Wwhen Satya Doyle Byock completed her studies after almost 20 years, she felt like she was stepping off a cliff. Adulthood seemed dangerously unclear. “I was in my 20s and in crisis, looking around for friends in crisis,” says Byock, now 40. Only a few of her fellow graduates seemed bright-eyed about the future, with jobs or further study that was in order. The rest had “absolutely no idea”.
After graduating, Byock volunteered abroad, at a prison in Colombia, in tsunami relief in Sri Lanka, before landing a job as a project manager at a software startup in Portland. It was a “good job”, in a turbulent sector, with a decent salary. But Byock’s disorientation continued. In her journals, she wondered if she was on the right path and why she didn’t feel satisfied.
Byock “floundered existentially”, she says now. “I climbed that ladder, I finished college, but it didn’t seem like the point of existence. I asked myself, ‘What do we do now?” The road ahead, from work to retirement, seemed soul-crushing.
Byock was telling her housemates about her desire to quit one night, when she broke down sobbing.
Everyone told her to stick with it, that it’s normal to feel lost in your 20s. But when, Byock wanted to know – and how – did it start to get better?
That question shaped her life in more ways than one. Soon after, she left the beginning and enrolled in graduate school to study Jungian psychology, intending to focus on the tumultuous years of post-adolescence. Today, Byock is the director of the Portland-based Salomé Institute for Jungian Studies and a practicing psychotherapist and author.
In her latest book, Byock makes her case – informed by her own experience and that of her patients (mostly Millennials and Gen Z), as well as cross-disciplinary study – for the period between the ages of 20 and 40 to have its own developmental phase. During these decades, Byock argues, individuals not only discover who they are, but make decisions, personal and professional, that will shape the rest of their lives.
“So much life happens in these years, but in literature there is a black hole around them. We talk about adulthood as ‘You’ll figure it out,’ but the fact is, it’s the ground floor of the rest of your independent life.”
Your 20s and 30s are “a powerful and powerful time,” says Byock. “If we set ourselves up in ways that feel satisfying, meaningful, and safe, we’re less likely to have a major, life-interrupting crisis later.” As it is, if these years are discussed at all, they are often minimized, like the widespread eye rolls about millennials’ “quarter-life crises” and “coming of age” problems.
“There is so much ridicule and contempt at this stage of life,” says Byock. “Something cute, for privileged kids… It’s so often talked about.”
Byock herself is an older millennial (those born between 1981 and 1996), but even when she was a student, the generational lens — which marked her peers as uniquely fluttery — struck her so narrowly. “It was like it was a new phenomenon. It didn’t seem true to me.”
After all, historically, the transition from adolescence to adulthood has always been validated with coming-of-age rituals. That psychological journey of maturation underpins enduring narratives, from fairy tales to Harry Potter and The Hunger Games – proof of its universal relevance.
At graduate school, by studying Jung, Byock sought to understand the common characteristics, across cultures and throughout history.
“It became my real interest, rather than focusing on ‘What’s wrong with kids these days?'” she says. “What I discovered is that there isn’t a focus on that stage of life — it doesn’t even have a name.” She dubbed it “quarterlife”.
In her book, Byock identifies four “pillars of growth” for emerging adults: Separate (separate our values and desires from those of our parents or social norms); Listening (learning to trust ourselves and meet our own needs); Build (create a life that is satisfying and meaningful to us) and integrate (make it routine, and reap rewards).
These are not sequential stages or tasks, says Byock, but areas for introspection and “psychological work” through which young adults can find peace. It’s a new framework for thinking about maturity – crucially, one less dependent on external milestones.
Home ownership among young adults has declined in recent decades, with repercussions for financial security, relationships and family planning. Between 2011 and 2021, the number of adults living with their parents in the UK increased by almost 15%.
“Certainly, the economics of adulthood are much worse than they used to be,” says Byock. Many graduates enter the “real world” already burdened by debt. But older generations often fail to grasp the stark difference between the opportunities they enjoyed versus the lack of young people today.
A survey last year found that almost half of the British public agreed that frivolous spending was behind young people’s inability to buy property, despite huge rises in prices and stagnant wages.
“These days there is a lot of talk about the loss of values in young people, their laziness and things like that – and a deep disrespect and misunderstanding of how economically difficult it is,” she says. The contrast, and unsettled feeling of many quarterlifers, is summed up in a popular meme that compares “My parents in their 20s” (having a baby, buying a house) to their children today (having food delivery for the nth time ordered; their lives determined “on fire”).
It’s not just economic decline they’re struggling with, says Byock. “Gender roles are completely different – in those ‘My parents at 27’ memes, Mum would stay home and raise the kids… The expectation of what we do in adulthood is completely different than it used to be.”
Young men, meanwhile, are “more lost than they used to be”, suggests Byock, with figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate espousing their disillusionment. “We need better ways to talk about what’s shifted in terms of gender roles, for everyone — because culture hasn’t kept up.”
The demographic shifts underway are similar to the 1950s, Byock says, when feminists began to publicly fight against the expectation that women should be satisfied as wives and mothers. “There were those questions of a satisfying life again: ‘Shouldn’t you be happy? You ticked all the boxes as a woman’.
“I think it’s a very similar phenomenon that we’re experiencing now, but across gender lines: it has more to do with deficits in culture, a very frequent apocalyptic world, and economic disadvantages or problems in general.”
Quarterlifers’ struggle to adjust and mature is exacerbated by the absence of support, or even validation. “Very few people talk meaningfully about this time of life, instead of saying, ‘Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps,'” says Byock. “In modernity, we have done a poor job of moving people from dependency and childhood to psychological independence.”
Many start adult life unschooled in the basic building blocks, such as how to cook and manage their finances, she points out. “I don’t think it should be seen as a silly thing that people have to learn how to become ‘adults’.” Yet this 20-something struggle is so often played for laughs (as in Lena Dunham’s Girls), and discussed as a uniformly privileged group of “disaffected graduates”. But all young adults may struggle with the questions of how to build a rewarding life.
Many of her patients are refugees or immigrants “wrestling with a distinctly different journey of stability and meaning than their parents,” says Byock. Even those individuals who are outwardly successful can find themselves dissatisfied, as Byock did in her work at the beginning. She describes two “types” of people: those who value stability and those who pursue meaning. The latter tend to flounder more obviously; the former may “look like they have it together” before they break up.
The path that Byock suggests for each is to learn from the other. “Meaning” types benefit from embracing structure and routine, while “Stability” types need to find something to nourish them outside of checking society’s boxes. “The path to wholeness—which I think ultimately all adults seek, not just quarterlifers—creates a fulfilling life that feels structured, organized, and safe, but also full of meaning, intimacy, and connection.”
A developmental lens, Byock argues, will help reduce divisions between generations. Younger people are often seen as “cultural scapegoats”, she says, but as millennials begin to rise to power, it is to society’s advantage that they feel empowered and inspired.
“We are missing massive potential from what I would argue is the most generative stage of life in terms of creativity, new ideas, certainly children, and parenthood.”
For now, she hopes to cultivate compassion for the challenges specific to early adulthood and reassure those in trouble. The journey to becoming an adult, says Byock, is not marked by partners, property or promotions, it is about bridging the gap from looking to authority figures for direction and answers, to learning to trust our own .
“It has nothing to do with privilege. It is generally this very basic human question that underlies all religion and philosophy: ‘What are we doing here? And, in this finite life, what am I going to do with it?’”
Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood by Satya Doyle Byock is published by Penguin for £10.99. Buy it for £9.34 guardianbookshop.com
