Why Your Late Twenties Is the Worst Time of Your Life | Hacker News Reader

Why Your Late Twenties Is the Worst Time of Your Life

hbr.org

68 pointsantr48 comments

HBR is losing it. This is the sort of murky, PR as meaningful content, that you'd expect from HuffPo. As to the mind wandering being harmful, there has been LOADS of material to counter that (here's a book about the benefits, by a real life science person, not some contracted copywriter! https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wandering-Mind-Brain-Youre-Looking/...)

Does stuff like this article goes to print? It seems that they have a separate group to make science-y stuff "go viral" to compete with BuzzFeed. Kind of like what WaPo is doing now.

I agree. They've become rather clickbaity and unreliable overtime.

The problem with the data in this study is that it comes from the users of an app called Happify, which is likely installed by people who don't consider themselves happy to begin with.

Yep, selection bias seems problematic.

I think it's also somewhat difficult to make statements about change over lifespan without a longitudinal design that tracks the same participants over time. I would guess that engagement styles with an app like Happify also differ by age.

They do link to a few scholarly studies that agree with their conclusions as a company, so I don't feel like this is totally reliant on the app users. Here is one of them that I was able to download and read: https://www.academia.edu/3633328/The_holistic_phase_model_of...

As an anecdote, when talking with my friends, we typically agree on that the time in secondary school - around the years 13-16 was the worst time in the life, defined by angst and worries, and those that went to university typically says that was the most fun times, because of all the new friends and all the activities.

But maybe no one asks the kids how they really are doing.

Furthermore, people who don't consider themselves happy to begin with and think an app is the solution. That's got to be a funky bubble.

I'm gonna be nitpicky here for a second, but Headspace played a key role in furthering my quest for more sustainable happiness (actually, it'd be my quest for less dissatisfaction). An app may not "make someone happy" but it just might facilitate the process in a very reasonable way.

It's not about whether the app works, it's about the kind of person who would try to use an app for that purpose at all.

If the app works, then we're talking about the "kind of person" who has a goal, then identifies and uses a tool that works to achieve the goal.

Yes, exactly, and that kind of analytical approach (i.e.: identify specific steps to "solve problem") is less common than some people, especially the kind of analytical people who comment on HN, think.

Further, as commenters above have said, making an app a part of your problem solution is an even narrower funnel. Some people might just go straight to "make some new friends", "join a club", "get involved politically", or whatever.

Meditate, see a therapist, exercise more, talk to a doctor...the mindset that says "I have a problem, I will search for an app to fix it" is vanishingly small, except within one thin demographic slice, where it is overwhelming.

Another Headspace user seconding this. I wouldn't say it changed my life, but using it has certainly had an impact on my overall happiness.

Sure, I'm not saying it isn't the solution - just that you're going to end up with quite a particular self-selected demographic.

Although personally I put more stead in human interaction to promulgate happiness than an app. :)

Gotta jump on this opportunity. This specific app is designed to help a person explore his/her own mind through meditation. My belief is that more people should look within before looking externally (which is, as you say, "human interaction") to improve themselves and the world around them. The fundamental flaw in positioning "human interaction to promulgate happiness" is that you attach your happiness to things outside yourself. I say start with yourself and go from there.

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Surprising that their "data science" team didn't take take the observations in the above two comments into consideration.

I hate to be one of those people who comments on the meta-article as opposed to the article. but this is something I found really interesting.

I didn't even realize I was reading something from Happify until halfway into the article. The whole thing was very interesting, especially as a person who just turned 29. While this article isn't necessarily an advertisement, it did cause me to google Happify and see what it was about. As I did this it occurred to me: this is what "sponsored content" should be! When you see "sponsored content" on a website it doesn't have to be some trash advertisement that's made to look like the rest of the site. It could be something as good as this article!

You should watch the last season of South Park. This isn't what we want instead of ads.

As someone who won't watch it, can you describe it?

It's very hard to explain, but a person is really an ad.

It's a sarcastic and smart commentary and meta-plot throughout the whole season about the dangers of advertisements being disguised and perceived as being something genuine.

Thanks.

>this is what "sponsored content" should be

I disagree. I don't mind sponsored content if it is of high quality and is interesting, but only if it is clearly labeled as being a paid advertisement and I know from the outset.

Your awareness of this fact will affect your judgement and how you interpret what you've read.

The advent of the internet and social media meant that the generation of current people in their 20s saw much more of what different people lived like as an example. They could stumble into early retirement, vagabonding, yoga, libertarian-ideology, psychology research, startups, furries, and many other lifestyle and thought pattern choices that led to much more ability to choose both their purpose and their action steps for the future earlier. This means that a lot of lessons that were delayed for earlier generations with less variation of choices presented are now hitting earlier.

More choices may lead to less satisfaction: http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun04/toomany.aspx

Happiness is tricky to define.

Can confirm, my Facebook timeline is very depressing as someone in their late 20ties.

