The Defining Decade

I caved to the pressure of this book’s title: “The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter and How to Make the Most of Them Now”.

*Yeesh😰😰 I’m in my 20s and they’re messy and I’m afraid to “waste” them, so maybe this book can help…*

Dr. Meg Jay is a clinical psychologist who has made a career of helping twenty-somethings navigate the uncertainties and insecurities of growing up.

This book distills her insights and offers many stories of young people who thrived or wasted their first decade in “the real world”.

Some of those stories were entertaining, but overall I thought this book was just okay, hence the 🤷🏽‍♂️.

With as much experience as Dr. Jay has, she still seems to be working with a small, mostly White, well-off-enough-to-afford-her-services sample of my generation.

Because of that, a lot of the personal and systemic questions that I have went unanswered and I felt underwhelmed by the end of the book. I’m okay with that because I don’t believe any book can or should have all the answers. But it did get me thinking about the books I choose to read.

I love to read books that I feel interested and included in. Sometimes those books so happen to be written by White people, but that often means that I feel interested and *not* fully included in the book.

Of course this is everyday IRL for me in the US, so I don’t know if I want to experience it in books too.

Do you have this problem too or feel similarly? I’m sure I’m not alone here so I’m curious what you think!