The Defining Decade: groundings
I read this on the flight from Keflavík Airport to Vancouver International, so a quick skim of an airplane read (a rec by Unjaded Jade). I don’t think this one is worth any more time or attention than a speedy flip-through, and for me, the contents weren’t wholly relatable, even though I have just stepped into my 20th year, and the book is about your twenties.
The contents of this self-help book is divided into three major sections: your career, love, and your body (aka peak performance). I’m generally biased against self-help as a genre, because of the pedantic common sense authors like to package and sell, but that’s for another day. Essentially, Dr. Jay explains that our current generation is delaying much of life’s big choices into later periods but not considering the consequences, and spending our twenties dawdling, wandering, and exploring without an outcome or goal, which can be dangerous because the clock is ticking — our biological clocks and our career clocks — and our subjective sense of time is distorted. She states multiple times that “thirties is not the new twenties”, and that the decisions twentysomethings make will have long-term cascading effects, like an airplane flying one degree off from New York, only to land in Seattle versus San Diego.
There are some harsh truths here, because I thought for a second that my life was infinite, and I had infinite time in the world, with infinite possibilities of how my life can play out. Maybe that’s naiveté or unrealistic optimism. I currently am at a ‘divergent’ period in my life, when options seem endless. But after some period of time, I will be sitting at a ‘convergent’ period where life is predictable and I have made all of the major decisions of a lifetime.
Much of this book covers again, the pedantic common sense of career prospects and leveraging networks. Maybe it will be more of an alarm bell in my mid-twenties. Again, the takeaway here is that time is not infinite, and I will need to fit things in. Compared to finding a career, finding love is much less predictable and requires a flexible view. Dr. Jay raises questions about compatibility, marriage, cohabitation, kids, and more. In the 1970s, the average age for a woman to have a child was 22, and I cannot even begin to imagine that fitting into my life. Even the current average of 26 feels early.
There’s more about the chance of neuroplasticity and fertility in your twenties, which decline rapidly as you exit your twenties. It’s a little bit scary to think about this, and consider how this timeline fits in with the rest of my career, because realistically, I never even considered a timeline for marriage, and explored how I can take on all pillars of my life simultaneously. So stressful. I wouldn’t recommend this book for thirtysomethings because Dr. Jay doesn’t romanticize the ‘negative’ consequences.
I hold a rosy outlook, but I think that there is less harm to ‘wander’ in your twenties than Dr. Jay advises against. I think that people who hold explorer mindsets can fully take the world in, appreciate it, and enjoy experiences because they are inherently unattached. It also depends on what individuals want in terms of relationships. Are relationships there for comfort, or for future prospects? The future will come, but not everything in the present is for the future, we also need to live in the present.
Dr. Jay did sober me up in realizing that there is a ticking clock if we want certain things, such as finding a life partner, having kids, seeing our grandkids go to college or get married. I also don’t think that we’re strapped into life events and choices, although our hearts probably will want them, it’s tough to categorize and plan for them with such rigidity and precision. It’s just that if anybody realistically warned me of the shortage of time, to get married and have kids and get a PhD in conversation, I would have become immediately defensive over a personal choice which is my lifestyle. So reading The Defining Decade as a universal and not personal warning actually allowed me to consider the possibility that no, my time on earth is not infinite, which adds a little bit of grounding to my perfectionist outlook.
