Meg Jay gave a talk at TED2013 suggesting that the 20s are a person’s defining decade — and it started a heated debate at the office. Here, a 20-something responds. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

I’m 24 and a woman, and that makes me a target for a lot of speculation and life advice. Sheryl Sandberg wants me to lean in to become a woman leader; Anne-Marie Slaughter says my lady parts may doom me to a half-fulfilled life; Susan Patton thinks I should have spent my time at Princeton looking for a husband (ideally one of her sons); and in TIME Magazine’s most recent cover story, Joel Stein suggests that I’m narcissistic and dying to be famous. Everyone’s talking about me.

And people wonder why millennials are so self-involved.

Meg Jay: Why 30 is not the new 20Now I can add clinical psychologist Meg Jay, today’s talk, to the list of well-intentioned non-millennial millennial critics. Jay spoke at TED2013 — and emphatically stated that “30 is not the new 20.” She urges twentysomethings to rid themselves of the idea that their 20s are a prolonged adolescence, throwaway years. According to Jay, 80 percent of life’s defining moments happen by the time a person is 35. Powerful — and intimidating — words.

To be honest: When I first heard the talk, I was appalled. It wasn’t a message I wanted my peers to hear: it put pressure on an already overstimulated generation to find the right career and start thinking about marriage now. And it seemed to simultaneously berate thirtysomethings, telling them their most important years were over and it was too late to get what they wanted.

In her book, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter – and How to Make the Most of Them Now, Jay addresses a lot of the eyebrow-raisers she couldn’t in her 14-minute talk. As anybody who has given a TED or TEDx Talk knows: Boiling years of work down to 18 minutes is a terrifying honor. While the format makes for a good introduction to a new idea, the nuance and detail can be lost in the condensation. The heteronormative lifestyle Jay seems to take for granted in her talk is subdued in her book, which actually dedicates its first 30 percent to work. And the book very quickly establishes a critical condition that’s taken for an assumption in her talk: That her advice is geared toward people who choose to list marriage and/or children in their life goals.

In her book, Jay includes personal experiences and reflections that help to soften what could otherwise seem like a condescending stance. She writes, “Like many twentysomethings, I wanted to establish my career before I had kids, and I did. I waddled across the stage to collect my Ph.D. diploma while eight months pregnant with baby number one.” By the time she had her second child Jay had a university job. But she writes, “Having two babies after thirty-five did not go quite as smoothly as I expected, and now I see how lucky I was. Many women are not as fortunate.” Jay wants twentysomething readers to avoid some of the same mistakes she feels she might have made.

If you are in your 20s and marriage and/or children are things you desire, Jay has a lot to say on the matter. She opposes the media’s portrayal of American twentysomethings as a “culture dominated by singles who are almost obsessed with avoiding commitment.” She writes, “I have yet to meet a twentysomething who doesn’t want to get married or at least find a committed relationship.” The anecdote doesn’t convince me, but Jay’s argument that postponing marriage just for the sake of it is a reasonable one. Just because people get married later doesn’t mean that, a priori, later is better. And that also doesn’t mean twentysomethings should be content to date and cohabitate for years with people they know they won’t end up with. At least thinking about the qualities you want in a long-term partner while you’re in your twenties, says Jay, can help prevent what she sees often in her practice: people who rush into marriage when they turn thirty because it’s suddenly the time to care. Basically: Start worrying in your twenties, and you might not feel as screwed in your thirties.

Twentysomething women trying to figure out how to have it all will have to look elsewhere. In her chapters on work and love, Jay doesn’t address the critical relationship between the two — and more important, how one might hinder the other. She doesn’t recognize that for an ambitious twentysomething, there simply might not be enough hours in the day to further a career and work on finding the perfect mate.

Ultimately, Jay’s goal is to create a sense of urgency for twentysomethings so they don’t end up in their 30s feeling like they wasted the past ten years — and to provide tools to deal with this proverbial fire under the butt. As she told me, “I’m being sincere when I say there’s nothing worse than sitting across from a 35-year-old who’s realizing they’re never going to get the life they want, and that’s sad. Creating urgency for twentysomethings is okay.” But how this helps anyone over thirty is less clear.

Indeed, Jay’s book could be a pretty depressing read for thirtysomethings who haven’t been powerwalking through their 20s. It might also add more pressure to twentysomethings who are being told from every angle what their generation could be doing better. It’s nice to imagine a bunch of Gen X’ers sitting around nodding their heads saying “Yes, yes, yes I wish I had heard this when I was 20. Onward, millennials! Succeed where we failed!” Certainly these people exist, as evidenced by the deluge of Gen X advice to young poets (Jay, Sandberg, Slaughter and Stein are all Gen X’ers); but what’s much more likely is a bunch of thirtysomething women tearing their hair out when they are told that being the first real beneficiaries of feminism and birth control has doomed them to spinsterhood.

