I think that's all fair to say, I just didn't read that into her message. Maybe she's better at expressing herself in the book. Or maybe it depends what your background is, because she's definitely expressing herself to a certain background.
I didn't get the impression she was encouraging the extreme that you have to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life in your 20s. I thought her message was simply that you have to do
something. Her own personal story is that she worked as an Outward Bound counselor, which ended up being quite different from the career that she ultimately chose.
I think she's responding to the fact that so many kids wait around for inspiration to strike about the perfect ultimate.. thing they're going to do. There's a cultural trope that everyone has a Perfect Ultimate Thing
and that once you've started on the path to a PUT, you can't change your mind.
One of her points is that trying new things is how you figure out what your PUT is. If you just drift around taking yoga classes and working un-challenging jobs, you aren't making any headway. The passage of time isn't some magical catalyst.
In your own case, you've done a lot in your 20s and you're now entering your 30s with professional, financial, lifeskill, and relationship capital which you'll use to do what you really want, possibly your PUT :) The capital you've accrued is due to your having made choices and commitments which have ultimately given you more choices than just fearfully holding on to your potential, keeping it virginal and unsullied.
And in the meantime, as you say, you've enjoyed yourself. Rather than stewing in angsty indecisive complacency. That might be another benefit of the book is that she speaks in case studies and you see that she's addressing distress that her young patients feel. She's not telling people who are happy with their lives that they're doing it wrong.
Maybe your teaching background puts you more in touch with the part of the culture that puts pressure on kids to hurry up and do Adult Things.
Conversely, maybe you see this attitude not at all and therefore see this as a push in that direction rather than backlash against the opposite.
It's kind of like being given a map and told to give someone directions but not being told where they are to start with. Telling someone to go right might send them up a mountain or into a lake depending. Hard to speak to your audience when there are so many messages out there and you don't know which they're exposed to.
Or maybe I and others are simply reading into her book what makes sense to us.
There might also be the age old problem here of not agreeing with the culture but nonetheless trying to help people living in it. Maybe it's not wise that we put so much emphasis on achievements. But for most people growing up in this culture, if they get to 30 with no significant achievements it's going to be difficult for them to feel capable of controlling and enjoying their lives.
Or there's the nature of cultural debates that they tend to be in the format of agreeing or disagreeing.
Had to throw an alternative viewpoint out there, since everyone seems to love it so much.
Case in point :)
I would add that, as a female, the points about relationships and fertility are very well taken. There's a strong current that says that women in their early twenties who express hopes about getting married and having kids are hopeless throwbacks who will end up barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, a disgrace to us all :) It's as though acknowledging the unfairness of biology is incompatible with equality. I don't think the author would take issue with your wife having kids in her 30s, because your wife at least had a plan. She didn't suddenly wake up at 30 being like, "oh, right..." And she, hopefully, knew there was some risk to waiting, whereas there's a lot of popular lore that says everyone can have a kid any time before they're 40.
