Satya Doyle Byock: Navigating Quarterlife
Satya Doyle Byock is a psychotherapist and author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. Satya has dedicated her career to influencing the way developmental psychology views and attends to “Quarterlifers”, or individuals between the ages of sixteen and thirty-six. Her incredible new book draws upon Jungian psychology, social justice advocacy, trauma-informed care, and historical research to provide readers with guideposts for this period of life, which has too long been ignored by popular culture and psychology, she argues.
Some quarterlifers, “Stability Types” as Satya calls them, have done everything “right” by society’s standards, yet remain unfulfilled and unclear on what to do next. “Meaning Types,” at the other end of the spectrum, are not interested in the prescribed path, but feel as though they are drifting through life directionless. Some don’t want to participate in life at all. Our conversation explores this spectrum of being, setting to untangle the messy, uncharted path to wholeness as we engage with Satya’s four pillars of Quarterlife development, a powerful toolkit for young adults looking for a way through their psychological and existential crises. We talk about the cultural hazing cycle, young adults’ devotion to parental expectations, and the importance of developing our discernment muscle. So whether you are a young adult, or are simply seeking to understand the struggles of a generation, I hope our conversation leaves you eager to explore the ever-evolving balance between stability and meaning.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
Meaning types vs. stability types…
Stuck in ambivalence..
Developing discernment…
MORE FROM SATYA DOYLE BYOCK:
Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood
Are You a Meaning Type or Stability Type? — Take the Quiz
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Well congratulations, my friend. Such a slim book, and yet I can’t stop thinking about it. Slim is hard, let's just be clear. Making it tight is the most difficult part of writing a book I think.
SATYA DOYLE BYOCK:
It's certainly a part of the reason it took so long.
ELISE:
Was it a 600 page tome?
SATYA:
There just were so many phases. I'm glad that you like it. It means a lot.
ELISE:
I love all the references. Obviously there's Joseph Campbell in there, Carl Jung, and other incredible thinkers, including women who have established some of our archetypal or the paradigms that fit so many of our lives. And I know, obviously it's formed out of your own practice, but also your own angst, which I think that anyone who is listening, whether they're in that 16 to 36 year old quarter life, or not can relate to, which is this idea that there's this period of life that has no name, although you're naming it, where you're sort of maligned, ignored, and treated like neither an adult nor child. There's no guidebook. And it's like a, it's a terrible wasteland and it doesn't really need to be that way.
SATYA:
It doesn't need to be that way. And it is shocking. You know, I say at some point in the book too, about how visible and invisible the stage of life is. And I think about that just in, in that we, we are so easy to celebrate youth and what we have tended to call young adulthood, or early adulthood, what I'm calling quarter life. Because those terms so easily evoke different stages for different people, including young adult literature, and other things that just create confusion. But that in Hollywood, in athletics, wherever, we are just celebrating people in quarter life all the time. But when it really comes down to trying to understand, yes, but how do those specific athletes or those specific actors, or any specific human moving through this time of life, how do you move through life from childhood and dependence to creating an independent, vibrant life? You know, to say, there's no, guidebook it's an understatement. We have nothing in society to offer people. At least that was my experience. And I think that's the experience of a lot of my clients.
ELISE:
No, it's incredibly difficult. And I think we're in, you sort of allude to this at the end, but it's almost a cultural hazing cycle. Where people who have managed that bridge quote unquote, successfully to be ‘functioning adults” with meaningful or not so meaningful careers. And we'll get to meaning in a minute. There's this feeling of you know, younger generations, every younger blows, right. It's the thing that's said about all of us and always essentially untrue. But I did it, I had to figure it out and that's part of life. So you need to figure it out, too. It’s not very nice.
