The Defining Decade –– Meg Jay

• Date Started: [[December 21st, 2020]]
• Date Finished: [[December 28th, 2020]]
• Type:: Kindle

Notes

• The book has some really good insights but highlights a very Western way of thinking about life and meaning through work and love. I think certain aspects about the book are very American centered - like the people Jay talks to and opinions about work and relationships. I'd be curious to see the kind of advice Jay would give me or someone from a third-world country, where life revolves around more than this.
• It wasn't as life-changing as I thought it would be, most of what was said were things that I already knew, but didn't know I needed to be articulated. At the same time, it wasn't as overrated as the other reviews I read said it would be.
• It was good to read Jay's commentary and how she advices people who come from different backgrounds.

Highlights:

• While most therapists would agree with Socrates that "the unexamined life is not worth living", a lesser known quote by American psychologist Sheldon Kopp might be more important here: "The unlived life is not worth examining."
• The young look older and the old look younger, collapsing the adult lifespan into one long twentysomething ride. Even a new term - amortality - has been coined to describe living the same way, at the same pitch, from our teens till our death.
  • [[Homo Deus - Yuval Harari]] and Amortality
• Uncertainty makes people anxious, and distraction is the twenty-first-century opiate of the masses.
• In almost all areas of development, there's a "critical period", a time when we are primed for growth and change, when simple exposure can lead to dramatic transformation.
  • The 20s are that critical period of adulthood.
  • These are the years it will be the easiest to start the lives we want. And no matter what we do, these years are an inflection point, a time when the experiences we have disproportionately influence the adult lives we lead.

• Identity Capital

  • Take the job with the most career capital. Where you'll build the most relationships, learn the most, grow the most. This doesn't necessarily mean the place you'll make the most money.
    • The advice: Many people in their 20s aren't building up any of them by sitting around at home or taking dead-end jobs. GPA and college degrees don't really count, since everyone has them
  • Identity capital is our collection of personal assets, individual resources that we assemble over time. These are the investments we make in ourselves, the things we do well enough or long enough that they become part of who we are.
  • Some identity capital goes into a resume - degrees, jobs, test scores and clubs. Other identity capital is more personal, how we speak, where we are from, how we solve problems, etc.
  • Researchers who have looked at how people resolve identity crises have found that lives that are all capital and no crisis -- all work and no exploration -- feel rigid and conventional. More crisis than capital is a problem, too.
  • Twentysomethings who take time to explore and also have the nerve to make commitments along the way construct stronger identities.
  • Most often, identities and careers are made not out of college majors and GPAs but out of a couple of door-opening pieces of identity capital.
  • "Research on underemployed twentysomethings tells us that those who are underemployed for as little as nine months tend to be more depressed and less motivated than their peers –– than even their unemployed peers. And before we decide that unemployment is better than underemployment, we should remember that twentysomething unemployment is associated with heavy drinking and depression in middle age even after becoming regularly employed."

• Weak Ties

  • Weak ties tend to be the best sources of employment, and a large network of weak ties gives you the broadest reach and greatest perspective, instead of a few very close ties.
    • The advice: build up your network of weak ties, instead of only spending time with your close friends. It's the people you rarely talk to who might lead to fortuitious relationships down the road, and you want that broad exposure.
  • The urban tribe helps us survive, but it does not help us thrive. It is the people that we hardly know –– those who will never make it into our tribe –– who will swiftly and dramatically change our lives for the better.
  • Weak ties force us to communicate from a place of difference, to use what is called elaborated speech. Unlike restricted speech, which presupposes similarity between the speaker and the listener, elaborated speech does not presume that the listener thinks in the same way or know the same information.
    • When we get comfortable with certain people, we often don't even attempt to explain our stances, and instead end most of our sentences with "you know what I mean". It's breaking out of this comfort zone, of our inner circles, that allows us to make more meaningful connections with the world.
  • When weak ties help, the communities around us, even the adult community that twentysomethings are warily in the process of entering, seem less impersonal and impenetrable. The world seems smaller and easier to navigate.
  • [[The Ben Franklin Effect]]
    • While attitudes influence behaviour, behaviour can also shape attitudes.
    • If we do a favour for someone, we come to believe we like that person. This liking leads back to another favour and so on. A close variant of what is called the "foot-in-the-door strategy", or the strategy of making small requests before larger ones, Ben Franklin tells us that one favour begets more favours and over time, small favours beget larger ones.