And finally: What about youth? If your 20s is not the time to have fun, when is? As Jay says in her talk, “I’m not discounting twentysomething exploration here, but I am discounting exploration that’s not supposed to count. Which by the way, is not exploration. That’s procrastination.”

I’m not going to upend modern philosophical thought when I say: Not all experiences need a focus, and not everything that counts can be counted. While I had hoped that Jay’s final chapter, “The Brain and the Body,” would focus on the sort of “capital” that doesn’t belong on a work or relationship résumé, it turned out to be further reading on my developing adult brain and my rapidly deteriorating eggs. Adults need to play, too.

When I asked Jay about “fun,” she said “there should be fun all throughout your life. Twentysomethings shouldn’t feel this pressure to live their life like an eternal spring break — because how can it, when you’re working and you don’t have money and you don’t know whether you’re going to get a text back from the person you like? It’s actually a very stressful time.” Agreed, but — as you get older — spring break gets harder and harder to schedule. While Jay finds it hard to see what is fun about scrambling for the L train at 4 am after too much Scotch, it’s hard for me to imagine what’s fun about owning a home and having two kids. And, yes, I know that’s in part because I’m in my twenties.

If my father’s house had a mantra, it would be “Life is long.” I was infused with the belief that I could do anything I wanted, at any age. No one likes thinking about life as a series of limitations, and certainly no woman likes to think of herself as a ticking time bomb. But Jay is right when she says we all have to face certain realities: Time runs out. Which is why I am also completely on board with Jay’s own mantra: Be intentional. Because while we may have different ideas on how to live the good life, Jay and I can agree that the intention of living it should be realized early and often.

Logic needs love: Jacob Berkson at TEDxSussexUniversity
Love does not exist outside of reason, says Jacob Berkson, but within it. Taking us on a historical tour of philosophers who believed that cold logic stood alone, Berkson shows how reason and emotion are forever intertwined. (Filmed at TEDxSussexUniversity)

The biology of love: Helen Fisher at TEDxEast
Can your choice of mate be predicted by science? Biologist Helen Fisher profiles the four chemicals that affect personality and suggests that data from online dating sites could unravel the mysteries of human attraction. (Filmed at TEDxEast)

In sickness and in health, men and women aren’t equal: David Page at TEDxBeaconStreet
As scientists are finding new ways to treat patients with advances in genetics, one critical area is being overlooked: the difference between men and women. As David Page suggests, genetically speaking, there is as large a gap between men and women as there is between humans and chimpanzees of the same gender — and understanding this gap could open up entirely new avenues for treating once-incurable illnesses. (Filmed at TEDxBeaconStreet)

Is technology destroying love? Yann Dall’Aglio at TEDxParis
How has the digital age changed love? Yann Dall’Aglio examines what it means to love in today’s society, if it’s in danger, and if it’s even worth saving. (French with English subtitles.) (Filmed at TEDxParis)

And here, some of the week’s highlights from the TEDx blog this week:

• A glimpse at the first TED in Iran
• A 6-year-old shares his plan to help the homeless
• The TEDx interns honor Leslie Snope’s Galentine’s Day

Esther Perel: The secret to desire in a long-term relationship

For a fascinating look at why we’re experiencing this “crisis of desire” (hint: it’s the first time in history when we’ve expected marriage to be about passion) and how we can boost out erotic intelligence within the space of a great relationship, watch this talk. And below, more great TED Talks in the areas of love, passion and sex.

• Helen Fisher: The brain in love
• Mary Roach: 10 things you didn’t know about orgasm
• Hannah Brencher: Love letters to strangers
• Helen Fisher: Why we love, why we cheat
• Jenna McCarthy: What you don’t know about marriage
• Thomas Dolby: “Love Is a Loaded Pistol”
• Isabel Allende: Tales of passion

