The term “quarterlife” was coined more than two decades ago by Abby Wilner, co-author (with Alexandra Robbins) of Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties. Although psychotherapist Satya Doyle Byock’s Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood credits Wilner with the neologism, it also often gives the impression that the struggle and quest for purpose in early adulthood is something its author has discovered; a therapeutic specialism of her own creation, rather than, say, a juncture of individual human uncertainty you can read about in the Bible.
Indeed, a key argument of the author, who practises in Portland, Oregon, is that quarterlife is “overlooked” and underexplored. The marketing blurb describes her focus as an area that has been “virtually ignored by popular culture and psychology”. This fails immediately when you consider that some of the most critically acclaimed cultural successes of the recent past (Lena Dunham’s Girls, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, Christopher Storer’s The Bear) explore this territory. Then there’s the “adulting” memes that abound, or how Taylor Swift’s astute observations on growing up have made her a global superstar. There was even an NBC sitcom based on twentysomethings called… Quarterlife.
It’s a gnawing incongruence: the big pitch that Doyle Byock has alighted on a brand new phase of development psychology, then mentioning a Bildungsroman or quoting a thinker that proves the opposite. Where her book does differ, however, from much traditional professional discourse – and, most refreshingly, from an attitude in certain modern quarters that has given rise to the word “snowflake” as an insult – is that she is absolutely on the quarterlifers’ side (they are defined here as “roughly” ages 16 to 36, although in an interview she gave to NPR, it was 20 to 40).
Her kindness, warmth and empathy frequently come across. She’s bang on about how woefully underprepared many young people are for life admin, and the spiral of shame to which this can lead. And, at 40 – an upper-end millennial – she gets it, and that’s a validating thing for readers who have become accustomed to brickbats from their elders.
Quarterlifers, according to Doyle Byock, come in two different flavours: “meaning” types and “stability” types. The former tend to be more adventurous, creative, spiritual. They are “likely to be artists” and travellers, but struggle with mundane tasks and are not particularly grounded. The latter are more likely to have a good job and relationship locked down, but perhaps wonder, as Peggy Lee put it: is that all there is?
If that binary sounds simplistic, that’s because it is. But it doesn’t follow that it is wholly devoid of truth or use. The work that the author does with her clients – and encourages readers to undertake – is to identify which of the two types feels most accurate, and to then improve balance between them in a bid for a more coherent, happier whole.
This process includes going through, in whichever order, “four pillars of growth”: Separate (from, for example, oppressive parents or a romantic partner); listen (to one’s own needs); build (making life plans and working towards goals); and integrate (put this all into practice to “manifest something new”).
An expository narrative is structured around four fictionalised, composite case studies. There’s Conner, the Adderall-abusing college dropout; Grace, the lesbian runaway in a co-dependent relationship; Mira, the married and successful but unfulfilled lawyer; and Danny, the stifled writer with a porn addiction. Yes, I know, this all sounds rather like a YA novel.
The book, then, sits somewhere between self-help and academic treatise. There is potential disappointment for readers keen on the former, because of a lack of a workbook element with explicit exercises (although there are descriptions of techniques that Doyle Byock uses in-session). And Quarterlife cannot succeed as the latter, given its limited historical, economic and societal context, despite the fact the author mentions more than once – correctly – that people and their problems do not exist in a vacuum.
The extraordinary lack of wider detail seems to be down to Doyle Byock’s desire to impress that the quarterlife phase is not limited to a particular era, and because her parameters are so nebulous. While the “teenager” may have been ushered into being by postwar advertisers, decades after G Stanley Hall’s maturation theory (neither of which are looked at here), people between the ages of 20 and 40 have always existed.
It doesn’t make sense for Doyle Byock to acknowledge, for instance, the high cost of living, or the rapid pace of technological change, or issues of race and gender, which affect present-day quarterlifers… and then not examine any of it properly.
Why not, instead of a throwaway line on quarterlifers’ “constant relationship to digital devices” right at the end of the book, delve into – off the top of my head – the algorithmic experiments of corporations such as Meta to manipulate users’ emotions, or the ways in which these products are designed to encourage dependency in young people?
Why not actually broach the late-00s global recession, a massive, defining influence on the economic circumstances that have so screwed the exact target audience of this book, rather than just vaguely mentioning that wages are low and adults are leaving home later?
Similarly, if you’re going to write that “crippling anxiety and depression are effectively the norm” on the first page, you need to point to some research that provides a convincing case and, furthermore, at least try to work out and explain why and how that is. (And, ideally, attempt to unpick the difference between poor mental health and mental illness.)
There isn’t a single statistic or clinical study; there’s zero science. While mainstream publishers are no doubt cognisant of what I’ll call the Stephen Hawking rule (each equation included halves sales), at times I felt like a maths teacher writing “show your working out” in the margins.
Perhaps most frustrating is that the concluding chapter reads like a draft for a much better book, broad brushing as it does all of the issues the author has left out. There’s a first and singular reference to neurodivergence. An allusion to climate anxiety. It’s a sort of literary “here’s what you could have won!” Unfortunately, it’s too late.
