I was saving this book to be the first one that I read after I turned 20 as a symbolic thing. Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed. The thesis presented by Jay is that the idea that “your 20s are made for enjoying because you’ll only be young once” is a dangerous one to blindly subscribe to.
As a therapist, Jay tells the stories of numerous millennials in their 20s and 30s who she’s had as patients. The common theme in all these cases is that they understood that your 20s should be a time for exploring, but they didn’t understand that exploring doesn’t mean fucking around.
In the context of work, it means not settling for underemployment and instead taking jobs that build “identity capital” (skill sets that make you unique - you don’t get that from settling with a low-level service job).
In the context of love, it means thinking about the compatibility between your own values, your partners values, and the values of your potential in-laws, rather than focusing on superficial things like commonalities and fuckability.
In the context of your “brain and body" (<-- that’s what she titled this section), it means building real confidence using the results you reaped by taking action and building personality and character by taking on more responsibility (and for women, being aware of the decline in fertility that comes with aging).
Throughout the book, Jay seems to present herself as the knight in shining armour for the disparaged youth that step in her door, which I was not a fan of. I’m sure Jay is a great therapist, and in fairness, I don’t think I am the target audience of this book. In fact, I think I have the opposite problem in that I take things much too seriously. Putting that aside, it’s already been 3 months since I’ve finished this book and I have yet to notice it affect my values, opinions, or decisions at all, which ‘good’ books tend to do.
IRL Update (09/17/2024): Wow it’s been a quarter of a year since the last one… I’ve been reading, just not writing as much. In the past 3 months I finished the second half of my 2B term, flew to Porto, Portugal to walk the Camino de Santiago for 2 weeks, and began my third co-op term returning to the firm I was with from January to April of this year. More book reviews coming soon 😄.