1. Women are more likely to get responses than guys. For a guy who writes a woman on OKCupid without any previous flirtation, he has a 25% chance of getting a reply from her. But for women who are cold-writing a guy — there’s a 40% chance she will get a reply.
2. Women’s perception of men’s attractiveness may be more warped than men’s perception of women’s appearance. With the rise of pornography, plastic surgery and airbrushing, many people wonder — do guys know what real women look like anymore? The answer appears to be yes. When Rudder showed us a graph of the ratings men give to women on an attractiveness scale of 1 to 5 through OKCupid, there’s a normal distribution with fewer women falling at the 1 and 5 extremes and the grand majority getting ratings in the middle. However, when women rate men on a scale of 1 to 5 on attractiveness through the site, the graph skews sharply towards the lower end. Women overall rate many men as a 1, and shockingly few as a 4 or 5. Jokes Rudder, “A 3.8 for a guy is basically Hollywood material.”
3. Still, men tend to email the most attractive women. While guys can clearly appreciate women in the center of the attractiveness spectrum,  that doesn’t mean they don’t aim for the top. Men of all levels of attractiveness tend to send the most emails to the few women rated across the board as a 5.
4. Message length doesn’t appear to matter. Rudder was sure that longer messages would up a person’s chances of getting a response from the object of their affection. But it’s not true. Whether a message is the length of a tweet or the length of a novella doesn’t seem to matter in terms of chances for a reply. The numbers listed in item #1 hold tight — men have a 25% chance of getting a response and women have a 40% chance.
5. If you don’t hear back quickly, you probably won’t. Rudder took a look at the length of time elapsed before a person replies to a message and how it corresponds to the likelihood that they will respond. In a fascinating twist, half of all replies are sent by the seven-hour mark. There’s a big drop-off from there in the chances of a reply. “Seven hours is the half-life of your hopes and dreams,” joked Rudder.
6. Not all replies turn into dates. Getting a reply on OKCupid is half the battle — but it isn’t everything. There’s only about a 30% chance that a reply will turn into an actual conversation — a correspondence that lasts for three exchanges or longer.
7. Despite the startling statistics, people do fall in love through the site. Every day, about 500 people disable their OKCupid profiles for a very specific reason: they met someone through the site that they’re embarking on a relationship with.

What have your online dating experiences been like? Which of these facts surprises you the most?

Helen Fisher: The brain in love

Inspired by Helen Fisher’s classic TED Talk, “The brain in love,” we invited three speakers with big ideas on relationships, sex and family to our New York office for a TED@250 salon, part of a program to tackle timely topics. Love was certainly in the air.

After a screening of the incredibly sweet office-romance film “Post-It Love,” Christian Rudder stepped to the stage. The co-founder and editorial director of OKCupid, Rudder set out to parse some of the data pouring into the site at all times from its users. For example, Rudder shared that when a man on the site writes a woman without any previous interaction, he has a 25% chance of getting a response from her. Meanwhile, women cold-writing men through the site have a 40% chance of a reply. Rudder shared another interesting tidbit — that half of responses are sent to a message are sent with seven hours. As Rudder put it to a big laugh, “Seven hours is basically the half-life of your hopes and dreams.”

But Rudder shared an inspiring bit of news. Every day, 500 people deactivate their OKCupid profiles because they met someone through the site. “All it takes is one,” says Rudder. This sentiment was echoed in the ahhhh-worthy Google video, “Parisian Love,” which tells a moving love story via search.

Bruce Feiler, author of Walking the Bible and the new book The Secrets of Happy Families, stepped up next to share the surprising thing that has revolutionized his family life: agile programming. A method of software development, agile breaks down large projects into small, do-able bits — allowing people throughout the process to give feedback as they go. Agile was developed in opposition to the “waterfall method,” where people in charge determine the flow of the project and people inside the process have no input.

Applying this to a family means creating detailed daily checklists. “You can’t underestimate the power of making a checkmark,” says Feiler. “It works in offices and it works with kids.” Agile in the home also involves having weekly meetings to talk about what went well over the course of seven days and what needs improvement. And Feiler reveals a surprising fact about his twin 8-year-olds: that they’re able to pick their own punishments and they generally give themselves harsher ones than their parents would have picked.

Finally, we heard from Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, who spoke about keeping passion in long-term relationships now that human beings “live twice as long” as we used to. Perel nailed the basic challenge of modern relationships — that, on the one hand, they must satisfy our deep-seated need for security, dependability and permanence while at the same time meeting our equally strong need for adventure, mystery and the unexpected.

“Can we want what we already have?” Perel asked. The answer is yes. But because Perel sees desire as the space between the self and the other, she reveals that this can be achieved in some counter-intuitive ways — in part by being more selfish and savoring moments of absence. Her thoughts were truly surprising and inspiring.

Stay tuned for these great talks on TED.com and the TED Blog in the upcoming weeks. And a special thanks to Built It Green, who donated the wood for the beautiful backdrop you see in these images.

Photos by Cloe Shasha