SATYA:
Yeah. It's cruel. And it's also just inaccurate in its core, in that, for instance, we know if you line up the cost of a mortgage now from what it was, I mean, you know, there's certain things that are very consistent across time, and there's other things like the economy or the stability of a culture that is shifting all the time. And so to just compare, it's not apples to apples. So buying a house now really is harder than it was, you know, 40 years ago for people in their twenties. But folks just don't want to hear that if they're older, and they're in that state of, well, I figured it out, I had to work a full-time job. The hazing is real, there's so much privilege involved in surviving quarter life. If, if you've survived, there's probably many, many elements of privilege that have made that possible. And it's hard for people to see that.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, for sure. And then there's this bigger meta spiritual idea, which is so important and you have this line from Joseph Campbell, which I hadn't heard and which I loved, which is: “If there is a path, it is someone else's.” So whereas previously there might have been fewer paths, right? Like get a job at a good company and you'll earn a pension. History that in some ways is incredibly complex and in many other ways, significantly less complex than where we find ourselves in this moment in time. But quarter life, as you say, is a messy embodied experience. Where you are, it's a heightened, like you are likely going through relationships quickly, experiencing a lot of mini ego deaths, all while feeling like you need to have it figured out or be on a track or, um, you know, be on your way to a fulfilled realized adulthood, which is also a myth!
SATYA:
I just think, as you're talking about all those conversations, any of us had with the answer, the uncles or the friends of the parents, or whomever, like what are you up to now? And, and of course, they're just checking in. But the feeling in so many conversations and moments in quarter life is that you're supposed to know what you're doing. And the very vast majority of people just don't know. And so part of what I'm trying to say in my book is, let's honor the fact that there isn't a path. And then in fact, from the perspective of the development of self or the pursuit of wholeness and the pursuit of who you are, that's exactly right. We don't have a path. There isn't a path. Versus this is the goal. And that's what I'm getting to. And once I get to that goal, everything will feel tidy and secure, which we know just is rarely the case.
ELISE:
And you mentioned privilege, and not to go too deep down on that road, but it's funny sitting here with you. Because we grew up in the same town, went to the same alternative hippie school. We both have parents who are doctors. And the four of us, you know, you, me, Lila, my brother are all successful people in interestingly creative or meaningful fields. So it's interesting. Can we talk about sort of the stability and we had a tremendous amount of privilege is my point in going into that. Parents who prioritized education or could prioritize education, access to nature, you know, many things I think that we recognize increasingly as being sacred for any child's development. A fair amount of freedom. Love.
SATYA:
Love.
ELISE:
Yeah. And a combination of structure and rule breaking for creative expression. And so I thought it was interesting, knowing you and knowing that about you. And, and I was thinking about myself in this context. And my twenties sucked. Like it was hard. And I didn't just fall into my career. It was a brutal slog at times, et cetera. But it seems like we both maybe got a fair amount of stability and meaning in how we were raised. Can you talk about that central core structure of the book, which is the meaning types and the stability types that need to come together?
SATYA:
Yes, and I am excited to talk with you about this, given our, our shared upbringing, because I'm really conscious that in writing the book and coming to an understanding of stability and meaning that I was really drawing on witnessing my parents and their development, and witnessing our family, and witnessing the community. And that, I think in addition to the privilege in the way hat people tend to understand that, that you and I both grew up with, for me, our community and our small school, and the ways, the ways that we were privileged. So much of it was modeling a kind of healthy adulthood. I think, for me, certainly, and maybe this is, you know, the case for you, I don't wanna completely lump our experiences together, but I think I had more exposure to healthy and happy adults than most do.
And that, that was a gift that actually allowed me to believe in what was possible, even when I was deeply, deeply struggling in my twenties. Because I had at least seen, even though I didn't know how they got there exactly, or how I was gonna get there, I had at least seen images of people who for the most part, felt that they were both stable and had structure in their life, and had sense a sense of meaning and purpose. And that that was different for each individual. Different people were sorting that out differently. So the core component of my book, the idea, I mean, first I'm defining the stage of life is quarter life. But part of what I'm indicating is that for most of psychology, I don't wanna say all of human histories because God only knows, but you know, what we know of the, the focus of adulthood has been on stability. Just, you know, find a job and don't leave it, find a partner and don't get divorced, have babies, you know, white picket fence. The vision of adulthood has been so wedded to stability that it was hard for me, even in writing the book and sorting this out, to pull them apart. That the understanding, full stop, is that the goal of adulthood is to gain stability and then midlife, we now understand people have to search for meaning because there wasn't time for that prior.