Sure it might only be ~5% of my friends who are travelling, starting companies, etc but it does create a vague sense of background stress that I'm wasting my time not knowing what my "passion" is and just working a 9-5ish job with 5 - 8 weeks of vacation a year.

It's pretty ridiculous when you think about it but it seems to be human nature.

If it helps - travelling is not a passion (IMO) and those people starting companies are very likely to be searching for a job in a couple years.

> Sure it might only be ~5% of my friends who are travelling, starting companies, etc but it does create a vague sense of background stress that I'm wasting my time not knowing what my "passion" is and just working a 9-5ish job with 5 - 8 weeks of vacation a year.

Not sure if this will help, but you've probably got Facebook friends who look at your feed and envy you and feel like they're wasting their lives.

A 9-5 job with 5-8 weeks of vacation a year?

I suspect GP just gave a lot of readers here something to be depressed about.

Turn off Facebook.

Seriously, I logged out a month ago and it's been great. It's one less thing to pay attention to.. but more importantly, it gets rid of 90% of the crap, arguments, and a source of potential-envy/angst.

Honestly... how do you fill in your compilation time? There's always those free 30s/2min (whether you're compiling js or java) where you have too much caffeine to accept nooping. That's where my addiction to 9Gag and facebook is rooted, and that's how I noticed that grand newspapers fill the pretty mediocre slot of idle-time fillers.

This is what I use to get rid of Facebook timeline; and use FB strictly as a Messenger.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

Occasionally, I get curious and log onto my phone's Firefox to see my newsfeed and it's so funny that the same people from six months or a year ago are posting the same messages, being "mindful," "lab coat ceremonies for med/PA school," (from the same people every year) "active lifestyle pictures". In a way, it was really insightful because I realized that it's actually the opposite, these "lifestyle" people did not grow up but are keeping on parroting what they should be doing year after year.

However instead of posting witty one-liners on someone's self-serving pictures, I've reached out to my friends more on FB messenger one-on-one where we've talked about loneliness, depression and failures - which led to meeting people I normally wouldn't meet up in real life.

I seriously wish that there could be a movement/art project where people would share their worst, mundane and most insecure moments on Facebook to portray modern living more accurately and to counter the current state of affairs on that site.

> I seriously wish that there could be a movement/art project where people would share their worst, mundane and most insecure moments on Facebook to portray modern living more accurately and to counter the current state of affairs on that site.

These types of posts seem commonplace on Twitter.

There's also https://www.messenger.com/ - official from Facebook for exclusively messaging.

A quote I find useful - unlike most quotes - is "Don't compare your inside to everyone else's outside."

In my 20s I knew people who seemed to have it together.

When I was in my 30s and 40s almost all of them lost the plot in various ways, with an assortment of expensively broken relationships, bankruptcies, and even a few unexplained and unexpected deaths.

Doing what makes you happy is so much better than doing what you think other people may think should make you happy.

Why late twenties? This part seems to describe people in their early twenties:

"When young adults get their first jobs and move into their own apartments, they’re going it alone, usually for the first time. Moreover, as they attempt to establish their status as adults, their environment sends them mixed messages: regardless of their professional or personal achievements, they are still considered by others to be "kids,"

Some people don't move out of the house until their late 20s, but some people do, and by their late 20s have things "figured out".

I think the problem here is they're taking data from a bunch of late-20s millennials.

> This prolonged interim state results in a lot of pain, and some studies suggest today’s young people are suffering more than previous generations did.

These kids aren't being drafted into war service. Crime and teenage pregnancy are down, civil rights are increasing, commodities are cheap and plentiful, access to global information and communication is higher than ever, advances in medicine continue to make formerly terminal diseases become manageable or preventable. The biggest thing millennials have to stress over is their debt and their ability to secure a job, both of which are issues most people have had to deal with by their late 20s.

From what I understand of the quarter-life crisis, it presents mainly in people who have been so privileged that they feel that even though they can self-sustain, they should be doing something better, like following a passion, or living in a different place. Fear of death is another factor, but it's less present than the fear of missing out.

Your late 20s are basically the end of what should be a wonderful time: wasting your youth and not worrying about your body falling apart (which it will begin to shortly). If kids these days are actually in a great deal of pain, it's because our society has given then an irrational sense of entitlement and fear of not having the best of everything.

You win the thread.

As a late 20s millennial, what if having a quarter life crisis is actually the sanest thing? Why shouldn't we have a crisis? We live on this earth for some 80 years, most of it which we have to spend commuting, in cubicles or doing other chores just for sustenance. Inevitably our body will fail us, we'll be in pain, we'll die, loved ones will die. Nothing we do really matters all that much either. I wouldn't say I'm depressed or overly concerned with these things but they're increasingly in the back of my mind. I'm just saying, maybe thinking about these things is the sane thing to do? Just because people in the past didn't have time to think about it because they were fighting for their lives, does that make it better or right?

