Portland author’s ‘Quarterlife’ explores the period between adolescence and midlife

People who are in the period of their lives between adolescence and midlife, from roughly age 16 to 36, might face anxiety, depression and confusion about the next steps in their lives. Satya Doyle Byock is the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood and a psychotherapist in private practice in Portland. Her book dives into this time in people’s lives and how society can better support those experiencing it. She joins us with details about the book.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to the challenges of early adulthood, also known as quarterlife. Here is how one listener described this time to us in a voicemail.

[Caller]:  My name is Kiwi. Quarterlife is definitely a time where crisis can happen at any moment. It’s kind of a confusing time where you have to figure out what you like to do all over again without having the whole entourage of your high school crew. It’s a great time to figure out who you are and what you want to do.

Miller: So, as Kiwi says, a great time perhaps, but also a time of crisis and confusion and the sense that you’re on your own. The Portland psychotherapist, Satya Doyle Byock, focuses on young people who are navigating these challenging years roughly between the ages of 20 and 40. She says that society doesn’t take their challenges seriously enough and doesn’t do enough to help young adults navigate these years. Her new book is called Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. Satya Doyle Byock, welcome to Think Out Loud.

Satya Doyle Byock: Thanks so much for having me.

Miller: How did your own experiences as a young adult shape your interest in this topic?

Doyle Byock: Well, hugely, and I write about this in the book, and Portland figures very heavily in it. You know, I went to college at Lewis and Clark and found myself, in the year leading up to graduation, really wondering what I was going to be doing on the other side with a liberal arts degree. I graduated with a history degree and found myself floundering for years even though I was working hard, multiple jobs, and some of them better than others. But I really did not feel prepared for the world past academia, sort of having been raised from kindergarten all the way through senior year of college, it didn’t seem like I had been really prepared for what was on the other side of that.

Miller: You include, early on in the book, a little bit of a history lesson of this age going back to fairy tales and novels. I mean, going back hundreds of years. It made me wonder what you see as the universal challenges of this age, this transition into adulthood, and what you see as the specific challenges that people in this age group are facing right now because of policies and what’s expected of them?

Doyle Byock: Yeah, I think so much of the difficulty right now is that there really is this overlapping, this convergence of both the difficulty of this time of life, historically … I call it the timeless period of quarterlife, because historically, transitioning out of childhood dependence and looking up towards direction, whether it’s your parents or teachers or church leaders or coaches, we’re really trained to look upwards for guidance and direction and then we’re let loose on the world. And that’s been the case. You look back in the fairy tales, the hero’s journey stories that Joseph Campbell highlighted, and literature and history for hundreds of years as you say, you can see the same difficulty of people trying to sort out who they are as independent adults.

But then of course, we have the modern world right now where there’s crisis after crisis, there’s a global pandemic, there’s racial reckoning and big questions around how to serve LGBTQ populations and on and on. There’s poverty, there’s gun violence, you can name any number of these things and how they directly affect people in their twenties, primarily, but late teens and thirties as well. So this convergence is causing chaos and certainly mental health struggles and basic survival questions for, I would say, most of the people in this age group.

Miller: Let’s listen to another voicemail that we got from a listener in Vancouver.

[Caller]: I just want to say the hardest part for me about those quarterlife years has been not really knowing where I’m going. It’s a hands off period, but you don’t really know where you are.

Miller: Satya, the caller, they’re saying two things in just ten seconds: that they don’t know where they are and they don’t know where they’re going. I mean, that sounds terrifying … just boiled down to a couple of words.

Doyle Byock: It is terrifying. I’m so sympathetic and it’s so common, you know? And again, I think it’s common both historically and now. We really are raised, again, in this academic ladder, and the notion is that you go first grade to second grade, junior year to senior year, on and on. But there’s always a sense of a step forward. So whenever our academic life ends, whether it’s in high school or college or after law school, wherever it ends, people tend to find themselves wondering, ‘Wait, what’s next?’ And this is where the corporate ladder used to be valuable, or if you’re a stay at home parent, then your life path maybe transfers to your child’s growth and development.

But right now, those models aren’t really holding anymore. And so we have this feeling of a pathless path that we know historically, again, from storytelling, in a way, that’s what life is. It’s a life that hasn’t been scripted for you. But we’re not talking about that enough. And so while people are finding themselves not knowing where they’re going next, or even where they are, it feels like they’re the only one experiencing that because the cultural narrative is such that you’re sort of supposed to know. Everyone always wants to know what you’re doing next at this time of life. And most people don’t know.

