Dr. Meg Jay on What It's Like to Be a Twentysomething Today, and Why the Twenties Are Such a Challenging Decade in One’s Life

In her book The Twentysomething Treatment: A Revolutionary Remedy for an Uncertain Age, clinical psychologist Dr. Meg Jay writes of the 75 million adults between the ages of 18 and 35 that most of them “are living through the most uncertain years they will ever know.” She continues, perhaps contrary to popular belief, that young adults are far from problem free; she writes in the book, which came out April 9, that today’s young workers will have, on average, nine different jobs by the age of 35, and it’s not just young adult lives that are unsettled: the era in which they live is unsettling, too. Every decade of life is difficult, but for twentysomethings, uncertainty is the most difficult part of all, she writes. I had a lot of takeaways from The Twentysomething Treatment, but perhaps more than anything? I learned a greater empathy for those in their twenties. It wasn’t too long ago when I was a twentysomething myself—I am 37 and will be 38 later this year—but it’s long enough that this group of twentysomethings have somehow even more challenges facing them than even my generation did. Dr. Jay is an expert in what it’s like to be a twentysomething and has been doing this work for 25 years; I read her first book The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—and How to Make the Most of Them Now when it came out in 2012, so I would have been roughly 26, and it changed the trajectory of the decade for me. (She has also written another book, Supernormal: The Secret World of the Family Hero, which came out in 2019 and talks about ordinary people who are made extraordinary by all-too-common experiences.) She is not just a clinical psychologist but also an associate professor at the University of Virginia and, in addition to her three books, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Psychology Today, the BBC, NPR, and TED. In this new book and in our conversation today, Dr. Jay talks about why one’s twenties are the most challenging time of life and reveals essential skills for handling the persistent uncertainties that are part of the decade surrounding work, love, friendship, mental health, and more during that decade and beyond. By the way, many of these essential skills are skills this 37-year-old is still learning. This is a really, really interesting conversation I can’t wait for you to dig into. The Twentysomething Treatment: A Revolutionary Remedy for an Uncertain Age by Dr. Meg Jay