• The Unthought Known

  • We all have "unthought knowns." Things we've forgotten about ourselves, but still know under the surface. In context here, it refers to the dreams of who we want to be and what we want to do that get stifled by "practicality" and our peers.
    • The advice : Introspect and try to find what you know about yourself but are afraid to admit to yourself. What do you want deep down, but don't know how to get, or are afraid you'll fail at?
  • There is a certain terror that goes along with saying "my life is up to me". It is scary to realize there is no magic, you can't just wait around, no one can easily rescue you, and you have to do something.
  • Not knowing what you want to do with your life –– or not atleast having some ideas about what to do with your life –– is a defense against this terror. It is a resistance to admitting that they possibilities are not endless. It is a way of pretending that now doesn't matter.
    • Being confused about choices is nothing more than hoping that maybe there is a way to get through life without taking charge.
  • The lottery question might get you thinking about what you would do if talent and money didn't matter. But they do. The question we need to ask ourselves is what we would do with our lives if we didn't win the lottery. What might you be able to do well enough to support the life you want? And what might you enjoy enough that you won't mind working at it in some form or another for years to come?
  • Unthought knowns are those things we know about ourselves but forget somehow. These are the dreams we have lost sight of or the truths we sense but don't say out loud. We may be afraid of acknowledging the unthought known to other people because we are afraid of what they may think. Even more often, we fear what the unthought known will mean for ourselves and our lives.
  • The more terrifying uncertainty is wanting something but not knowing how to get it. It is working toward something even though there is no sure thing. When we make choices, we open ourselves up to heartbreak, so sometimes it feels easier to not know, not to choose and not to do.

• My Life Should Look Better On Facebook

  • After graduating and being fixed on the college process, many students feel they're "failing" in their 20s because they don't know how to get an A anymore. They're used to having a formula for success, and now that it's gone, they feel lost.
    • The advice: Stop focusing on glory or impressing other people, focus on what you want to do with your life. If that means moving to Nashville and settling down, do it! You don't have to become a rocket surgeon.
  • Facebook and other social media can be just another place, not to be, but to seem.
  • [[The Tyranny of the Should]]
    • Working toward our potential becomes a search for glory, when somehow, we learn more about what is ideal than about what is real.
    • Maybe we feel the cultural press to be an engineer before we find out what exactly that entails. Or our parents tell us more about what we should be like than what we are like.
    • Scrambling after ideals, we become alienated from what is true about ourselves and the world.
    • Shoulds can masquerade as high standards or lofty goals, but they are not the same. Goals direct us from the inside, but shoulds are paralyzing judgements from the outside. Goals feel like authentic dreams while shoulds feel like oppressive obligations. Shoulds set up a false dichotomy between either meeting an ideal or being a failure, between perfection or settling. The tyranny of the should even pits us against our own best interests. [[Paralyzing perfectionism]]
    • An adult life is built not out of eating, praying and loving, but out of person, place and thing: who we are with, where we live, and what we do for a living. We start our lives with whichever of these we know something about.

• The Customized Life

  • Some of us suffer less from [[The Tyranny of the Should]] than from the tyranny of the should-not.
  • Distinctiveness is a fundamental part of identity. We develop a clearer sense of ourselves by firming up the boundaries between ourselves and others. I am who I am because of how I am different from those around me. There is a point to my life because it cannot be carried out in exactly the same way, by any other person. Differentness is part of what makes us who we are. It gives our lives meaning.
  • But different is simple. Like the easiest way to explain black is to call it the opposite of white, often the first things we know about ourselves i not who we are, but who we are not.
  • An identity or a career cannot be built around what we don't want. We have to shift from a negative identity, or a sense of what I'm not, to a positive one, or a sense of what I am. This takes courage.
  • Having an uncommon life isn't going to come from resisting the choices, it's going to come from making the choices.
  • If the first step in establishing a professional identity is claiming our interests and talents, then the next step is claiming a story about our interests and talents, a narrative we can take with us to interviews and dates.
  • Life does not need to be linear, but does need to make sense.
    • It shouldn't be your dream to work at one place forever, no one knows where they'll be in five years. The burden is on applicants to show that working makes sense beyond just wanting a job or the building being two blocks from their apartment.

• An Upmarket Conversation

  • The advice: Don't be afraid to get into a serious relationship early.

  • Society is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness. –– David Brooks

  • People in their 30s wish they had thought about marriage sooner.
  • After 25, age of marriage doesn’t predict divorce.

• Picking Your Family

  • The advice: If you can’t stand your partner’s family, it’s not going to be good for the relationship, and is a serious consideration for whether or not you should continue.
  • Your significant others' family is just as important as yours, and just as important as they are. This is the family you are choosing. We end up believing that our family is beyond our control.
    • There is no question that choosing our partners has led to countless happy unions - but foregrounding of the individual in relationships has caused us to forget the fact that we get to pick and create families. This is something the Indian culture still values: marriage isn't just about the union of two individuals, but also about the union of two families.