Miller: That’s one cultural narrative. Another is that it’s supposed to be hard. At the end of the book, you call this a kind of hazing, but it’s really common. I mean, we saw a version of it about a month ago with the administration’s plan to forgive some student loans. One of the most common responses – there were economic arguments – but one of the most common social ones was, ‘Hey, I did this. So should you.’ And the subtext almost seems to be that there was something noble in the struggle itself. How do you reckon with that?

Doyle Byock: Well, I find it really heartbreaking. I think it’s a painful reality when a culture is more interested in making life difficult for the people growing up in it than it is to say, ‘Hey, how can I support you?’ You know, nobody is suggesting, I’m certainly not suggesting, that we create a gilded slide in coming of age and we say, ‘Hey, I’m going to lay this all out for you. I’m gonna hand you all the money you need. I’ll buy you a house. I’ll give you a degree. You don’t need to struggle or work for anything.’ Nobody is suggesting that. Coming of age is hard. Growing up is hard. Life is hard. These things aren’t going to be made super easy no matter what policies we put in place.

But we also know that it’s exceedingly difficult now, to the point that there is a massive suicide epidemic. There’s massive rates of overdoses and general domestic violence. Life is hard in a way that it just fundamentally does not have to be for this age group. And so there are things we can put in place, including forgiving student loans, which if we look at the economics of it, are simply far more inflated than they were for anyone coming of age 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. And so just economically, the comparison to say, ‘I paid off my student loans, so should you,’ it doesn’t line up.

Miller: You divide up quarterlifers into two very broad categories, with the caveat that life is never quite so easy that everything can be divided up in that way. But it’s nevertheless helpful, a division for the way you’re looking at the world. One type of person you call ‘stability types’ and the others are ‘meaning types.’ I thought we could take these one by one. So what are the hallmarks of a ‘stability type?’

Doyle Byock: Yes. So stability types are what we tend to think of when we think of a functioning adult, culturally. And I tried to create a typology for this, to sort of separate the notion that people are either succeeding at adulthood or failing at adulthood. So stability types are people for whom the social structures, the sort of written or unwritten script of adulthood, is relatively easy for them to participate in, or at least relatively easy to fake it. Stability types are often seemingly functional. They’re checking the right boxes. They might be heading towards a long term partnership or a solid stable career. They may very well have anxiety or depression, but they tend to hide or mask those things relatively well. Their struggle, when they come into therapy, is really less that they are flailing and they don’t know what they’re doing or they’re struggling with delusions. It’s more that they feel empty inside. That they feel like they’ve checked right boxes, they’ve done what they’re supposed to do, but they feel empty and meaningless, and their life doesn’t have a sense of purpose.

Miller: Where do you start then, in general, with people who come to you from this perspective?

Doyle Byock: Well, it’s tricky, because we have to start with folks who come in, and this is kind of classic ‘quarterlife crisis,’ or ‘midlife crisis.’ I think the midlife crisis often can be thought of as a crisis of stability types. The difficulty is to start with a new orientation to what life is about, because for stability types, they think they have done exactly what they were supposed to do and they’ve ended up feeling unmoored or empty. And so we have to start sometimes with questions that are more right-brained or more philosophical or theological to say, ‘Why are we on this planet? What are we doing here? What is life about? And how do we support you to find a deeper sense of meaning and a deeper sense of purpose or intimacy, connection, closeness, than you were taught to want, based on social expectations.’

Miller: There are a lot of lovely moments in the book, based on composite stories from your own psychotherapy practice. Can you tell us about the patient that you call Mira and the way that you and she came to talk about different aspects of her being?

Doyle Byock: Sure, Mira is a client who’s 31 when I meet her, and she’s a lawyer at a good firm in Portland, and she comes in – she’s recently married and had a nice wedding – she comes in with this complaint where she has sort of come to therapy because it feels like what she really is supposed to do next because she’s feeling empty inside and doesn’t even really know how to convey that to the people around her. We find, in working together, that her mother passed away relatively suddenly about five years before. And so we start to explore together what the grief is in her life that wasn’t ever fully processed because she was so capable at functioning through it. We start to unpack this other side of her and how to get comfortable with this other side of her that may be more artistic, maybe less prone to get everything right and do everything right. And one of the keys to exploring that with her is learning that she has a brother who functions very differently in the world, who she’s historically kind of looked down upon. We start to learn about her brother and this other side of herself as being ways to speak about other ways of being in the world that might in fact have meaning for her.

