As Ian put it to me, almost desperately, “My mom goes on to me and everybody else about how great I am and how proud she is of me, and I want to say: For what? What exactly stands out about me?”
Far from narcissistically lapping up his mother’s praise, Ian had long sensed that her words were too generic to mean much. He felt hoodwinked—and with good reason. Life isn’t limitless, and neither was Ian. Twentysomethings often say they wish they had fewer choices but, at the moment, Ian didn’t have as many choices as he’d heard he did. And the longer he waited to get going, the fewer the options were going to be.
“I want you to come back next week,” I said. “When you do, we’re getting out of the ocean. It’s not the right metaphor. We’re going shopping for jam instead.”
There is a classic study in psychology known as the jam experiment. The jam experiment was conducted by a researcher named Sheena Iyengar who, then at Stanford University, had the idea that the local grocery store would be an excellent place to understand how people make choices. Iyengar’s research assistants posed as jam suppliers and set up sampling tables at a gourmet store. In one condition of the experiment, six flavors of jam were available for tasting: peach, black cherry, red currant, marmalade, kiwi, and lemon curd. In another condition, twenty-four flavors of jam were featured: the six flavors just mentioned plus eighteen others. In both conditions, customers who tasted the jam could then use a coupon to buy a jar at lower cost.
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 visited the twenty-four-flavor table went on to buy jam. In contrast, shoppers who visited the six-flavor table were more able to decide which jar was right for them, with about 30 percent leaving the store with jam in hand.
The next week, I told Ian about the jam experiment and wondered aloud about whether he felt too overwhelmed by life’s purported possibilities to pick something.
“I do feel overwhelmed by the idea that I could do anything with my life,” he said.
“Then let’s get concrete. Let’s talk about choosing jam,” I offered.
“Am I at the six-flavor table or the twenty-four-flavor table?” he asked.
“That is an excellent question. I think part of making any decision in your twenties is realizing there is no twenty-four-flavor table. It’s a myth.”
“Why is it a myth?”
“Twentysomethings hear they are standing in front of a boundless array of choices. Being told you can do anything or go anywhere is like being in the ocean you described. It’s like standing in front of the twenty-four-flavor table. But I have yet to meet a twentysomething who has twenty-four truly viable options. Each person is choosing from his or her own six-flavor table, at best.”
Ian looked at me blankly, so I went on.
“You’ve spent more than two decades shaping who you are. You have experiences, interests, strengths, weaknesses, diplomas, hang-ups, priorities. You didn’t just this moment drop onto the planet or, as you put it, into the ocean. The past twenty-five years are relevant. You’re standing in front of six flavors of jam and you know something about whether you prefer kiwi or black cherry.”
“I just want things to be great,” Ian said. “I just want things to work out.”
“You’re keeping it vague,” I challenged. “You’re avoiding knowing what you know.”
“So you think I already know what I should do?”
“I think you know something. I think there are realities. Let’s start there.”
“So this is like the lottery question,” he said.
“What’s the lottery question?” I asked.
“You know,” Ian continued, “it’s when you ask yourself what you would do with your life if you won the lottery. Then you know what you really want to do.”
“That’s not the right question,” I countered. “That’s not about reality. The lottery question might get you thinking about what you would do if talent and money didn’t matter. But they do. The question twentysomethings need to ask themselves is what they would do with their lives if they didn’t win the lottery. What might you be able to do well enough to support the life you want? And what might you enjoy enough that you won’t mind working at it in some form or another for years to come?”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“That cannot be true.”
Over the next months, Ian told me about his experiences at work and in school. For a long time, I just listened. Ian talked, and we both listened to what he said. After a while, I reflected back specific information about what I heard and saw. There was an early interest in drawing. A childhood love for LEGOs and building. An architecture major he started, but didn’t finish, because it felt too archaic. He earned his degree in cognitive science because he liked technology and perception. I saw Ian talk easily about his wish to create products of some kind.
Eventually, Ian thought through all of the options that seemed available to him. He assembled six tangible flavors of jam, six things he might do next.
“I could keep working at the bike shop, but it is kind of gnawing at me. I know it’s the wrong thing to do. My manager is in his forties and something about that really bothers me. . . .”
“I could go to law school. My parents are always telling me I should do that. But I don’t want to take the LSAT and I hate reading and I hate writing and I guess there’s a lot of that in law school. . . .”
“Now that so much design is happening online, that interests me. The interface between design and technology interests me. I applied to a digital design apprentice program in D.C. a couple of years ago. It was at a company that takes a lot of postgrads and sort of develops and launches them. I wanted to do that but I didn’t get in. . . .”
“I could take Arabic lessons and do something with, you know, international relations or something, and maybe get sent overseas somewhere. But that’s just an idea. I enrolled in a class a while back but I never went. . . .”
“I could go visit my buddy in Cambodia to buy some more time, but my parents are getting sick of me doing that. . . .”
“I could go to St. Louis and hang out with my old girlfriend. She watches Grey’s Anatomy all the time and says we should both get post-bacs. But I only took two hard science classes in college, and I didn’t do so well in them. Anyway, this probably sounds bad, but I cannot even deal with her until I get somewhere with this whole work thing on my own.”
(It didn’t sound bad. Work before love. I’d heard that from twentysomethings—and especially twentysomething men—many times before.)
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