Alison Stewart: A lot of people feel a sense of nostalgia thinking back to their younger years. However, we often forget about feeling anxious about the future. The pressure that comes with independence and believing success can be universally measured. A new book offers insight into what some psychologists call quarterlife, the stage between adolescence and midlife. The author provides some guidance on how to navigate this time. The book is titled Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood.

Satya Doyle Byock writes, quarter lifers have typically imbibed a whole host of contradictory messages about how to be an adult, namely to be functional and successful, but also popular and attractive, wealthy and famous, intelligent and interesting, creative and entrepreneurial, but not self-involved are selfish nor privilege nor cruel are unaware of the world's pain. In order to abide by these competing implicit and explicit directions, none of which are about genuine self-knowledge or self-care, quarter lifers become profoundly disoriented.

New York Times bestselling author, Tembi Locke gave the book early praise saying Quarterlife is an insightful revealing look at the messy and uncharted paths to wholeness and a powerful tool for anyone navigating early adulthood. The author is Satya Doyle Byock, a licensed psychotherapist in private practice in Portland, Oregon. She joins us today to talk about her new book, which is out today. Welcome and Happy Pub Day.

Satya Doyle Byock: Thank you. It's such an honor to be here and to celebrate today. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, midlife adults, we're talking to you 20-somethings and early 30-somethings. What do you struggle with the most? How did you figure out what you wanted to do with your life? If you have, are you the parent of a young adult? When did you feel like they started to have a handle on life? Please let us know your story. We want to hear your midlife stories, quarter-life stories, excuse me. Give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212433 WNYC, or let us know via social media @AllOfItWNYC.

You note in the book that this age group has been called different things over time. Sometimes, people, I guess they will be older millennials now, Gen Z is right in the middle of it. When I was coming up, we were the MTV generation. That meant 20, 30-somethings. The beat generation were in their 20s. What is happening at this time that leads people to have so many questions?

Satya Doyle Byock: Well, you start with one of the main points I try to make in the book, which is this time of life has gone by a million names, mostly generational names, and often modifiers of other stages but we really have not had a name for this stage of life, which is not just generations, people coming of age and moving forward. It's a stage of life. It's a really tricky time because people are navigating, leaving the dependents of childhood while tackling making money, feeding themselves, trying to figure out who they are in a deep way, trying to build relationships and date, I could go on and on.

It's an exquisitely difficult time. Meanwhile, society tends to be pointing fingers and making fun of this time of life and people traveling through it instead of saying, "Hey, how can we help? We see that you're freaked out. We see that you're anxious. We see that you're depressed. We see maybe that you're excited. How can we celebrate you?" Instead, there's often a lot of ridicule. It's very hard.

Alison Stewart: In the introduction, you start with four questions. Why do I feel lost? Why is my life such a mess? Why am I stuck? What's wrong with me? I'm just curious why you started with those particular four questions.

Satya Doyle Byock: Well, they're a summation and a way of all of the issues, the problems that people come into therapy with in this time of life, which is a lot of sense of anguish and disorientation but also a deep feeling that they're the only ones going through this or that there's something wrong with them because we tend to hold up people in this time of life as being achievers. Everyone's always celebrating, oh, you're graduating from college or what's your new job? There's so much interest in the success of quarter lifers but really not a lot of patients for their pain and suffering. People tend to feel that they're alone because everyone's posturing to try to make it seem as though they're doing fine.

Alison Stewart: Early in the book, you write that true adulthood is psychological. How so?

Satya Doyle Byock: Well, we have tended to define adulthood more by economics or the acquisition of degrees or, again, new jobs. It's more this external half of almost capitalism or patriarchy. People are seeking to climb ladders and to get things. That's how we define adulthood, with a mortgage or a marriage. What I'm trying to assert really clearly is, this is much more of an inner process than we have ever honored, that it's really about becoming oneself and developing true maturity. That's a psychological process, it's not just a process of acquisition externally.

Alison Stewart: In the introduction, you wrote that you became a psychotherapist focused on working with people in this age group because you yourself lived through this disorientation. You're very candid about it. Would you mind sharing a little bit of your story?

Satya Doyle Byock: Sure. I just share a snippet in the book, really, because I have gone on and on. It was years of having climbed the ladder that was laid out for me more or less, which was, in my generation, with my family and demographic, I got a college degree, I did well. I got lots of As and actually enjoyed the journey, but then I finished college and felt like, "Wait a second. I have no marketable skills. I don't really know how to cook for myself very well or take care of myself if my car breaks down. What is this all really about? What am I actually doing here?"

