阅读理解（1）｜TED演讲_20岁光阴不再来
Why 30 is not the new 20.—Meg Jay
When I was in my 20s, I saw my very first psychotherapy client. Iwas a PH.D. student in clinical psychology of Berkeley. She was a 26 years oldwoman named Alex. And Alex walked into her first session wearing jeans and a bigslouchy top, and she dropped onto the couch in my office and kicked off her flatsand told me she was there to talk about guy-problems. You know when I heard this,I was so relieved. My classmate got an arsonist for her first client. And I gota twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys. This I thought I could handle.But I didn’t handle it. With the funny stories that Alex bring to session, itis easy for me just to nod my head while we kicked the can down the road. 30 isa new 20, Alex would say. And as far as I could tell, she was right. Workhappened later, marriage happened later, kids happened later, even death happenedlater. Twentysomethings like Alex and I had nothing but time. But before long,my supervisor pushed me to push Alex about her love life. I pushed back. I saidsure, she is dating down, she is sleeping with a knucklehead, but it is notlike she is gonna marry the guy. And then my supervisor said, not yet, but shemight marry the next one. Besides, the best time to work on Alex’s marriage is beforeshe has one. That’s what psychologists call an “Aha moment”. That was moment Irealized 30 is not the new 20. Yes, people settle down later than they use
d to,but that didn’t make Alex’s 20s a development downtime. That made Alex’s 20s adevelopmental sweet spot and we were sitting there, blowing it. That was when Irealized that this sort of benign neglect was a real problem and it had realconsequences, not just for Alex and her love life, but for the careers and the familiesand the futures of twentysomethings everywhere.
There are 50 million twentysomethings in the United States rightnow. We are talking about 15% of the population, or 100% if you consider thatno one getting to adulthood without going through their 20s first. Raise your handif you are in your 20s, I really want to see some twentysomethings here. Okay.Yeah, you all so awesome. Uh, if you working with twentysomethings, you lovingwith twentysomething, you’re losing sleep over twentysomethings, I want to see.Okay, awesome. Twentysomethings really matter. So I specialize in twentysomethingsbecause I believe that every single one of those 50 million twentysomethingsdeserves to know what psychologist, sociologist, neurologists and fertility specialistsalready know: that claiming your 20s is one of the simplest yet most transformativething you can do for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for theworld. This is not my opinion. These are the facts. We know that 80% of life’smost defining moments take place by age 35. That means that 8 out of 10 of thedecisions and experiences and “Aha moments” that make your life what it is willhave happened by your mid-30s. People who are over 40 don’t panic.pushed
This crowdis gonna be fine, I think. We know that the first 10 year of a career has theexponential impact on how much money you are going to earn. We know that morethan half of Americans are married or living with or dating their future partnerby 30. We know that the brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your20s as it rewires itself for adulthood, which means that whatever it is youwant to change about yourself, now it’s the time to change it. We know thatpersonality changes more during your 20s than at any other time in life. And weknow that female fertility peaks at age 28, and things get tricky after age 35.So, your 20s are the time to educate yourself about your body and your options.So, when we think about child development, we all know that the first 5 years area critical period for language and attachment in the brain. It’s a time whenyour ordinary day-to-day life has an inordinate impact on who you will become. Butwhat we hear less about is that there’re such a thing like adult development,and our 20s are that critical period of adult development.
But this isn’t what twentysomethings are hearing. Newspapers talkabout the changing timetable of adulthood. Researchers called the 20s an extendedadolescence. Journalists coin silly nicknames for twentysomethings like “twixsters”and “kidults”. It’s true. As a culture, we have trivialized what is actuallythe defining decade of adulthood. Leonard Bernstein said that to achieve greatthing you need a plan and not quite enough time. Isn’t that true? So, what youthink happens when you pat a twentys
omething on the head and you say “you had10 extra years to start your life”? Nothing happens. You have robbed thatperson of his urgency and ambition, and absolutely nothing happens. And thenevery day, smart, interesting twentysomethings like you or like your sons anddaughters come into my office and say things like this: I know my boyfriend isno good for me but this relationship doesn’t count, I’m just killing time”. Orthey say, “Everybody says as long as I get started on a career by the time I am30, I’ll be fine”. But then it starts to sound like this: “My 20 are almostover and I have nothing to show for myself, I had a better resume the day I graduatedfrom collage”. And then it starts to sound like this: “Dating in my 20s is likemusical chairs, everybody was running around and having fine, but then sometimearound 30 it was like the music turned off and everybody started to sittingdown. I didn’t want to be the only one left standing up, so, some times I thinkI married my husband because he was the closest chair to me at 30”. Where the twentysomethingsare here? Do not do that. Okay, now that sounds a little flip. But made nomistake, the stakes are very high. When a lot has been pushed to your 30s,there is enormous something pressure, to jump start a career, pick a city,partner up, and have two or three kids in a much shorter period of time. Manyof these things are incompatible, and as research is just starting to show,simply harder and more stressful to do all in once in our 30s. The postmillennialmidlife crisis isn’t buying a red sports car. It’s realizing you can’t havethat career you now want. It’s realizing you can’t have that child you now want,or you can give y
our child a sibling. Too many thirtysomethings or fortysomethingslook at themselves and at me, sitting across my room, and say about their 20s. “Whatwas I doing? What was I thinking?” I want to change what twentysomethings aredoing and thinking.
