According to clinical psychologist, Meg Jay, the “defining decade” is your twenties. In her new book by the same title, Jay does her best to expel the now socially accepted theory that “thirty is the new twenty.” Having worked with hundreds of twentysomethings in her practice over the past ten years, Jay weaves together personal stories of her clients with findings of other psychologists, sociologists, neurologists, reproductive specialists, human resources executives and economists. From the introduction:
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… [a]dults of all ages let what psychologists call “unrealistic optimism”-the idea that nothing bad will ever happen to you-overtake logic and reason. Adults of all backgrounds failed to do the math. Now twentysomethings have been set up to be another bubble ready to burst.
Being a twentysomething myself, I’m not sure if I buy into the assumption that I am a “bubble ready to burst,” but I can certainly empathize with the notion that twentysomethings are set up to be “too big to fail” and then get lost in the endless possibilities of being young and having everything ahead of them.
Jay sets the book up in three sections- “Work,” “Love,” and “The Brain and the Body.” The first two sections on Work and Love contain individual accounts of twentysomethings who met with Jay after seeking counseling for each respective subject area of their lives. The third section on “The Brain and the Body” actually explains the neuroscience of the twentysomething brain and its physical development:
By the time we reach our twenties, the brain has gotten as big as it is going to be, but it is still refining is network of connections. Communication in the brain takes place at the level of the neuron, and the brain is made up of about one hundred billion of these, each of which can make thousands of different connections. Speed and efficiency are paramount and are the hard-won result of two critical periods of growth.
The two critical periods of growth occur in the first eighteen months of life and then again in our twenties (which is a fact I was completely unaware of.) Jay concludes the book with sound advice for making a timeline and “Doing the Math” about the reality of future prospects for a twentysomething. Time is a concept that a lot of twentysomethings do not realize has a huge impact on their later lives, and Jay has written a sound work of non-fiction that drives this point home without being too preachy or condescending. I recommend this book for any upcoming college graduates you may know who could use an easy-to-read book of advice for the future.
The Defining Decade by Meg Jay, Ph.D (Twelve Press, 2012)
by Anna
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