• The Cohabitation Effect

  • Couples who live together before marriage tend to be less satisfied with marriage, and more likely to divorce. It happens from “sliding not deciding,” slipping into living together out of convenience, then eventually deciding to get married. But your criteria for cohabitation will be lower than marriage, so you can end up in a suboptimal marriage.
  • The advice: Before moving in together, get clear on your commitment levels, and stress test the relationship in other ways (such as travel) to make sure it’s what you want.
  • "In psychotherapy, there's a saying: the slower you go, the faster you get there. Sometimes the best way to help people is to slow them down long enough to examine their own thinking. Everyone has haps in their reasoning, if you stop and shine a light on these mental ellipses, you find assumptions that drive behaviour without our being aware of them."
  • **[[Sunk cost theory]], and other fallacies involved. Most people think that after being together for some time, it's easier to just get married than to let the relationship go, because of the time that's already been invested in it - regardless of whether that's the right choice. Living together can lead to “lock-in” where it’s too hard to break up, despite a bad relationship, so you don’t.
  • The biggest misconception people have is that living together is a good test for marriage.
  • A self-cure may seem harmless or subtle. Or it may be obviously troubling like cutting or bingeing or getting high to numb out. Usually sometime during the twenties, life changes and old solutions seem cumbersome and out of place. The things that once helped us feel better, are now getting in our way.
    • A raft is a good thing when you're crossing a river, but once you get to the other side, put it down. Every problem was once a solution.
  • High school and our twenties are not the only time when we have our most self-defining experiences, but also the time we have our most self-defining memories.
    • Adolescence is a time of many firsts, including our attempt to form life stories. As we become capable of - and interested - abstract thought, we start to put together stories about who we are and why. As our social networks expand across our teens and twenties, we repeat these stories to others and to ourselves. We use them to feel a sense of coherence as we move from place to place.
  • The stories we tell about ourselves become facts of our identity.
    • Though some of these stories may be left untold, they are no less meaningful or powerful. Research and clinical experience suggest that these untold stories are most often about shame.

• Being in Like

  • The advice: Make sure your personalities get along, and don’t ignore the differences that might ruin the relationship. Also, if you’re neurotic, you have to learn to control it, or you’ll destroy your relationships.
  • You and your partner need to be "in like": being alike in ways that matter and genuinely liking who the other person is. Often these go hand in hand - the more similar people are, the more they are able to understand each other and how they act/go about their day and this forestalls an incredible amount of friction.
  • Personality is not about what we have done or even about what we like. It is about how we are in the world, and this includes everything we do. Personality is the part of ourselves we take everywhere.
  • [[The Big Five]] refers to five factors that describe how people interact with the world: Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism and Extraversion.
    • There is no right or wrong personality, there is just your personality and how it fits with those of other people. It is often the case that we dislike people because of the way their extremes compare to our own.
  • When and if you commit, chances are you will chose someone who is similar to you in ways that are convenient. But long-term relationships are inevitably inconvenient.
  • And for all of the ways you may not be like someone you love, by knowing their personality, you have the opportunity to be more understanding about why they do something differently. The goes a long way toward bridging differences.
  • Neuroticism or the tendency to be anxious, stressed, critical and moody, is far more predictive of relationship unhappiness and dissolution than is personality dissimilarity. How a person responds to differences can be more important than the differences themselves. To a person who runs high in Neuroticism, differences are seen in a negative light. Anxiety and judgements about these differences then lead to criticism and contempt, two leading relationship killers.
  • It's easy to surround yourself with friends who are just like you. As a group, you may decide everyone else is doing it wrong. Friends can form a culture of criticism where differences are seen as deficiencies.

• Forward Thinking

  • The advice: Large social networks can improve our brains by forcing us to communicate in a diversity of ways and better shape our beliefs. Having a few close friends and no one outside our bubble harms our intellectual development.
  • **Being smart in school is about how well you solve problems that have correct answers and clear time limits. But being a forward-thinking adult is about how you think and act (especially) in uncertain circumstances. The frontal lobe doesn't just allow us to cooly solve the problem of what exactly we should do with our lives.
    • The frontal lobe is where we move beyond the futile search for black-and-white solutions and learn to tolerate and act on better shades of grey.**
  • By the time we get to our twenties, our brain is about as big as it can get, but it is still refining its 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 - each of which can make a thousand different connections.