Both the tangible confusion of being in the world as an independent person with the pressure of, "Well, when are you going to get a job?" and "Well, why does your job not pay more? You have a college degree. You have a good college degree." All these things that it felt like older adults didn't really understand the level of confusion and difficulty I was up against and my peers were up against in the world. I talk about a particular meltdown that I have in the book and the suffering that ensued but also leading to me starting to put the pieces together and understand, "Wait a second. There's something else here to be discovered about this time of life."

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we'd like to get you in on this conversation. If you are in this period of quarter-life, how do you feel about where you are right now? What do you hope to accomplish? Maybe you're a mid-life adult, what did you struggle with most as a young adult? What do you wish you had known about this time in your life? Give us a call, (212)-433-9692, (212)-433-WNYC.

You can also let us know via social media @AllOfItWNYC, that's Twitter, or you can DM us on Instagram if you prefer to remain anonymous. We're talking about this time in life known as quarter-life with Satya Doyle Byock. The name of the book is  Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. You mentioned early on that it's a stage. Just for people so they have context, what comes before quarter-life, what comes after quarter-life? How does it fit in the chronology of a life?

Satya Doyle Byock: We know childhood, we know adolescence, and then we know adulthood vaguely as this thing that comes later on, after adolescence. We don't really understand how people become adults, but we know that, at some point, adulthood starts. Really, the main stage of life in adulthood that we're familiar with is mid-life, which starts with the mid-life crisis, this moment of collapse that has been popularized in pop culture, media, psychology, and all.

There has not been a name between adolescence and mid-life for this period of adulthood. I call it quarter-life. I draw on the more popular term quarter-life crisis that a lot of folks are familiar with, this idea of crisis, an early-on [unintelligible 00:08:56] mid-life crisis. I'm trying to assert it and honor it as a developmental stage onto itself. I posit that it's between ages 16 and 36 roughly, also maybe 20 to 40. It's the second quarter of life and the first part of adulthood.

Alison Stewart: You've outlined two types of quarter-lifers in the book, the meaning type and the stability type. I like the example that you give that Prince Harry is the meaning type, and Prince William is the stability type, so just some of you people understand where we're starting with that. How do you separate those who search for meaning versus those who search for stability? Let's start first with what each looks for, and then we can talk about how that impacts how we live a life.

Satya Doyle Byock: Of course, I get into it in much more depth in the book and sometimes struggle a little bit to offer really quick examples because I don't want to be too reductive, but the quick examples are, it's the artist is the meaning type, the lawyer is the stability type. In a way, it's straight out the gate, straight out of adolescence, early adulthood, people tend to orient more towards one type or the other. There's folks who sometimes might be referred to as people in extended adolescence or failure to launch folks, they are likely to more be meaning types.

They're more the artists, the creatives, the philosophers. They struggle to believe that the world often in the cataclysmic state, that it is in very appropriately for a lot of folks, people think, well, why am I supposed to have all this excitement and joy about entering the world when things are in collapse? These are contemplative folks, meaning types are contemplative, often existential, often creative folks and again, if you're using the Prince Harry example, you can see the way that he's trying to make sense of his childhood, his life, his trauma, he veers more in that direction.

Meanwhile, there's Prince William who seems to never have struggled very hard at least from what we can see, stability types are better at putting on a front. They're more likely to have a good persona. They're more likely to be the lawyers or the business folks or the economists and they don't seem to be questioning as far as the public can see society much or the ladder of adulthood that they're being asked to climb. What I say is that both types ultimately are going to need to find both stability and meaning, meaning types are going to have to find a way to thrive in the external world, ideally finding stability and stability types are going to need to start asking a deeper questions of their own sense of meaning in the world.

Alison Stewart: What can happen for someone who is a stability type who seems to have it all together, but doesn't acknowledge that they perhaps are having emotional pain or they're having emotional difficulty.

Satya Doyle Byock: Well, the deal with psychology is you can only really suppress things for so long. It pops out, it leaks out, it shows up, it shows up in various ways. Once at some point we can only hide things so long. I sometimes think of it as a loaded spring. While meaning types have real trouble showing up in the external world and putting on a front, stability types are often loading a spring.

