豆一TED英语演讲稿：二十几岁不可挥霍的光阴(附翻译)_1

2021年1月18日发(作者：预防传染病手抄报内容)
TED英语演讲稿：二十几岁不可挥霍的
光阴（附翻译）
when i was in my 20s, i saw my very first
psychotherapy client. i was a student in clinical
psychology at berkeley. she was a 26-year-old woman
named alex. now alex walked into her first session
wearing jeans and a big slouchy top, and she dropped
onto the couch in my office and kicked off her flats
and told me she was there to talk about guy problems.
now when i heard this, i was so relieved. my classmate
got an arsonist for her first client. (laughter) and
i got a twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys.
this i thought i could handle.
but i didn't handle it. with the funny stories that
alex would bring to session, it was easy for me just
to nod my head while we kicked the can down the road.

i could tell, she was right. work happened later,
marriage happened later, kids happened later, even
death happened later. twentysomethings like alex and
i had nothing but time.
but before long, my supervisor pushed me to push
alex about her love life. i pushed back.
i said,
with a knucklehead, but it's not like she's going to
marry the guy.
and then my supervisor said, yet, but she might
marry the next one. besides, the best time to work on
alex's marriage is before she has one.
that's what psychologists call an
that was the moment i realized, 30 is not the new 20.
yes, people settle down later than they used to, but
that didn't make alex's 20s a developmental downtime.
that made alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and
we were sitting there blowing it. that was when i
realized that this sort of benign neglect was a real
problem, and it had real consequences, not just for alex
and her love life but for the careers and the families
and the futures of twentysomethings everywhere.
there are 50 million twentysomethings in the united
states right now. we're talking about 15 percent of the
population, or 100 percent if you consider that no one's
getting through adulthood without going through their
20s first.
raise your hand if you're in your 20s. i really want
to see some twentysomethings here. oh, yay! y'all's
awesome. if you work with twentysomethings, you love
a twentysomething, you're losing sleep over
twentysomethings, i want to see — okay. awesome,
twentysomethings really matter.
so i specialize in twentysomethings because i
believe that every single one of those 50 million
twentysomethings deserves to know what psychologists,
sociologists, neurologists and fertility specialists
already know: that claiming your 20s is one of the
simplest, yet most transformative, things you can do
for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for
the world.
this is not my opinion. these are the facts. we know
that 80 percent of life's most defining moments take
place by age 35. that means that eight out of 10 of the
decisions and experiences and moments that make
your life what it is will have happened by your mid-30s.
people who are over 40, don't panic. this crowd is going
to be fine, i think. we know that the first 10 years
of a career has an exponential impact on how much money
you're going to earn. we know that more than half of
americans are married or are living with or dating their
future partner by 30. we know that the brain caps off
its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it
rewires itself for adulthood, which means that whatever
it is you want to change about yourself, now is the time
to change it. we know that personality changes more
during your 20s than at any other time in life, and we
know that female fertility peaks at age 28, and things
get tricky after age 35. so your 20s are the time to
educate yourself about your body and your options.
so when we think about child development, we all
know that the first five years are a critical period
for language and attachment in the brain. it's a time
when your ordinary, day-to-day life has an inordinate
impact on who you will become. but what we hear less
about is that there's such a thing as adult development,
and our 20s are that critical period of adult
development.
but this isn't what twentysomethings are hearing.
newspapers talk about the changing timetable of
adulthood. researchers call the 20s an extended
adolescence. journalists coin silly nicknames for
twentysomethings like
true. as a culture, we have trivialized what is actually
the defining decade of adulthood.
leonard bernstein said that to achieve great things,
you need a plan and not quite enough time. isn't that
true? so what do you think happens when you pat a
twentysomething on the head and you say,
extra years to start your life
have robbed that person of his urgency and ambition,
and absolutely nothing happens.
and then every day, smart, interesting
twentysomethings like you or like your sons and
daughters come into my office and say things like this:
know my boyfriend's no good for me, but this
relationship doesn't count. i'm just killing
they say,
a career by the time i'm 30, i'll be fine.
but then it starts to sound like this:
almost over, and i have nothing to show for myself. i
had a better résumé the day after i graduated from
college.
and then it starts to sound like this:
my 20s was like musical chairs. everybody was running
around and having fun, but then sometime around 30 it
was like the music turned off and everybody started
sitting down. i didn't want to be the only one left
standing up, so sometimes i think i married my husband
because he was the closest chair to me at 30.
where are the twentysomethings here? do not do that.
okay, now that sounds a little flip, but make no
mistake, the stakes are very high. when a lot has been
pushed to your 30s, there is enormous thirtysomething
pressure to jump-start a career, pick a city, partner
up, and have two or three kids in a much shorter period
of time. many of these things are incompatible, and as
research is just starting to show, simply harder and
more stressful to do all at once in our 30s.
the post-millennial midlife crisis isn't buying a
red sports car. it's realizing you can't have that
career you now want. it's realizing you can't have that
child you now want, or you can't give your child a
sibling. too many thirtysomethings and fortysomethings
look at themselves, and at me, sitting across the room,
and say about their 20s,
i thinking?
i want to change what twentysomethings are doing
and thinking.
here's a story about how that can go. it's a story
about a woman named emma. at 25, emma came to my office
because she was, in her words, having an identity crisis.
she said she thought she might like to work in art or
entertainment, but she hadn't decided yet, so she'd
spent the last few years waiting tables instead.
because it was cheaper, she lived with a boyfriend who
displayed his temper more than his ambition. and as hard
as her 20s were, her early life had been even harder.
she often cried in our sessions, but then would collect
herself by saying, can't pick your family, but you
can pick your friends.
well one day, emma comes in and she hangs her head
in her lap, and she sobbed for most of the hour. she'd
just bought a new address book, and she'd spent the
morning filling in her many contacts, but then she'd
been left staring at that empty blank that comes after
the words case of emergency, please call ... .she
was nearly hysterical when she looked at me and said,
going to be there for me if i get in a car wreck?
who's going to take care of me if i have cancer?
now in that moment, it took everything i had not
to say,
therapist who really, really cared. emma needed a
better life, and i knew this was her chance. i had
learned too much since i first worked with alex to just
sit there while emma's defining decade went parading
by.
so over the next weeks and months, i told emma three
things that every twentysomething, male or female,
deserves to hear.
first, i told emma to forget about having an
identity crisis and get some identity capital. by get
identity capital, i mean do something that adds value
to who you are. do something that's an investment in
who you might want to be next. i didn't know the future
of emma's career, and no one knows the future of work,
but i do know this: identity capital begets identity
capital. so now is the time for that cross-country job,
that internship, that startup you want to try. i'm not
discounting twentysomething exploration here, but i am
discounting exploration that's not supposed to count,
which, by the way, is not exploration. that's
procrastination. i told emma to explore work and make
it count.
second, i told emma that the urban tribe is
overrated. best friends are great for giving rides to
the airport, but twentysomethings who huddle together
with like-minded peers limit who they know, what they
know, how they think, how they speak, and where they
work. that new piece of capital, that new person to date
almost always comes from outside the inner circle. new
things come from what are called our weak ties, our
friends of friends of friends. so yes, half of
twentysomethings are un- or under-employed. but half
aren't, and weak ties are how you get yourself into that
group. half of new jobs are never posted, so reaching
out to your neighbor's boss is how you get that
un-posted job. it's not cheating. it's the science of
how information spreads.
last but not least, emma believed that you can't
pick your family, but you can pick your friends. now