And I'm trying to revise that and name what I think all of us have known for a long time, which is it just doesn't work that way. It's not that easy. And actually, if we aren't finding our own personal sense of meaning in this world, while also working to gain some sense of physical, emotional, relational stability, then there's gonna just continue to be a lot of angst, and confusion, and pain and, all sorts of symptoms resulting from that. So for my understanding quarter life, the goal is to find your own personal blend of both stability and meaning. So it's you know, needing to be engaged with both sides of the body, you know, both sides of the being at once really.
ELISE:
It’s so interesting to hear you talk about the way that we were raised, which was kind of allo-parenting style. I had no immediate family in Montana where I grew up, but then all this community of connected adults, who were very present in our school and they were playful in our school. As you mentioned, they weren't just there as audience members in the theater, it was like schoolwide water fights and a lot of playing, a lot of intimacy with adults who weren't my parents.
SATYA:
I don't wanna start naming names here, you know, but like, I think of so many of the adults we grew up with absolutely. You know, and that also in our whole town, you know, there was a lot of a sense of adults being allowed to co-parent, you know, even when that wasn't their job. I remember just as I'm saying this, I was biking in my neighborhood and biked straight through an intersection without stopping and almost got hit by a car. And the driver pulled over and came up to me and said, you can't do that again. I could have hit you, you know? And that was just one moment out of God knows how many of being genuinely lovingly parented, but, but really helped to understand dangers around me.
And I think, you know, speaking of privilege, I mean, we also grew up in, like, our school was, was founded on an idea of blended incomes. So I think critically, it's not just about economic privilege or, you know, certainly we grew up in a primarily white town in Montana, but not just racial privilege either. I mean, there really was an emphasis on understanding this is about community support, and about seeking ways through for all of us, not just kind of castle on a mountaintop kind of stuff.
ELISE
No, certainly it, the socioeconomic diversity of Sussex in a town that's not particularly wealthy.
SATYA:
Sussex being our school.
ELISE:
Our school was I think really formative because some kids paid nothing. And I think the maximum tuition was like $9,000 or something. I'm not sure, but we really, it was very blended.
SATYA:
Very, very blended. Actually the way that was set up has influenced me enormously in my own Institute that I run and just really understanding what it is to truly shift barriers. Even though they could have, Bente, the director of the school, and the folks who were running it could have filled that school with people who could pay full fee. I'm sure. I mean, certainly now, I don't know how they're running it now. But just to truly be in a socioeconomically mixed environment all the time with a small class and small community, I think is transformative. So really honoring that, I mean that there were even in that we were being shown and taught what a different kind of community could look like. Again, that isn't just about wealth privilege or race privilege.
It's actually about love, privilege and healthy privilege. And how do we get there? And so again, I love being able to talk with you about it because of your shared experience of this, of what are we actually trying to get to. And to me, that's, that is this, this blend of stability and meaning, but it's a sense of wholeness and health ,and how do we break that down? Versus I wanna be famous. I wanna have five Porsches, you know, whatever people create as their goals. Everyone knows now if you get those things, it might make you happy for the long term, but the larger percentage, the larger chances that it's really not actually what you're looking for. It's just a stand in because you don't know that what you're looking for is something much deeper.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, absolutely. That gives me chills and thinking about, but again, we're trained, or what's modeled for us. And I'm thinking of schools in LA obviously where there's some attempt to do financial aid, but it's a very expensive city to live in. And so invariably you end up, with largely a lot of financial inequity and then it's interesting to think about that in the context of my own kids. Like my son now is sort of, we live in a very small house, and he's always like, our house is way too small, founded only on play dates, with other families. So it's interesting to think about what I'm not giving him by giving him a more mixed environment, and then what he will potentially model his own life dreams on, which might be, “I need a really big house.”
SATAYA:
He might also return to, oh my gosh, look at what my parents were really trying to do for me. I mean, we really have, we never know.