The point is that compared to the struggles of previous generations, current-generation late-20s people in the First World have worries far higher on Maslow's Hierarchy [0]. Personally, I think that's a good thing -- I'm not worried about being drafted into the war like my Grandfather, for example.

Inequality though brings some dissonance into play: two similarly aged people sitting side-by-side on BART may have VASTLY different worries, even though they look alike; one worries about self-actualization, the other worries about how they'll eat because the BART fare cost almost as much as their daily wage after tax.

It's good that people from different backgrounds and different futures coexist and are neighbors -- we sometimes call that "diversity" -- but standing up the worries of those groups next to each other makes one group seem frivolous. "I can only afford a $700k house, so I'll never live close to Campus!" vs. Fight for 15.

I think the struggle of people "further along" always seems silly to the people "below" them. Worrying about cubical life can seem silly and entitled to someone struggling to pay rent + feed kids; worrying about harvesting tax losses & capital gains rates (or whatever it is rich people worry about) seems silly and entitled to cube drones. I'm sure there are some better illustrative examples here that are less money-focused, but I'm out of time.

Anyway, point being, I'm not passing judgement about anything, just trying to unpack it a bit.

[0]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Ma...

I think there's a difference in your example, though. When a poor person grows to become a well-off person, they can still have an identity crisis as they come to terms with the culture clash of their old way of life [and friends and family] and a new environment surrounded by the well-off. They'd be more satisfied with what they have, but still depressed for other reasons.

It's better to take your original example - Grandpa vs Me - as the lens for the original survey. They had way more serious problems to deal with over a long period of time. We've had a recession and fairly progressive politics that has improved the lives of many (though at the same time making life worse for non-white and low-income people).

I also like to consider how biased these surveys run by "App" companies are. Consider all the people who don't have smartphones, or don't have the leisure time to fill out "happiness" surveys - like most young black Americans, who will disproportionately be more worried about getting shot by police, going to jail, making enough money to pay for food/"the poor tax"/teenage families/housing/etc. They're lucky if they make it to their late 20s. Or being classified an illegal immigrant, and therefore having absolutely no rights but still needing to make a living to support yourself and your family. So some may be unhappy, but for radically different reasons than those polled, like systemic racism, voting restrictions, lack of protection of human rights, or the oligarchy of the super-rich continuing to grow a larger lower class.

Right, the App surveys suffer from selection bias in a huge way. It's almost the pinnacle of what Silicon Valley gets made fun of for, right: "you're so dissatisfied with your comparatively cushy life that we'll make an app for that!"

Yet we've seen [0] that our happiness is relative to our peers. Is the happiest illegal immigrant better off (happiness-wise) than the saddest millionaire? We build our floor on our parents' (families' etc) ceiling. If we build a craptastic studio apartment, it doesn't matter if it's on the 300th floor, we're still unhappy. I guess that's the empathetic way to look at it? Sociology is hard.

[0] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-08/asa-mcb080805...

From the video at the bottom of the post

> 20-somethings were more likely to report negative feelings and mind wandering, both are detrimental to well-being

Letting my mind wander whenever it wants, and only focus on working when I'm in the mood, has been the best thing I've done in my entire career and for my sanity. My mind is so much clearer when it is free to wander.

I wonder if they misunderstood in ability to focus with mind wandering. Day dreaming, which is what I learned to call it when I was very young, is very beneficial to my sanity and creativity. I get all sorts of ideas when I let my mind go where it wants to go.

The articles science is suspect at best.

That being said, I'm 26 and a lot of my friends and myself describe what the authors are talking about when we talk about life. It's really hard to find your place and be happy in this crazy world. I feel lucky to have found programming and my wife, but many of my pals aren't having the same feelings of direction and satisfaction. It's all subjective to what each individual desires anyway, but its interesting to ponder.

The very short article had a link to a large BPO company as an 'in association with' at the side of the page.

But the page didn't load well, so re-loaded.

The same article had a link another large BPO company (competitor to the first), also as a 'in association with' at the side of the page.

If working for a consultancy in a BPO role, it is very likely late 20s is the worst time of your life. Graduate, join a big name, and then pin-holed into a tiny-tiny role doing a repetitive job in an extremely hierarchical organisation where career progression is slow not for anyone, but everyone, as verticals in the organisation prevent diversification.

To quote Adam Smith, often quoted regarding the brilliance of pin-production and need for specialisation, but having far greater insight into the consequences of such production methods, now done by ERP and email:

> The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, nobdle, or tender tentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning many even of the orginary duties of private life.

> The rude state of husbandry which preceeds the improvement of manufactures, and the extention of foreign commerce. In such societies, the varied occupations of evey man oblige evey man to exert his capacity, and to invent expendients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring.

signup for an account and see the baseline questions. this data is completely useless

That article left much unanswered.

One side thought is that I really wonder what the societal implications are of life-stage depression shifting down to a younger age, coupled with a massive generational cohort (millennials) all entering that life phase at the same time. What effect does a collective wave of people all feeling hopeless at once have on our culture?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_return :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com