The Defining Decade

The Defining Decade (2012), a self-help book by clinical psychologist Meg Jay, critiques modern views about young adulthood which, in the author’s view, often trivialize its critical role in establishing the mental groundwork for a healthy and happy adult life. Jay draws on her experiences as a counselor to individuals who have passed out of their twenties and are overcome with regret for having squandered the opportunity to figure out their desires and identity during this time. Jay speaks directly to people who now inhabit this critical phase, suggesting ways to prepare behavioral and mental frameworks that will minimize regret.

Jay contextualizes current attitudes about the second decade of human life in recent economic changes. In today’s world, young adults are educated at an unprecedented rate, but a smaller portion of them actually ends up finding work when they graduate. Jay credits this to the outsourcing of simple labor, which has sent most jobs that were usually reserved for young adults needing entry-level experience to countries where such labor is cheaper. The unemployment rate for young adults is further exacerbated by an expanding population.

Jay explains the ways in which anxiety about this changing market appears in her experience as a psychologist. Most of her young patients express doubt about their ability to find a job they like from a seemingly endless array of alternatives. Though Jay does not have a solution for this particular problem of the broadening of economic options, she talks about one way to manage it: by forming identity capital. She defines the term as the aggregation of relationships and skills that have intrinsic value and endure over time. While identity capital is almost by definition “good,” it is often difficult for young people to comprehend, since their mindset is still focused on the attainment of fleeting goals unrelated to identity capital, such as degrees, grades, and other accolades or forms of praise. A lack of identity capital, she believes, can lead to depressive episodes and destructive behavior.



One of the most important things in one’s twenties, Jay argues, is introspection. When adulthood constantly threatens to shift one’s attention away from the self and into the practical world, the best thing to do for oneself is to make sure that one’s practice matches one’s interests. Jay also condemns the tendency to identify too much with one’s social media persona or how it is received: images and reactions are all essentially fleeting. If an identity is based solely on these liquid phenomena, it is hardly an identity at all.

In other sections of the book, Jay touches on such subjects as relationships, cohabitation, and meditation. She sympathizes with the notion that it is difficult to select certain activities to follow when the options are endless. However, in her view, it is more interesting to follow a handful of paths deeply than to scramble to follow a huge list of interests selected more or less arbitrarily. The pursuit of an interest inevitably builds a narrative, multiplying future options and exposures to new experiences. Jay argues that it is unnecessary, even detrimental, to live with one’s partner, citing research that shows that early cohabitation leads to higher divorce rates. She casts cohabitation as a product of convenience facilitated by economic reasons rather than an inherently good living style.

Jay dedicates the latter part of the book to the relationships of physical systems – namely, the body and brain – to adulthood. She notes a primary difference between pre-adult and adult life: the former asks you to solve problems where the terms and challenges are clear, while the latter involves constant adaptation and ambiguity. To make the brain more flexible, she recommends having a large network of friends rather than a few core ones. Big social networks help individuals engage in the kind of loose, frequent, global discourse that better molds their identities. Jay also recommends that people in their twenties practice self-calming techniques, and hang onto their jobs and relationships, resisting the common urge to end them impulsively when something goes wrong. In the same vein, she exhorts her audience to try to solve problems independently and develop a growth mindset.



At the end of the book, Jay makes a simple appeal to the arithmetic of longevity. Most people ignore or suppress the importance of the future in order to deal with the present. She suggests that her readers try to invert this thinking by remembering that life is finite and precious. The Defining Decade exhorts people in their twenties to claim adulthood, rather than simply live it, by acknowledging that the experience of the immediate present is itself a set of decisions that has a huge bearing on the future.