Here is the story about how that can go. It’s a story about a womannamed Emma. At 25, Emma came to my office because she was, in her words, havingan identity crisis. She said she thought she might like to work in art or entertainment,but she hadn’t decided yet. So, she’d spent the last few years, waiting tablesinstead. Because it was cheaper, she lived with her boyfriend who displayed histemper more than his ambition. And as hard as her 20s were, her early life hadbeen even harder. She often cried in our sessions, but then would collectherself by saying, “you can’t pick your family but you can pick your friends”.By one day, Emma comes in and she hangs her head in her lap, and she sobbed formost of the hour. She just bought a new address book, and she’d spent themorning filling in her many contacts. But then she’d been left staring at thatempty blank that comes after the words “in case of emergency, please call:”.She was nearly hysterical when she looked at me and said, “Who’s gonna be therefor me if I get in a car wreck? Who’s gonna take care of me if I have cancer?”You know in that moment, it took everything I had not to say: “I will.” Butwhat Emma needed was not some therapist who really, really cared. Emma needed abetter life and I knew this was her c
hance. I had learned too much since I firstworked with Alex, to just sit there while Emma was defining decade went paradingby. 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 forget about having an identity crisis and getsome identity capital. By “get identity capital”, I mean do something that addsvalue to who you are, do something that’s an investment in a who you want to benext. I didn’t know the the future of Emma’s career, and no one knows thefuture of work. But I do know this, identity capital begets identity capital.So, now it’s the time for that cross-country job, that internship, that startupyou want to try. I’m not discounting twentysomethings exploration here, but Iam discounting exploration that’s not supposed to count, which, by the way, isnot exploration, that’s procrastination. I told Emma to explore work and makeit count. Second, I told Emma that the urban tribe is overrated. Best friendsare great for giving rides to the airport, but twentysomethings who huddletogether with like-minded peers limit who they know, what they know, how theythink, how they speak and where they work. That new piece of capital, that newperson to date almost always comes form outside the inner circle. New thingscome from what are called our weak ties, our friends’friends’ friends. So yes,half of twentysomethings are un- or under-employed. But half aren’t. And weakties are how you get yourself into that group. Half of new j
obs are neverposted. So, reaching out to your neighbor’s boss is how you get that unpostedjob. It’s not cheating, it’s the science of how information spreads. Last butnot least, Emma believed that you can’t pick your family but you can pick yourfriends. You know this was true for her growing-up, but as a twentysomething,soon Emma would pick her family, when she partnered with someone and created afamily of her own. I told Emma the time to start picking your family is now. Nowyou may be thinking that 30 is actually a better time to settle down than 20,or even 25. And I agree with you. But grabbing whoever you’re living with orsleeping with when everyone on Facebook starts to walking down the aisle is notprogress. The beat time to work on your marriage is before you have one. Andthat means being as intentional with love as you are with work. Picking yourfamily is about consciously choosing who and what you want, rather than justmaking it work or killing time with whoever happens to be choosing you.
So, what happened to Emma. Well, we went through that address bookand she found an old roommate’s cousin who worked at an art museum in anotherstate. That weak tie helped her get a job there, that job offer gave her thereason to leave that live-in boyfriend. Now, five years later, she is a specialevents planner for museums, she’s married to a man she mindfully chose. Sheloves her new career. She loves her new family and she sent me a card that said,“now the emergency contact blan
ks don’t seem big enough”. Now, Emma’s storymade that sound easy, but that’s what I love about working with twentysomethings,they are so easy to help. Twentysomethings are like airplanes just living LAX, boundfor somewhere west. Right after takeoff, a slight change in cause is thedifference between landing in Alaska or Fiji. Likewise, a 21 or 25 or even 29,one good conversation, one good break, one good Ted Talk can have an enormouseffect across years and even generations to come. So, here is the idea worthspreading to every twentysomething you know, it is 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: 30 is not the new 20, so claim your adulthood, getsome identity capital, use your weak ties, pick your family. Don’t be definedby what you didn’t know or didn’t do. You are deciding your life right now.
Thank you!

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