Miller: There’s a really poignant moment near the end where the two different aspects of her personality basically come together. Can you describe what happened and how this fits into your understanding of some of the developmental stages that are necessary for this process of becoming your own adult?

Doyle Byock: Yeah, so Mira and I, early on in the work, did this exercise that I sometimes talk about as hearing both sides, or listening to both sides, of oneself. And so she learned that there was this really strong other voice inside of her who wanted to be an artist, wants to be an artist. And we spoke about that as being the real Mira, and the other as sort of being this self that was more adapted to culture, to social expectations in a variety of ways. So we worked together on really deeply listening to that side and letting that side, in this kind of active imagination way, gain more of a hold in her life.

So in our work together – in this kind of imaginable work that feels very real when individuals are in therapy and doing the work together, it can feel abstract if you’re not living it – but to deeply know there is this other side of myself that isn’t getting attention and to start giving that side attention in therapy, in art practices, in inner dialogue, it’s extremely powerful. And I talk about that in the book through what I call a ‘pillar of growth’ being about listening, just simply truly listening to one’s inner life, and for stability types, that can often be very difficult.

Miller:  We asked folks on Facebook for their experiences about these years. Monica Adele Couvrette wrote, ‘I feel like I’ve been three or four different people since the age of 16. I’m 34 now. I feel like it’s the period where you lose and then find yourself. I feel like I’m finally settling into the person I’ll be for the rest of my life, with growth and change, of course.’

Satya, what do you make of that line that, ‘I feel like I’ve been three or four different people since the age of 16?’

Doyle Byock: Well, I’m heartened just by how much people are sharing about this experience of life and the search for self. Again, this really, to my mind, is what this time of life is about – is actually trying on different skins, as it were, trying on different personalities, identities – not in a way that is akin to a mental health disorder necessarily, but to say we were raised from very early childhood onward to participate in some kind of social script, one way or another. And then when we’re let loose on the world, it’s actually very healthy to my mind to be in what may appear a bit of chaos to other people, but to say, ‘What am I going to enjoy? How am I going to live most vibrantly in this world?’ That takes experience. It takes trying things on and failing. It takes, maybe traveling to new places, trying out new cities, participating in jobs and then quitting them. You know, these things that we can make fun of folks for, of being different people before the age of 34. But that, in fact, really provides a great deal of insight into who we are long term, so that we don’t have to have a catastrophic midlife crisis when we’re 50 years old and discover, ‘Oh, I’ve been living a lie this whole time.’ You know, the search for self is a very real, often chaotic thing and I’m all about that happening earlier than later in life.

Miller: We started with the first or one of the two broad types that you identify as ‘stability types.’ The other is the ‘meaning type.’ What are the hallmarks of this way of being in the world?

Doyle Byock: So in contrast to stability types, meaning types can often appear as though they are not succeeding well in adulthood. And of course there’s a spectrum for both of these types. So some folks may fake it better than others. But generally speaking, meaning types are people who might be more of the artists, the philosophers, the activists. People in the queer community are often more in this space because they don’t fit into the heteronormative gender roles that adulthood is really built on, in many respects. Meaning types can be highly emotional, and contemplative, and they often, again, for their friends and family while they are coming of age, can appear to be more chaotic and less comfortable with the structures of adulthood.

So adulthood is really based on what I call stability goals. The notion is that you find a partner, you find a job, a career, you get well educated if that’s part of your demographic, you learn to make money on your own, and that’s that. The notion is your family kind of wants to be able to clean their hands of you and trust that you’re going to be fine in the world. And meaning types can cause their families a lot of stress in that respect because they don’t necessarily know how to support themselves in this form of economy or they resist it. They don’t want to. So working with meaning-type clients is often very different than working with stability-type clients.

And again, the value to me in understanding them as different types versus within a DSM diagnostic kind of pathology lens, is to say there’s different ways that people are coming at adulthood with different perspectives, and there’s ways to work with both to find both stability and meaning which is what we all want.

Miller: Let’s listen to another voicemail. This is Isaiah.

[Caller]: I’ve lived a pretty expansive life, I believe. Got incarcerated at the age of 16 to 18. Upon release, got my first job that gave me a scholarship to go to college. Got my degree in massage therapy. Went through several court battles and lost my degree. Lost several things through that time as well. And I continued to grow, struggled, became homeless, moved away from family, ended up building a life from nothing with the charity of others.