At some point, it bounces back and so that's where this early onset midlife crisis shows up the quarter-life crisis is often a crisis of stability types who realize, "Wait a second, I can't keep checking the boxes, getting the degrees, performing, getting raises and promotions, these things ultimately aren't satisfying to me," and they have to start asking themselves the deeper questions of who am I truly and what do I want in the world?

Alison Stewart: Let's take a few calls. Let's talk to Brian calling in from Amityville. Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for calling all of it. You're on the air.

Brian Hi, good afternoon to you both. I just right now I'm at lunch at work and I don't know how I stumbled into this, but I recently turned 25 and graduates college and started my first job recently and I thought everything was supposed to be like laid out that's I always thought it. It's been interesting hearing both of you talk about how difficult it is to navigate invest in the time of quarter-life and essentially like, as I'm going through it, I have found comfort at times in talking to my friends and talking to family who are understanding and you start to realize you're a lot more, when you feel comfortable sharing it with people like you find a lot more people are in that space than you originally thought.

Alison Stewart: What you said you stumbled into the work you're doing?

Brian: Yes, I got my first job right around the same time I turned 25 so this idea of adulthood all hit me at once where I was no longer, I was post-grad. People were asking me, "Hey, like, what'd you go to school for? What's your first-- When are you going to start working and student loans is something that hang over, you making adult friendships" I went from having a familiar space in college now having to navigate this whole new world by myself. Well, not by myself, but when I wasn't familiar with.

Alison Stewart: Brian, thank you for calling Satya. Brian sounds like a familiar story. I saw you had a reaction to what he was describing.

Satya Doyle Byock: Oh, my gosh.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Satya Doyle Byock: Brian, thank you so much for calling it's really-- I'm tearing up just feeling, "Wow, I know how ubiquitous this experience is and how little we talk about it." Hearing you in your story, and I'm so glad you turned on the radio today. It's just amazing how often folks both feel alone and are also having this very, very similar experience post-college or high school, whatever.

I'm so glad you're talking to your friends about it and sharing it, and starting to learn, "Wait a second, I'm not the only one going through this. Why didn't society set me up better for this experience of being in my 20s?" We really are failing people in this stage of life by saying, "Go to college," which is very typically lacking in actual tangible skills, and then figure it out afterwards. Thanks for calling, Brian. It's awesome. I really appreciate hearing from you.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Satya Doyle Byock. The name of the book is  Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. Let's talk to Joel who's called in. Hi, Joel. Thanks for calling. You're on the air.

Joel: Hi, how are you? This conversation just resonates so perfectly with me. It's a little scary. I've got an older brother that was valedictorian and 4.0 and went into finance. Meanwhile, I dropped out of college and I went into art school eventually. Now I'm 45, I have a real job working with the COVID vaccines, and married, wife, two kids. Really, now at this point in my life, finding that only post 40 am I struggling with owning whom I've become. It was only a few years ago where I finally found the career, finally found the job that I feel is home and is right for me, and what I was always meant to be doing.

Now my struggle is really accepting that and owning it and letting the past sit in the past of this struggling artist that struggled to find where I needed to be. Those early years are really tough. I went through a couple of different career changes. I went from the art world, to photo industry, to the tech world. It's a tough time. I talk to younger people all the time that I work with and tell them, "You're not locked into anything. You don't have to stay in the path you set out for yourself. What you have to do is be aware of when it's not working anymore and feel the freedom to decide to change."

Alison Stewart: Joel, thank you so much for calling. My guest is Satya Doyle Byock. The name of the book is  Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. Someone actually tweeted to us. Thank you. Just tuned in. We'll play for my 30-year-old daughter, stability types, meaning types really hit the target. What are some strategies or perhaps a few questions, someone who's listening to this and thinking, "Gosh, this really hits for me," that they could ask themselves first steps to try to figure their way through this time of life?

Satya Doyle Byock: Just to Joel too, thank you for everything you expressed. It's brilliant to hear your experience in the sibling relationship too. I talk about siblings in the book as well. To your question, Allison, I think one thing that is helpful is to really allow ourselves to see the opposites, our opposites in the world. I talk about how siblings can actually start to see each other as spaces for learning versus just, "Why am I the dropout and my brother is this great economist," or whatever. To start saying, "Okay, how is my brother navigating the external world?"

Stability types might ask themselves, "How is my meaning type sibling navigating the inner world?" I try to offer that if we can acknowledge more and more in our cultures in America, for sure we are such an extroverted culture to start asking ourselves, "What's going on inside, really? Who am I really?" To really start allowing ourselves in our 20s instead of just tackling jobs and careers and academics, to say, "Okay, who am I?"