ELISE:
Well that actually leads me to my next question. So in your practice, you identify these meaning seekers and these stability seekers and this idea that people are sort of kids, or these young adults, 20-somethings are torn between these two poles, which are not typically well mixed or taught. Do you feel like that those those are personality traits or is it more how people are raised? Are they cultural values or natural?
SATYA:
Well, my sense is, and I mean, I would be really curious in the long term to kinda work with anthropologists and historians, but in all of the research that I did into literature, like there's a whole chapter on literature and storytelling in the past and really trying to understand this cross-culturally, that there have always been folks who have more or less been able to adhere to what society expects of them in quarter life, implicitly or explicitly. Some of what is expected of us is very, very clear. We all grow up with that. And some of it's just sort of implied. But that there have always been people in their culture in their time for whom that was not that complicated of a direction. Or that they didn't have a lot of inner consternation to try to check those boxes.
And they show up everywhere. I mean,it's not culture related. It's not neighborhood related,. They show up in every family and I call those folks stability types, and stability types are on their own massive spectrum. It's all about feeling into where do you land in this? The point is to help each of us understand our direction and for quarter lifers to, to sort of understand themselves on this spectrum. And so what are they looking for? It's kind of that, you are here red circle, you know, on a map. It's like: you are here. So it's finding that spot. So there's other folks in contrast who I call meaning types who have always really struggled to check those boxes, or to give a shit, to care that that's what society is asking of them. And very frequently they've historically been the artists, the creatives, the writers, you know, people on the fringes in some form or another, for whom checking those boxes in society just does not make sense. And so they often adhere to what I call meaning values. You know, they feel wedded to making meaning in their lives. But often what they're struggling with ironically, you know, is finding some way to gain stability in culture, in their lives, in society—that they're not totally allergic to.
ELISE:
Right. So just for listeners, she profiles sort of for composite clients who are meaning types or stability types, and the book traces the process for bridging these two things together. And so one of the meaning types is this writer, this young kid, Danny. Young man, I guess. And I thought it was so beautiful if you don't mind, if I read to you, um, you write: “On the journey towards stability for meaning types, I think of this as the need to incarnate, Danny would have to make a conscious choice to participate in existence rather than continue to feel dragged along by time and age, like a reluctant cow on a lead. It was extremely subtle, but a huge part of his growth rested on something like an invisible switch that only he could flip. He needed to decide to be alive in his body. His pursuit of wholeness required that he step into life with two feet once and for all.” I thought it was amazing that you named that, that ambivalence. And I've heard friends talk about this with kids who are older, who are sort of like, why am I alive right now? And like, what am I doing here? I don't believe in any of this. I don't wanna participate in any of these inequitable systems like F this, right. That, but you naming it, this sort of decision or this, are you gonna come fully in or can, or can we get you. This choice that he has to make to live.
SATYA:
Totally. It’s a choice I had to make. I mean, I'm intimately familiar with i't’s something I see in a lot of clients, and certainly feel in the ambivalence. I think in particular of the culture that Gen Z is representing more and more of just, “Why, why in an apocalypse? Should I try so hard to do X, Y or Z?” You know, and when I'm working with clients, you know, the, I mean, this can come off as I don't know, maybe inappropriate for a therapist to say, so bear with me, but it's sort of like, if you're not gonna kill yourself, which is an option for all of us, whether we're comfortable with that or not, it, it is an option, you know, but most people don't actually wanna do that. They're not actually interested in ending their lives and, and all of the pain that that would cause, but they can't quite then get themselves to say, okay, if I'm not gonna do that, then what am I gonna do here?
And so people get stuck. A lot of people just get stuck in this ambivalence, this ambivalence of being alive at all this ambivalence of being alive now, with an unbelievable amount of pain and suffering that we're all wrestling with in society, culture. And so yeah, with Danny, it's trying to say you're here, and yes. I mean, the option is there that you not be here, but probably you're not gonna take it. I certainly hope you don't take it. I mean, it's painful to think of, but then choose to participate, and choose to participate in a way that brings you joy as much as you can conceivably imagine, and step in.