From that period of time, what I’ve learned is that it’s all a cycle and we play a very little role in it. Come to realize that nothing really makes sense. We just do the best we can to experience the human condition and try not to suffer. You know, a lot of people don’t want to suffer. And I’ve suffered a lot and gained a lot from it. And for me, I’ve been in that survival mode for so long that getting to the point of stability has been something I’ve been really striving to be too. So there’s a reason why my house has wheels on it cause I never know what’s gonna happen next. I wish I could go back and correct a lot of things I made, but we live with those decisions and nobody’s perfect.

Miller: Satya, there is a lot in that one minute. But I thought we could focus on one line that it’s really striking, when he says, that he’s learned that, ‘it’s all a cycle and we play a very little role in it.’ I mean, it sounds like he’s saying that it feels like life is just happening to him, that he doesn’t have too much agency in it? How would you approach that notion?

Doyle Byock: It’s so tricky. You know, I mean, I hear he started out quarterlife incarcerated, right? And there were years when I worked in a prison in Bogota, Colombia before I was a psychotherapist and wrote my thesis in college, actually, on the experience of incarceration. So I’m very sympathetic. And I think in a society in which incarcerated people become third class citizens almost instantaneously and for whom court battles and court fees and the justice system just becomes a core part of their life, there’s no question. I mean, I can imagine – I’ve not been incarcerated myself – but the result is feeling as though you don’t have much agency over your life because the state, rightly or wrongly, has removed that in many respects.

We all, I think, feel on this planet on some level, a question of what is our real agency to create the lives that we want. But living in a country in which quarterlife is often treated with a punitive lens, over and over and over again, that instead of saying to a 16 year old, ‘Hey, you really screwed up. How can we support you? What are the ways in which you can repay society or support the victims of your crime in some way? But we’re not going to throw you in jail for many years or maybe for the rest of your life. We’re not gonna destroy your life with further legal battles. What can we do to support you to become a citizen again and a thriving citizen?’ You know, that should be the lens with which we’re treating quarterlife at least more often than not. So I’m sympathetic to Isaiah’s experience that he has no control. I can only imagine.

Miller: What are the hallmarks, do you think, of people’s earlier experiences that made them more able to navigate quarterlife in healthy ways? What can go right?

Doyle Byock: I think there’s a couple of things. There’s both the policy angle, again, of some of what I just spoke to in regards to the way that we treat mistakes in quarterlife – the way we handle student loans – we can be doing a lot of things differently from a policy perspective to support quarterlifers to thrive in different ways.

But I think also really honoring that this time of life culturally is about finding yourself and not making fun of that with terms like navel-gazing or this notion that all young people are narcissistic, which is not true. The more we can culturally support people to truly go in search of themselves and the life that they want to live on this planet, in this lifetime, I think that more can go right, because this is a profoundly generative, creative time of life. It’s so much fun being a therapist for people in this time of life who are creatively engaged in who they want to become. And this is true from people from all walks of life, all backgrounds, all demographics. The more we can center a lens on the joy of finding yourself in this moment in history, as complicated as it is in this world, the more we can all find this time of life to be about thriving and excitement and curiosity, and also about participating beautifully in shared society and culture.

Miller: At one point, you note that a client was with you for four years and you call an ‘enduring mentorship / therapeutic relationship.’ I’m curious what the mentorship piece of this and more broadly what you see as your role?

Doyle Byock: Well, it’s helpful when we are coming of age, when we graduate again from whatever school and we’ve left our parents home, there’s often not a steady adult by our side anymore. So to be a therapist to people in this time of life means often being a steady, consistent person in their life who is co-witnessing their existence with them and also being human. So, I’m careful about not over sharing with clients, but I’m also human with them. I’m not a blank slate who never speaks up or shares my own experience – and I share some of it in the book to say, ‘I’ve been through this’ – and so the mentorship is often really just about human mentorship or adult mentorship, and not getting stuck in an overly psychoanalytic or blank-slate stance with clients.

Miller: Satya Doyle Byock, thanks very much for your time.

Doyle Byock: Such a pleasure. Thank you for having me to

Miller: Satya Doyle Byock is a psychotherapist in private practice in Portland, the author of the new book Quarterlife:The Search for Self in Early Adulthood.

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