That's a very broad question. The larger thing is, find a great therapist to work with if you can, and to allow some self-inquiry. Not just to who you want to be, but also to the things outside that you struggle with, and maybe even resent. Sometimes the things we like least can also teach us about what we're trying to grow into.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call from Millie in the Catskills whose daughter falls into this category and she could use some guidance because she's a little bit of confused about what's going on with her child. Hey, Millie. Thanks for calling you're on with Satya Doyle Byock.

Millie: Thank you so much. I'm a WNYC listener colon before I'm in my late 60s and we live on the West side. I have a 31 year old daughter who was born and raised there and has been graduated college. She actually bought a home up here in the CAD skills and she's been a teacher for seven years down there. She's so accomplished the stability type as you just mentioned but the meaning type is missing.

I know that my daughter is not the only 30 year old child adult 20s early thirties that are in that position. I think as an old [inaudible 00:21:01] as I was and graduated college and got a job and been living in the city, it's just a very different world than it was 30 years ago. I don't know whether it's because you have more opportunities than we did.

We did maybe because we talked to our children much more than our parents ever spoke with us and we're so much more open with them but there's definitely disability type of the meaning type just really hit me because and what you just said at the very end going to a therapist is what needs to be done. Yes, she has been doing that just within the last this past year. I do believe it's helping but she is so not alone. I can't wait to read your book. Thank you so much for this conversation.

Alison Stewart: Millie, thank you so much for the call. Really appreciate it. How does someone start to really it's an overused word but I happen to like the word manifests the life that they want. If they are in a situation where everything's okay but they just know something's not quite right. I still have that. I remember that feeling about my 20s. It's like I've got it all.

It makes sense but something just not quite right. I wasn't really even sure how to identify it. What are some of the steps we can take or things people can think about or conversations that can be started within families to help that person that quarter-life person in the family start to get some energy to go towards what will make them a more fulfilled person?

Satya Doyle Byock: For stability types, in particular, it really starts with an acknowledgement that climbing the social ladder and doing everything you think you're supposed to be doing is not actually going to quiet that inner voice that says something's wrong. I'm not living my real life. It's a very ethereal confusing thing. It's like if I've done what I'm supposed to be doing, if I've gotten the degree and I've gotten the job I've gotten the teaching job I'm exactly where I thought I wanted to be. I'm doing what society wants me to be but I'm still not happy.

We have to start with culturally, socially acknowledging this is a very widespread human phenomenon that we're just not talking about. If we talk about it as the midlife crisis. I'm simply trying to start by saying this is happening on epidemic levels. People are questioning their lives and they should be, the world is a mess. How do we wake up every single day with a new crisis and not wonder am I where I want to be on this earth? Is this what I want to be doing? One thing in listening to Millie that really came up for me is that I often have felt that the boomer generation is a meaning type generation culturally and the millennials are a stability type generation culturally.

Even though that's not the case for everyone in those generations by any means it can create a generational divide sometimes. If stability types bought into the idea that they could check the boxes and be happy, boomers didn't they had already torn down those social structures and said that's not going to feed my life. I'm going to go look for meaning elsewhere. That generational divide can be tricky to bridge.

Alison Stewart: What about that idea that Millie brought up which I thought was interesting about the abundance of choice that it can be sometimes be paralyzing.

Satya Doyle Byock: Well, It is paralyzing. There's no question and it's largely paralyzing because again we're not raising people to know how to make decisions from their own skin from their own bodies. We're teaching people to make decisions through a very frontal lobe left brain academic path like a multiple choice. If these are the choices one of these is right. That's how we train kids and adolescents and young adults. Instead, when you're finding your own path, it's much more of learning to read your instincts the way that wild animals make choices. They're not choosing multiple choice answers on a quiz, they're listening to their own instincts in their bodies about where to go and where to move.

We need to start enhancing that cultural education, but also allowing quarter lifers to listen to themselves in very different ways. Of course, I talk about this in the book. There's a whole section on learning to listen to yourself. It's harder than just a chapter in a book or even therapy, but there's ways to start learning and taking ourselves seriously from the inside out.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. I have been speaking with its author Satya Doyle Byock. Callers, thank you so much for calling in and sharing your experiences. Satya, thank you so much for sharing your book.

Satya Doyle Byock: Such an honor. Thanks for having me here.

 

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