ELISE:
It's really interesting. And I think anyone listening would be able to distinguish between, it's not like a suicidal ideation, depression. It's this, you said the word ambivalence, but it is this sort of waffling right. Of Ugh. And I believe, I mean, this is my own spiritual set that you probably do too, since you love Jung. But like we do choose, I think we choose on a soul level to come into body, and we choose a lot of the factors of our life so that we can learn what we need to learn in this particular go around. But you can sense that the reticence of like, oh no, not now, like, I didn't want this—this is not what I wanted!
SATYA:
That your higher self may have chosen. I mean, I think even when we hear that, it's like, yeah, well I was in a different place then, you know, I didn't know or whatever, but, but that, but that our egos need to choose too. I mean our smaller selves, so to speak, our timebound selves, you know, ourselves in 2022, whatever also need to say, okay, all right, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do this for as long as it naturally lasts. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do it fully with my whole body, with my whole soul, with my whole intellect. I'm gonna do this. Because why do life, you know, half-assed why do life without our full selves, participating. That to me is the tragedy. I mean, it's not that life is not painful in many respects, but to do it only partially I think is what we most regret at the end of our lives. I should have done it more fully.
ELISE:
Totally. I should have, um, the, should the Sharma.What's the name of the athlete?
SATYA:
Connor.
ELISE:
Connor. So on the flip side, Connor stability type, athlete, drop side of school, I thought this was a beautiful moment where you talk about, as his, eventually the walls come down and he starts processing and the emotion he gets back in touch with his emotions. He talks about sort of the load that his parents or the expectations that his parents had put on him, but he had, he can't really identify it like that. Right. So you write, “I have found the devotion to parental expectations among the trickiest things to sort through in quarter life, because the devotion itself can be so unquestioned.” So interesting, like how we unwittingly or meaningfully program our children with how we think they should live our lives. And then the burden that that creates. It's really hard to think about like boundaries, and expectations, the cont helping them create the container without filling it for them. So do you run into that all the time? I'm sure it's cultural too.
SATYA:
I don't know that it is. I mean, every culture has a different way of understanding the relationship between parents and children, every subculture does. Many people don't have parents. They don't have two parents. A parent is in jail, a parent has passed away. You know, there's so many different ways this shows up, but a critical element of quarter life, critical element of quarter life is that you sort out how to separate from your sense of self, and your parents' sense of yourself, or your perceived sense of your parents' sense of yourself. Right? Because it's all perception in the end. I mean, for folks whose parents have passed away, it's like, I, I think my mom or I knew they X, Y, and Z wanted these things for me.
There is a point at which parents need to let go. Parents need to say, I trust you. You know, I give you permission to live your own life no matter what I've implied or said directly. But I also think that that a huge aspect of this is that quarter lifers need to take the reins of their own lives and that no matter how permissive or directive a parent may have been in the past,in a sense it doesn't totally matter. It's it is still, I mean, the work with Connor was: This is your life. It's not your parents' life. And you need to decide to acknowledge that, and participate on your own terms, that it's neither about sitting on an analytic couch and complaining about what your parents did or did not do, you know. But it's also not staying completely engaged with them forever and ever exact in exactly the same patterns as, as childhood laid out. Right? So there's a lot of navigating relationships with parents that is a huge part of this, you know, it was certainly a huge part of my quarter life.
ELISE:
Yeah. And he other stability type that you profile Mira, her mom has passed, right? Yeah. So she's living out, which she thinks her mom wanted for her. And it seemed like for both of them, I know that there's sort of listening, building, integrating—this process that you outline in the book—but for both of them, it was listening in an interior way to that split that part of themselves that had split, and was buried. Right. And then that integration to wholeness. So can you talk a little bit about that and how that shows up in your practice of getting these stability types reconnected to meaning?
SATYA:
So the notion is when you're, there's some element of this that's about extroversion and introversion, right. That it's not just about identifying as an extrovert and then living that out. Carl Jung—the intention, you know, with Jung’s typology. So Carl Jung coined the terms, extroversion and introversion, and all of typology that we know, you know, from feeling types and meaning types and all of the Myers Brigg stuff ultimately is Jung's core work.
ELISE:
I didn't know that.
