment in who you might want to be next. i didn't know the future of emma's career, and no one knows the future of work, but i do know this: identity capital begets identity capital. so now is the timefor that cross-country job, that internship, that startupyou want to try. i'm not discountingtwentysomething exploration here,
but i am discounting explorationthat's not supposed to count, which, by the way, is not exploration. that's procrastination. i told emma to explorework and make it count. second, i told emmathat the urban tribe is overrated. best friends are greatfor giving rides to the airport, but twentysomethings who huddle togetherwith like-minded peers limit who they know, what they know, how they think,
how they speak, and where they work. that new piece of capital,that new person to date almost always comesfrom outside the inner circle. new things comefrom what are called our weak ties, our friends of friends of friends. so yes, half of twentysomethingsare un- or under-employed. but half aren't, and weak ties are howyou get yourself into that group. half of new jobs are never posted,
so reaching out to your neighbor's bossis how you get that unposted job. it's not cheating. it's the scienceof how information spreads. last but not least, emma believed that you can't pick your family,but you can pick your friends. now this was true for her growing up, but as a twentysomething,soon emma would pick her family when she partnered with someoneand created a family of her own. i told emma the timeto start picking your family is now. now you may be thinking that 30is actually a better time to settle down
than 20, or even 25, and i agree with you. but grabbing whoever you're livingwith or sleeping with when everyone on facebookstarts walking down the aisle is not progress. the best time to work on your marriageis before you have one, and that means beingas intentional with love as you are with work. picking your familyis about consciously choosing
who and what you want rather than just making it workor killing time with whoever happens to be choosing you. so what happened to emma? well, we went through that address book, and she found an old roommate's cousin who worked at an art museumin another state. that weak tie helped her get a job there. that job offer gave her the reasonto leave that live-in boyfriend.
now, five years later, she's a specialevents planner for museums. she's married to a manshe mindfully chose. she loves her new career,she loves her new family, and she sent me a card that said, "now the emergency contact blanks don't seem big enough." now emma's story made that sound easy, but that's what i love about workingwith twentysomethings. they are so easy to help.
twentysomethings are like airplanesjust leaving lax, bound for somewhere west. right after takeoff,a slight change in course is the difference between landingin alaska or fiji. likewise, at 21 or 25 or even 29, one good conversation, one good break, one good ted talk,can have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come. so here's an idea worth spreading
to every twentysomething you know. it's as simple as what i learnedto say to alex. it's what i now have the privilege of saying to twentysomethingslike emma every single day: thirty is not the new 20,so claim your adulthood, get some identity capital,use your weak ties, pick your family. don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do.
you're deciding your life right now. thank you. (applause)
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