inquiry

If you ever want to change something about yourself, your 20s are your best shot.

Q: You say we pick our families, not just our friends. What do you mean?

A: I work with clients who a lot of times are feeling sad or bad or mad about the families they grew up with. This is a real paradigm shift for a lot of twentysomethings, to shift from this idea that family is something you’re stuck with. It’s absolutely something you’re going to create. For the next 40 years, it is going to be about your spouse and your kids and not about your mom and your dad.

Q: You talk about the concept of “dating down.” Can you explain what you mean and why it’s harmful?

A: That’s a twentysomething sort of expression — dating below where you ought to be. I think of it as having low-criteria or no-criteria relationships. I think twentysomethings think their relationships don’t matter — that if they just want to have a good time with someone really good-looking or convenient, why not?”

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Meg Jay, author of The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter — and How to Make the Most of Them Now.USATODAY

A distinctive character type is emerging in modern society, the person who can’t manage demanding, complex forms of social engagement, and so withdraws.

Richard Sennet, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation

via NewYorker

To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself…

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Real people have consistency, so if things are going well in our relationships, change is gradual, worked through slowly. In online life, the pace of relationships speeds up. One quickly moves from infatuation to disillusionment and back. And the moment one grows even slightly bored, there is easy access to someone new. One races through e-mail and learns to attend to the “highlights.” Subject lines are exaggerated to get attention… My own study of the networked life has left me thinking about intimacy - about being with people in person, hearing their voices and seeing their faces, trying to know their hearts. and it has left me thinking about solitude – the kind that refreshes and restores. Loneliness is failed solitude. To experience solitude you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise, you will only know how to be lonely.

People often discard first intuitions until they reach the end of a friendship, the end of a love, and then this long-buried first impression reappears only to prove that the animal senses in human beings warning them clearly of dangers, of traps, may be accurate but are often discarded in favor of a blind compulsion in the opposite direction to that of self-preservation. Proving that human beings have a sense of danger but that some other desire, some other compulsion, lures and draws them precisely toward these traps, toward self-destruction.

The Four Chambered Heart - Anaïs Nin

They’ve grown together; they weren’t made for each other.

“Successful couples tend to perceive themselves as similar, regardless of whether they would have done so as unacquainted strangers. ‘If I like you, I’ll find a way to be similar,’ Douglas Karney says. So perceived similarities are a consequence, not a cause, of strong relationships.” LA Weekly

“Relationships don’t begin because of actual similarities, but people who are in relationships project similarities onto their partnership. That is, if you’re spending a ton of time around someone you think is rad, you’ll try to hunt for elements of your own personality that match up with the other person’s rad-ness. That’s why looking to long-married couples for matchmaking is ultimately a fool’s errand — they have learned to think they’re very similar to each other over the course of years. They’ve grown together; they weren’t made for each other.” JEZEBEL

Personality changes for the better during our 20s more than at any other time in life, if we engage with adult roles and, as researchers say, “get along and get ahead.” Good jobs may seem elusive, but even some workplace success — even just goal-setting — in our 20s is associated with greater confidence and well-being in our 20s and 30s. More than half of Americans are married, or are dating or living with their future partner, by age 30. Along the way, committed relationships in our 20s make us more secure and responsible — and less depressed and anxious — whether these relationships last or not. The brain caps off its last growth spurt in our 20s, making these years our best chance to learn to manage emotions and wire ourselves to be the adults we want to be. Newly minted college graduates are living with a staggering, unprecedented amount of uncertainty. Uncertainty makes people anxious, and distraction is the 21st century opiate of the masses. It’s easy to stay distracted and wait for deliverance at 30. It’s almost a relief to imagine that twentysomething jobs and relationships don’t count. But a career spent studying adult development tells me this isn’t true. And a decade of listening to young adults tells me that, deep down, they want to take their lives seriously. The 30-year-olds who feel betrayed by their 20s almost always ask, “Why didn’t someone tell me this sooner — like when I graduated from college?” So here goes. I’ll say it. I’ll even make it short enough to tweet: “30 is not the new 20. Don’t be defined by what you didn’t know or do. You’re deciding your life right now.”

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Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia, is the author of “The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter — and How to Make the Most of Them Now.” via LATIMES

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Cornell University (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1999, Vol. 77, No. 6. | 121-1134)

It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense. (Miller, 1993, p. 4)

Twofold Beck’s Triad

“… a too formal logical thinking introduces absurdities, even an antinomy of reason in the statement I am lying, whereas everyone knows that there is no such thing. It is quite wrong to reply to this I am lying—If you say, I am lying, you are telling the truth, and therefore you are not lying, and so on.” — Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis

1964 seminar, 1977 English translation