SATYA:
Yeah. So, so Carl June coined these terms coined this concept and for him, the whole notion was ultimately we are seeking wholeness, we're seeking a whole sense of self and an integration of these different elements. And so it was never in his mind about, well, I'm an extrovert and here's my traits, or I'm an introvert, and here are my traits. It was, here's where I exist naturally, on instinct at birth, you know, in, at this age, but therefore here's the work that I have left to do to integrate and understand. So there's a lot of shadow work, right? Shadow work goes back to Jung in the end as well is, it's about balance. It's about understanding what we don't understand about ourselves. And so when I'm working with Connor and Mira in the book, they're this two stability type characters.
A lot of the work is, well, what's the other half, you know, where's your meaning self, you know, and if you have adhered to what society expects of you or what your parents expect of you, then there's a lot of self investigation that is left for you to do, to say, okay, but who am I? And what do I want? So there's, there's sort of the extrovert and the introvert component. There's, there's also the societal, and the personal, and that typically meaning types are more oriented towards the sort of anti-society or the personal, and stability types are more oriented towards the society or the functional, the sort of fitting in. And in the end, again, you know, this becomes redundant, but it's like, we need to do both. How do we find a whole sense of self?
ELISE:
But I think any, anyone at any age can understand this and maybe you found your sense of wholeness later in the more sort of arduous process, as you said of like, you have your stability and then you've managed to make a right turn into meaning somehow. But we also look at how many disaffected, I mean, I have this conversation with people all the time who are like, I hate my job, you know, like career lawyers—some people love being lawyers, I don't wanna pick on law—but that was my best friend's story. Career law, right into entrepreneurship.It's hard.
SATYA:
I mean, I think the thing with lawyers or law is that it, it is once you're done with college, if you're not gonna jump into the unknown and graduate school or continued education is an option. There's four or five options. It's like law is a huge one. So there's a lot of folks that I know certainly, who were like, well, I guess I'll go to law school. And it wasn't some burning desire to be a lawyer necessarily. But then of course also, I mean, this is another conversation, but there's a lot we can be doing to make workplaces more joyful, and systems less painful. And that's a whole nother thing, right? It's not just about the title, the career title.
ELISE:
As I was reading, I was trying, and I think I've done a good job in my life of bridging stability and meaning. And I think that my parents set this up for me in some ways by this to both/and, and some of it has led to like workaholism and things that aren't exceptional, but you can do whatever you want, as long as you do it with all of your effort. So I have trouble resting, or ever feeling like I'm doing, there is a legacy to that, but that was very much the message. It was like you, if you wanna be a painter, that's great. As long as you apply yourself with like the full amount of your power. You can't be a lazy painter. Is really what they were saying.
You can't opt out in that way. So in many ways I'm grateful because ,not that they would've stopped me from going to law school, but of course I thought about it. I graduated in a recession, and there were no jobs and my life could have gone in a lot of strange directions, of things that were available, but I'm grateful to where I've ended up. But it has required, I will say like a continual dance with the universe, and staying open and flexible, and working really hard. It is that combination of like creating stability and a structure for creative work, that you work on with. Is it Grace? Is she the meaning type? Where no container, traumatic childhood, deep trauma. And lovely. I really wanna be Grace's friend, I know she doesn't exist, but you working with her to be like, bring the bills, like let's open the bills, let's practice. I mean, there's in the building chapter. I thought it was interesting and wise you offered such practical support of like, let's build some of these muscles, both the meaning muscles and the stability muscles.
SATYA:
It makes, as you're talking about the sort of subtle prescription that your parents gave you, you know, to do whatever you want, but do it with your whole self. Part of what I try to lay out. So, so in addition to the typology of stability and meaning types, I lay out what I call in the book, the four pillars of growth. I call them pillars, because I really did not want them to be stages or checkbox. You know, that it's not about linear growth. It's not about doing them once and being done. They're just components of our work. Right. And I think part of what your parents were expressing to you is to engage both in listening to yourself, you know, listening is one of the pillars, and to building what it is that you want to create, which is another one.