• Calm Yourself

  • The crazy anxiety many people in their 20s have makes them constantly fear being broken up with, fired, dropped. This can lead them to quit or end relationships themselves so that they don’t get surprised. People think that the minute something goes wrong, they’re going to get fired, but jobs aren’t that fragile. Neither are relationships.
  • The advice: Learn to calm yourself down, to realize that these little setbacks are not huge issues. Life goes on. Stop relying on other people to cheer you up.
  • Twentysomethings who don't feel anxious or incompetent at work as usually overconfident or underemployed.
  • The brain is designed to pay special attention to what catches us off-guard, so we can better prepare to meet the world next time. The brain even has a built in novelty detector, a part that sends chemical signals to stimulate memory when new and different things happen.
  • This is why we are more likely to remember when things don't go as planned, or if something arouses emotions. People in their twenties react more strongly to negative informations, there is more activity in the amygdala –– the emotional seat of the brain.
    • Knowing what to overlook is what makes adults typically wiser than young adults. With age comes the "positivity effect". We become more interested in positive information. We disengage with impersonal conflict, and react less strongly to negative information.
  • "Stuffing your feelings –– that's not a root. That's no better than chronic worrying. Suppressing your feelings keeps your body and brain stressed and it impairs your memory. It will leave you in a sort of fog."
  • Reference to [[Man's Search for Meaning - Victor Frankl]]
  • [[Borrowing an Ego]] - reaching out to someone else for comfort, and letting their frontal lobe do all of the work.
    • We all need to do that sometimes, but if we externalize our distress too much, we don't learn to handle bad days on our own. We don't practice soothing ourselves just when our brains are in the best position to pick up new skills. We don't learn how to calm ourselves down.
  • [[Growth mindset vs. Fixed mindset]]
    • People with a growth mindset believe that people can change, that success is something to be achieved. Failures may sting, but they are also viewed as opportunities for improvement.
  • Real confidence comes from [[Mastery - Robert Greene]] of experiences, which are actual, lived moments of success, especially when things seem difficult. Whether we are talking about love or work, the confidence that overrides insecurity comes from experience.
    • For work success to lead to confidence, the job has to be challenging and it must require effort, otherwise it's "underemployment". It has to be done without too much help, and it can't go well every single day. A long run of easy successes creates a sort of fragile confidence, the kind that is shattered when the first failure comes along. A more resilient confidence comes from succeeding –– and from surviving some failures.
  • We imagine we will show up at work and instantly add value or be taken seriously. This is not the case. Knowing you want to do something isn't the same as knowing how to do it, and even knowing how to do something isn't the same as actually doing it well.

• Getting Along and Getting Ahead

  • The advice: Set some goals that matter to you and work towards them. Whether they are professional, personal, or social.
  • Conventional wisdom tells us that childhood or adolescence is when our personalities are on the move, but our personalities change more during the twentysomething years than at any time before or after.
  • In our twenties, positive personality changes come from what is called [[getting along and getting ahead]]. Feeling better doesn't come from avoiding adulthood, it comes from investing in adulthood.
    • [[Atomic Habits - James Clear]] Even simply having goals can make us happier and more confident. Goals are how we declare who we are and who we want to be - it leads to greater purpose, mastery, agency and well-being.

• Every Body

  • [[the availability heuristic]]
    • It is a mental shortcut whereby we decide how likely something is based on how easy it is to bring an example to mind. It stops being about facts, and becomes about "salience", or how many examples we know of and then generalizing from there.
  • In one more generation, it will be quite common to have kids between thirty-five and forty, especially among the well-educated who tend to postpone childbearing, for parents to be pulled in two different directions. Not by twentsomethings and octogenarians but by toddlers and octogenarians.
    • Men and women will soon face caring for two entirely dependent groups of loved ones at precisely the moment they are most needed back at work.

• Do the Math

  • The advice: The future isn't written in the stars. There's no guarantees, so claim your adulthood. Be intentional, get to work, pick your family, do the math, make your own certainty. Don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do. You are deciding your life right now.
  • We would rather have $100 this month than $150 next month. It's a human tendency that underpins addiction, procrastination, health, oil consumption and even saving for retirement.
  • Twenty somethings are especially prone to this present bias.
    • Especially those who put a lot of psychological distance between now and later. Love or work can seem far off in time, and the future can seem even more distant when we are around people who don't talk about it either. Later can feel spatially far away if we imagine ultimately settling down in another place altogether.
    • The problem with feeling distant from the future is that it leads to abstraction, and abstraction leads to distance, and round and round it goes. The further away love and work seem, the less we need to think about them; the less we think about them, the further away they seem. [[The More We Know, The Less We Know]], [[self-perpetuating loop]]
  • Twentysomethings, especially those who surround themselves with other twentysomethings, have trouble anticipating life. The need memento vivi - or ways to remember they are going to live. They need something to remind them that life is going to continue past their twenties, and that it might even be great.
  • A timeline may not be a virtual reality chamber, but it can help our brains see time for what it really is: limited. It can give us a reason to get up in the morning and get going.