Top 100 Meg Jay Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Most twentysomethings know better than to compare their lives to celebrity microblogs, yet they treat Facebook images and posts from their peers as real. We don’t recognize that most everyone is keeping their troubles hidden. This underestimation of how much other twentysomethings are struggling makes everything feel like an upward social comparison, one where our not-so-perfect lives look low compared to the high life everyone else seems to be living.”

— Meg Jay

52. “For some, life may be about neatly building on Phi Beta Kappa or an Ivy League degree. More often, identities and careers are made not out of college majors and GPAs but out of a couple of door-opening pieces of identity capital.”

— Meg Jay

53. “When it comes to making choices, less is more. The fewer choices we have, the more likely we are to pick something.”

— Meg Jay

54. “With all the attention paid to the urban tribe, however, many twentysomethings have limited themselves to huddling together with like-minded peers. Some are in almost constant contact with the same few people. But while the urban tribe helps us survive, it does not help us thrive. The urban tribe may bring us soup when we are sick, but it is the people we hardly know – those who never make it into our tribe – who will swiftly and dramatically change our lives for the better.”

— Meg Jay

55. “Success often came not from being in the right place at the right time, but from being able to recognise being in the right place at the right time.”

— Meg Jay

56. “We become what we hear and see and do every day. We don’t become what we don’t hear and see and do every day. In neuroscience, this is known as “survival of the busiest.”

— Meg Jay

57. “Whatever it is you want to change about yourself, now is the easiest time to change it.”

— Meg Jay

58. “Sometimes the best way to help people is to slow them down long enough to examine their own thinking.”

— Meg Jay

59. “According to evolutionary theory, the brain is designed to pay special attention to what catches us off-guard, so we can be better prepared to meet the world next time. It even has a built-in novelty detector, a part that sends chemical signals to stimulate memory when new and different things happen.”

— Meg Jay

60. “The twentysomething years have never been more in the zeitgeist. Popular culture has an almost obsessive focus on the twenties such that these freebie years appear to be all that exist. Child celebrities and everyday kids spend their youth acting twenty, while mature adults and the Real Housewives dress, and are sculpted, to look twenty-nine. The young look older and the old look younger, collapsing the adult lifespan into one long twentysomething ride.”

— Meg Jay

61. “The future isn’t written in the stars. There are no guarantees. So claim your adulthood. Be intentional. Get to work. Pick your family. Do the math. Make your own certainty.”

— Meg Jay

62. “Compared to their twentysomething selves, women are about half as fertile at thirty, about one-quarter as fertile at thirty-five, and about one-eighth as fertile at forty.”

— Meg Jay

63. “The urban tribe may bring us soup when we are sick, but it is the people we hardly know – those who never make it into our tribe – who will swiftly and dramatically change our lives for the better.”

— Meg Jay

64. “Perhaps this is the true travesty of “social” media: the damage it has done to the social lives of young people just when they need others the most.”

— Meg Jay

65. “Life stories with themes of ruin can trap us. Life stories that are triumphant can transform us.”

— Meg Jay

66. “Because our twenties are the capstone of this last critical period, they are, as one neurologist said, a time of “great risk and great opportunity.”

— Meg Jay

67. “I kept thinking of an even more robust research finding: that being on the high end of the Neuroticism dimension is toxic for relationships. Neuroticism, or the tendency to be anxious, stressed, critical, and moody, is far more predictive of relationship unhappiness and dissolution than is personality dissimilarity.”

— Meg Jay

68. “If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. – Dale Carnegie, writer and lecturer.”

— Meg Jay

69. “The post-twentysomething brain is still plastic, of course, but the opportunity is that never again in our lifetime will the brain offer up countless new connections and see what we make of them. Never again will we be so quick to learn new things. Never again will it be so easy to become the people we hope to be. So whatever it is we want to change about ourselves, our twenties are the easiest time to change it.”

— Meg Jay

70. “Finding someone like you might seem easy, but there is a twist – not just any similarity will do. Dating and married couples do tend to be similar to each other in attractiveness, age, education, political views, religion, and intelligence. So.”

— Meg Jay

71. “Confidence doesn’t come from the inside out. It comes from the outside in. People feel less anxious – and more confident – on the inside when they can point to things they have done well on the outside.”

— Meg Jay

72. “Twentysomethings who don’t feel anxious and incompetent at work are usually overconfident or underemployed.”

— Meg Jay

73. “In my practice, I notice that many twentysomethings – especially those who surround themselves with other twentysomethings – have trouble anticipating life. They need memento vivi – or ways to remember they are going to live. They need something to remind them that life is going to continue on past their twenties, and that it might even be great.”

— Meg Jay

74. “In one way or another, almost every twentysomething client I have wonders, ‘Will things work out for me?’ The uncertainty behind that question is what makes twentysomething life so difficult, but it is also what makes twentysomething action so possible and so necessary. It’s unsettling to not know the future and, in a way, even more daunting to consider that what we are doing with our twentysomething lives might be determining it.”