It's sort of this quality of, I mean, we can also speak about it. I think you and I could have many long conversations on the masculine and the feminine. I was trying to degender all this stuff, but it's just another way of putting into words, the, the importance of being present with our inner lives, and ourselves, and who we uniquely are, and then putting that into action, and putting the efforts there, and making that happen in really tangible ways. And generally speaking, the way that I understand this, is that meaning types are more comfortable with the listening and stability types are more comfortable with the building and the doing. And again, we need to learn to do both. So being with Grace, you know, who's a woman, quarter life woman who, client of mine who really struggled to stay on top of bills, and not completely shut down when an envelope came that she knew had a bill inside of it, or really struggled to listen to her voicemails, they would just pile up and up on her phone. There's an avoidance there. And so it is building the muscle of saying, okay, totally, it's scary, it's uncomfortable, but let's work on facing it, so that you don't just retract more and more into the inner life, or into fun, and relationships, and emotions and all those things. And how do you create that effort when it's scary?
ELISE:
Yeah. How do you ground, right. How do you take what's your head and then bring it into the world? It's that, that bridging that's,versus like being entirely in the, in the world and not at all connected to anything outside or bigger than yourself or right, that collective consciousness, which is where inspiration comes and so much meaning.
And then I'm, I'm relieved, always that you talked, you talked at length, but then the listening, you talk about discernment and that this also isn't an exercise in blind faith or intuition, or just like following every whimsy. It's the development of discernment. Can you talk about that a little bit? I see a lot of lack of discernment amongst, you know, people I love, but they're willing to like follow anyone or follow anything. That's like, whoa.
SATYA:
I know it's amazing. I mean, this is definitely a moment in the book where, you know, there's power in putting ideas into the world. It's an uncomfortable power at times. I mean, because I'm very aware that people misinterpret things that other people say in good faith,. And this is an area where I could feel what I was expressing in the book veering into the trust yourself. Every intuition is right. You know territory, which I absolutely am not on board with. And when I wrote the word discernment and was expressing the importance of discernment, my editor asked me to define it in the book because it, it does seem like a word or an idea that's just not actually talked about that much. Certainly for quarter lifers, it's not sort of part of our conversation. So discernment, it's a bit of the right brain left brain combo again, of yes, listen to your body. Yes. Listen to your intuition. Yes. Listen to your gut, listen to your hunches. Notice synchronicities in the world, write down your dreams. I mean, practice divination, pull the Tarot, throw I Ching, get your astrology read. Like these are all things I participate in fully, joyfully, lovingly. But I keep my left brain around all the time in that process, so that I can use my intellect to also sort through carefully what is working and what is not working, you know, what's going to prove true value in my life. And what's just going to send me off in the wrong direction. You know, what is their actual research to back up or histories of people I truly respect to back up, you know, and what is just whimsy or, you know, stuff that gets into cults and conspiracy theories fast. And to be somebody who's really trying, if we use the, you know, the terminology of my book to sort of walk the line between stability and meaning that is a left brain, right brain conversation, it's a masculine, feminine conversation. I mean, you're trying to stay in the third, right? Not just in the binary on one side or another. So that for me means you don't throw out divination as stupid or intuition as nonsense, but you also don't follow any of it blindly.
ELISE:
It's tricky. And as so much of this is like, this is about finding, finding ourselves and finding our own sovereignty, and don't give your sovereignty to anyone else either. It's an act of resonance: is this resonant, is this dissonant. And so often, and I understand the instinct, particularly in a world that feels so overwhelming. We're quick to find any external authority to tell us what to do, even if it's under the guise of a therapist, or a Tarot card reader. But it just doesn't work like that. And all the, you know, powerful intuitives, sort of world class intuitives that I know, their primary message is: You don't need me. All I'm doing is showing you that the connection is real. And then you need to learn how to do this for yourself.
SATYA:
I love that you bring it back there because I think that that is exactly what quarter lifers need, people in this stage of life need. And it's exactly what they're most scared of. Because again, we raise people to be dependent fundamentally. And in dependence, it's a very hard two words to put together, we expect people to follow rules, do their homework, X, Y, and Z, all, you know, all the way through childhood. We expect people to do those things. And then we say, okay, go on, we're done, go figure it out, go live your own life, go be independent. And so that shift from listening to authority, and taking direction, and doing what your coach says, your mom says, your whomever, your teacher says, to sorting out what's true and not true on your own. That is a massive, massive, psychological moment, and a massive cultural moment, developmental moment. And we're really not naming it. S I love that you bring it back there and really come back to that core element because learning how to trust ourselves and develop inner discernment is such a huge process. And it's not talked about enough.
