The Defining Decade

[lightreads]

The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter--And How to Make the Most of Them Now by Meg Jay

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Make your popcorn, kids, and gather round: I read a self-help book.

Sooo….never read one of these before, and I always assumed that the audience of self-help books was composed largely of people who don't actually have what I think of as "problems." And by that I mean self-help books are for people dealing with something that can be dealt with, as opposed to something that can't. The difference between 'I need to learn to be more assertive' and 'my retina tore in half and it's inoperable' (true story). Because my assumption has always been that dealing with things that can be dealt with is a skill that results from all the shit you learn from the things that can't be dealt with.

This book did nothing to change my mind, since it assumes the reader doesn't have problems as I conceive of them, but instead is struggling with all that making way in the world stuff. You know – money, a vocation, love. And the idea is to, like, talk people through adulting. Does this actually work on anybody? Because I'm assuming it's a largely useless endeavor, since all of my learning has been of the other variety. The 'boy hospitals are quiet at 4 a.m.' variety, or the 'twiddly-doo, wish my STD tests would come back' variety (…true stories). So I find it difficult to imagine that reading a book that tells you in vague terms how some anonymized case studies handled finding a career would actually help anybody. But hey, maybe I'm wrong. I've learned a shit ton from books in my life; it's just all of those books were fiction, and somehow that works so much better for me.

Either way, this wasn't the book for me. Its cookie-cutter notions of what straight, able-bodied, self-doubting life looks like have very little to do with how my twenties went. I mean, my twenties were, in retrospect, fucking insane. I crammed a massive amount of stuff into one decade, and had yet more crammed in on me.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but actually, you know what? I rocked it. I rolled that decade like a motherfucking cigarette and smoked it. I got a couple degrees and was poor and was rich and fucked a bunch of people and read amazing books and found my person and said "it's cancer, okay, coping initiated" and wrote a million words of crap and a few words of not crap and lost my eye and lost my mind and clawed it back and earned my way into an amazing one-in-a-million job and sang every day and walked away from my parents and learned and learned and learned.

And I screwed stuff up. All the time. But this book seems entirely irrelevant to that. Or to anything else I'm carrying right now. What can it possibly tell me about yesterday's negative pregnancy test that I don't already know?

Though I guess it did crystalize for me that I have done okay. And never having been asked to take stock like that before, I suppose that's nice.

But really. Does this stuff actually help anybody?




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Comments

[readerjane]

We were all encouraged at work to read at least one of the major business-oriented self-help books: Seven Habits, or Getting Things Done, or such.

I had about the same attitude going in. Learned nothing from SH, but picked up an idea or two from GTD.

However, a teammate of mine told me he actually found SH a revelation: that the ideas the book espoused were things he'd never learned growing up and needed to learn. So I guess self-help books do actually help some people. I think the books' main failing is that they advertise themselves as useful for everyone, when really their audience may be quite narrow.

[lightreads]

Hm. Interesting. I wonder though how effective a book is at getting someone to actually change their behavior, though, no matter how revelatory it feels. I should think not very effective, but who knows.

[norah]

Can't vouch for that one. I got very little out of my 20s - have always blamed being drunk for most of it but you rocked that too, curse you for taking away my excuses! I guess a couple degrees and lotsa sex and books and my person, yes, but certainly not with your style!

ETA: but I totally read self-help books. Regularly. And they've certainly helped me, usually in a small way with a targeted chronic problem, speeding up incremental personal growth, a new perspective or coping strategy here or there, enough to be worth it.

[lightreads]

I don't know, I'm increasingly convinced that we don't waste time. Not on the decade scale, I mean. We can't, because we got here from there, even when it felt like years of spinning the wheels in the same damn patch of sand. Would it really be better to have done it all faster? Eh, maybe, but it wouldn't all happen faster, it would all be a different life entirely. Something tagged "alternate universe realities diverge" where you can't remember what the original was just a few thousand words in.

[gnomad]

My general take on self-help books is that they're helpful to the people who are lacking in the basic knowledge to solve a problem or move forward with a particular thing. I don't see them as being particularly good at changing the way people navigate their lives on any sort of bigger scale, but they're helpful to that one person who wants to fix things and just...doesn't know where to start, doesn't have the nuts & bolts bit yet.

Of course, if you don't have the problem that person is trying to solve or if you do and you already know the basics, then they look very stupid and obvious.

[cyphomandra]

Bugger re the negative pregnancy test, and all the best for your next cycle.

I have found the occasional targetted (e.g adult children of narcissistic parents etc) self help book useful for thinking about how people can get stuck in (and unstuck from) dysfunctional coping mechanisms, but yeah, mainly fiction works better for me. And the most important thing I learned from my 20s (actually, I don't think it really sunk in until my 30s) was that if there was a difference between how I felt about something/someone and how I thought I should feel about something/someone, trying to convince myself it was actually the latter never, ever worked.

[lightreads]

Thanks. We are rolling right into the next round, so there is a nice sense of momentum.

(actually, I don't think it really sunk in until my 30s) was that if there was a difference between how I felt about something/someone and how I thought I should feel about something/someone, trying to convince myself it was actually the latter never, ever worked

Oh yes. I think I've learned that three or four separate times now. Apparently it requires repetition.