The Defining Decade. Мэг Джей

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       The Unthought Known

       Uncertainty will always be part of the taking-charge process.

      —Harold Geneen, businessman

       The search of youth is not for all-permissibility, but rather for new ways of directly facing up to what truly counts.

      —Erik Erikson, psychoanalyst

      Ian told me his twentysomething years were like being in the middle of the ocean, like this vast, unmarked body of water. He couldn’t see land in any direction, so he didn’t know which way to go. He felt overwhelmed by the prospect that he could swim anywhere or do anything. He was equally paralyzed by the fact that he didn’t know which of the anythings would work out. Tired and hopeless at age twenty-five, he said he was treading water to stay alive.

      As I listened to Ian, I started to feel a bit hopeless myself.

      I try to, as psychologists say, “meet my clients where they are,” but Ian’s ocean metaphor was a real problem. When I thought of myself out there with him, with so many directions that seemed the same, I couldn’t come up with a good solution either.

      “How do people get out of the ocean?” I asked Ian, wondering if he had some sense of how he might stop treading water.

      “I don’t know,” he said, turning his head as he thought intently. “I would say you pick a direction and start swimming. But you can’t tell one way from the other, so you can’t pick. You can’t even tell if you’re swimming toward something, so why would you use up all your energy going the wrong way? I guess all you can do is hope someone comes along in a boat or something,” Ian said, almost with relief.

      There is a certain terror that goes along with saying “My life is up to me.” It is scary to realize there’s no magic, you can’t just wait around, no one can really rescue you, and you have to do something. Not knowing what you want to do with your life—or not at least having some ideas about what to do next—is a defense against that terror. It is a resistance to admitting that the 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.

      Rather than take charge, Ian hoped someone would come along, pick him up, and carry him off in a predetermined direction. It happens all the time. Maybe Ian would hop aboard with a group of friends or with some girlfriend. He’d go their way for a while and be distracted from his life a bit longer. But I knew how that would play out. He’d wake up one day in a far-off land, working in a job or living in a place that had nothing at all to do with Ian. He would be a world away from the life he would suddenly realize he wanted.

      With his ocean metaphor, Ian was pretending there was no particular life he wanted to live. It was like he had no past and no future, and no reason for going one way or the other. He wasn’t reflecting on the years he had lived so far, and neither was he thinking through the years that were ahead. As he said, this made action impossible. Because Ian didn’t know that twentysomethings who make choices are happier than those who tread water, he kept himself confused. This was easy to do.

      Ian hung out with an indecisive crowd. At the bike shop where he worked, his friends assured him he didn’t need to make decisions yet—“We’re not!” they cheered. They had long discussions on the job about never settling and about never selling out, yet there they were, settling for under-employment and selling out their futures. I suspected Ian was in my office because somehow he knew these conversations were full of unintentional lies.

      When Ian turned to his parents about his vectorless life in the ocean, he heard other lies. His mom and dad said, “You’re the best! The sky is the limit!” They reminded him he could do anything he set his mind to. They didn’t understand that this undefined encouragement was not helpful. It led less to courage than it did to confusion.

      Twentysomethings like Ian were raised on abstract commands—“Follow your dreams!” “Reach for the stars!”—but they often don’t know much about how to get these things done. They don’t know how to get what they want or, sometimes, even what they want. As Ian put it to me, almost desperately, “My mom goes on to me and everybody else about how great I am and how proud she is of me, and I want to say: For what? What exactly stands out about me?”

      Far from narcissistically lapping up his mother’s praise, Ian had long sensed that her words were too generic to mean much. He felt hoodwinked—and with good reason. Life isn’t limitless, and neither was Ian. Twentysomethings often say they wish they had fewer choices but, at the moment, Ian didn’t have as many choices as he’d heard he did. And the longer he waited to get going, the fewer the options were going to be.

      “I want you to come back next week,” I said. “When you do, we’re getting out of the ocean. It’s not the right metaphor. We’re going shopping for jam instead.”

      There is a classic study in psychology known as the jam experiment. The jam experiment was conducted by a researcher named Sheena Iyengar who, then at Stanford University, had the idea that the local grocery store would be an excellent place to understand how people make choices. Iyengar’s research assistants posed as jam suppliers and set up sampling tables at a gourmet store. In one condition of the experiment, six flavors of jam were available for tasting: peach, black cherry, red currant, marmalade, kiwi, and lemon curd. In another condition, twenty-four flavors of jam were featured: the six flavors just mentioned plus eighteen others. In both conditions, customers who tasted the jam could then use a coupon to buy a jar at lower cost.

      The key finding in the study was that the twenty-four-flavor table attracted more attention yet it resulted in fewer buyers. Shoppers flocked to the exciting array, yet most became overwhelmed and dropped out of buying jam altogether. Only 3 percent of those who visited the twenty-four-flavor table went on to buy jam. In contrast, shoppers who visited the six-flavor table were more able to decide which jar was right for them, with about 30 percent leaving the store with jam in hand.

      The next week, I told Ian about the jam experiment and wondered aloud about whether he felt too overwhelmed by life’s purported possibilities to pick something.

      “I do feel overwhelmed by the idea that I could do anything with my life,” he said.

      “Then let’s get concrete. Let’s talk about choosing jam,” I offered.

      “Am I at the six-flavor table or the twenty-four-flavor table?” he asked.

      “That is an excellent question. I think part of making any decision in your twenties is realizing there is no twenty-four-flavor table. It’s a myth.”

      “Why СКАЧАТЬ