ELISE:
No. And how to create that stability and structure. You might go from professors to a boss, but your boss isn't gonna sort of give you an assignment, a well delineated assignment after a lecture, right, there are just expectations that you're gonna meet deliverables at work, and do your work well. And some people can easily, you know, stability types, I think probably bridge that gap quite easily, but for others it's like, wait, what?
SATYA:
Well, and stability types might be having massive panic attacks. They're just not telling anyone or they're not announcing it. They're just better typically at masking severe anxiety or stress or self hatred or whatever. It's hard for everyone. I mean, it's scary.
ELISE:
I know at the end you sort of go into this, a cultural, large conversation about actually making this a conversation or something that we understand, honor, support instead of mocking. And at the same time, there's also this holding the line between yes, this is happening, naming it, making it real, acknowledging how difficult it is, real life support, and life is suffering in pain. And it wouldn't be life without it, that's in my experience, it feels like it's been contraction growth, contraction growth. Like if you're not growing, you're dying. So how do you think as a culture we can set this up better?
SATYA:
Well, I think we can name that more. I mean, to start it's to really say, okay, life is not linear growth. Full stop. I used to refer to this as the myth of linear growth, where I had to sort of detox myself growing up from this general feeling that I was just supposed to be continuing to climb these steps. You know, the book opens with this beautiful illustration of a broken ladder, kind of to nowhere up to the sky, you know, and it's shifting out of this notion that our job is to climb the ladder.
You know, that phrase, climbing the ladder, corporate culture, climbing the ladder to motherhood, if that's your goal, or to becoming a lawyer, if that's your goal, or to a hefty retirement fund, but there's always a sense of climbing a ladder. And I think what you're expressing is a very different model, which is contraction, and expansion, and growth, and death, that is much more of an ancient understanding of life. You know, death rebirth, death, rebirth, death, rebirth that it's not just birth to death, which is so much more of what we are raised with in Western culture. But it's more constant cycles of death and rebirth. And if we can honor that and express that more to people coming of age, and that we can really mirror that back then when they're struggling, I think there's a lot less shame and confusion that people are doing it wrong somehow when there are cycles of contraction, or death, or you know, falling apart.
ELISE:
Life is a process of letting parts of yourself die, old relationships, old jobs, structures, behaviors that no longer are helpful, those maladaptive traits. And you have to let that stuff go, but we're not, that's not something that I think we're, that's not, as you said, the framework around which we live.
SATYA:
And what's exciting about it then is that we also then by saying that open an invitation to quarter lifers to not just participate in society, but what's happening now very clearly is also societies need to go through processes of death and rebirth. And we have opportunities to recreate a society that is more equitable, more loving, more generous, less violent, less punitive. And if quarter lifers know that that's part of the deal, that society's cultures, everything is in a process of death and rebirth. Then they are also invited to participate versus just saying, check these boxes. And that's, to me, it's a much more interesting proposition.
ELISE:
Thank you for indulging us as we took a walk through memory lane. I’m a big fan of Satya, and I feel this work is so important. As she writes: “There are a lot of conflicting perspectives on each of these terms within the psychological literature (extended adolescent, young adulthood, emerging adulthood), but each one implies a state of being in between, as if these twenty some years of life are merely a transitional zone between other, real life stages. a sort of lobby you wait in until something important happens. Even worse, the prevailing impression is that adulthood arrives when you finally reach certain markers of economic and relational security, as if those achievements will magically pull you out of the lobby of your suffering and into the grand hall of real life.” I hope that this book catches on like wildfire because it speaks to something, that has for too long has gone without a name. And as she says, there is no reason that it needs to be this hard, particularly when our future requires full participation from all of us, and that each of us bring our gifts to bear.