— Meg Jay

75. “Unthought knowns are those things we know about ourselves but forget somehow.”

— Meg Jay

76. “Every problem was at one point a solution.”

— Meg Jay

77. “What would an A in your twenties even mean?” I wondered out aloud. “I don’t know. That’s the problem. I just feel like I shouldn’t be less-than.”

— Meg Jay

78. “Often the clients with the toughest family backgrounds know the least about how to get what they want in love. But these are the clients who need to be the most careful. They are the very clients who need to partner well.”

— Meg Jay

79. “Every day, I work with twentysomethings who feel horribly deceived by the idea that their twenties would be the best years of their lives.”

— Meg Jay

80. “As I gathered up my maps and turned to go, I hesitated and asked the ranger, “Am I going to make it?” He looked at me and said, “You haven’t decided yet.”

— Meg Jay

81. “Gage’s social recovery, and countless subsequent studies of the brain, tell us that the brain changes in response to the environment. This is especially true in the twentysomething years as the brain caps off its second – and final – growth spurt.”

— Meg Jay

82. “This is a problem because, while the urban tribe may be the most supportive figures in our twenties, they are not the most transformative. The urban tribe may bring us soup when we are sick, but it is the people we hardly know – those who never make it into our tribe – who will swiftly and dramatically change our lives for the better.”

— Meg Jay

83. “All the thinking I did was really debilitating and unproductive. The one thing I have learned is that you can’t think your way through life. The only way to figure out what to do is to do – something.”

— Meg Jay

84. “Most twentysomethings yearn for a feeling of community, and they cling to their strong ties to feel more connected. Ironically, being enmeshed with a group can actually enhance feelings of alienation, because we – and our tribe – become insular and detached. Over time, our initial feeling of being part of a group becomes a sense of disconnection with the larger world.”

— Meg Jay

85. “No one I know really knew what they wanted to do when they graduated. What people are doing now is usually not something that they’d ever even heard of in undergrad.”

— Meg Jay

86. “Rather than a way of catching up, Facebook can be one more way of keeping up. What’s worse is that now we feel the need to keep up not just with our closest friends and neighbors, but with hundreds of others whose manufactured updates continually remind us of how glorious life should be.”

— Meg Jay

87. “We even know that larger social networks change our brains for the better as they require us to communicate with more and different others.”

— Meg Jay

88. “I would advise the same approach today as you ask your own weak ties for letters of recommendation, suggestions or introductions, or informational interviews: Make yourself relevant. Do your homework so you know precisely what you want or need. Then, gather up the courage and politely ask for it.”

— Meg Jay

89. “The key finding in the study was that the twenty-four-flavor table attracted more attention yet it resulted in fewer buyers. Shoppers flocked to the exciting array, yet most became overwhelmed and dropped out of buying jam altogether. Only 3 percent of those who.”

— Meg Jay

90. “Those who use what is called a growth mindset believe that people can change, that success is something to be achieved. Maybe it’s not the case that any person can be anything, but it is still true that within certain parameters, people can learn and grow. For those who have a growth mindset, failures may sting but they are also viewed as opportunities for improvement and change.”

— Meg Jay

91. “Once she could envision what she wanted her thirtysomething life to look like, what to do with the twentysomething years became more urgent and more defined.”

— Meg Jay

92. “From countless studies of MRI scans of healthy adolescents and twentysomethings, we now know that the frontal lobe does not finish wiring up until sometime between the ages of twenty and thirty. What this means is that, in our twenties, the quick, hot, impulsive, pleasure-seeking, emotional brain is ready to go, while the slow, cool, rational, forward-thinking frontal lobe is still a work in progress.”

— Meg Jay

93. “The twenties are an inflection point – the great reorganization – a time when the experiences we have disproportionately influence the adult lives we will lead.”

— Meg Jay

94. “How does what you did before relate to what you want to do now, and how might that get you to what you want to do next? Everyone realizes most applicants don’t actually know what their careers will look like. Even the ones who think they do often change their minds.”

— Meg Jay

95. “Most have come of age on their devices, where they are bombarded not just with skydiving selfies, but with headlines about economic, political, climatic, and global doom.”

— Meg Jay

96. “Talia’s friends invalidated what was real about Talia by assuming that searching was better than finding, friends were better than family, and adventure was better than going home.”

— Meg Jay

97. “If you are paying attention to your life as a twentysomething, the real glory days are still to come.”

— Meg Jay

98. “The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.”

— Meg Jay

99. “Older spouses may be more mature, but later marriage has its own challenges. Rather than growing together while their twentysomething selves are still forming, partners who marry older may be more set in their ways.”

— Meg Jay

100. “Every time somebody on Facebook changes their status to engaged or married, I panic. I’m convinced Facebook was invented to make single people feel bad about their lives.”

— Meg Jay