如果您可以在余生中成为一个年龄，那会是什么？
Would you choose to be nine years old, absolved of life’s most tedious responsibilities, and instead able to spend your days playing with friends and practicing your times tables?
还是您会选择20多岁的时候，当时间感到无尽时，您的牡蛎是您的牡蛎 - 旅行，酒吧和俱乐部招呼？
西方文化idealizes youth，因此得知这一点可能会令人惊讶a recent pollasking this question, the most popular answer wasn’t 9 or 23, but 36.
Yetas a developmental psychologist, I thought that response made a lot of sense.
在过去的四年中，我一直在研究人们在30多岁和40多岁的经历，我的研究使我相信，这一生活的这一阶段（虽然充满挑战）比大多数人想象的要多得多。
职业和护理紧缩
当我30多岁时，我是一名研究人员时，我想了解更多有关我所在的年龄时期的信息。那时我意识到没有人在30多岁和40多岁的人进行研究，这使我感到困惑。在这段时间里，经常发生很多事情：购买房屋，结婚或离婚；建立职业，改变职业，生孩子或选择不生育。
要学习一些东西，它有助于命名。因此，我和我的同事将30至45岁的时期命名established adulthood，”然后着手尝试更好地理解它。尽管我们仍在收集数据，但我们目前已经采访了这个年龄段的100多人，并收集了来自600多人的调查数据。
We went into this large-scale project expecting to find that established adults were happy but struggling. We thought there would be rewards during this period of life–perhaps being settled in career, family and friendships, or peaking physically and cognitively–but also some significant challenges.
我们预期的主要挑战是我们所谓的“职业和护理紧缩”。
This refers to the collision of workplace demands and demands of caring for others that takes place in your 30s and early 40s. Trying to climb a ladder in a chosen career while also being increasingly expected to care for kids, tend to the needs of partners, and perhaps care for aging parents can create a lot of stress and work.
Yet when we started to look at our data, what we found surprised us.
Yes, people were feeling overwhelmed and talked about having too much to do in too little time. But they also talked about feeling profoundly satisfied. All of these things that were bringing them stress were also bringing them joy.
例如，44岁的Yuying说：“即使这个时期有复杂的要点，我现在在这个空间中感到非常幸福。”现年39岁的妮娜（Nina）只是形容自己是“非常幸福的”。（根据研究协议的要求，本文中使用的名称是化名。）
When we took an even closer look at our data, it started to become clear why people might wish to remain age 36 over any other age. People talked about being in the prime of their lives and feeling at their peak. After years of working to develop careers and relationships, people reported feeling as though they had finally arrived.
36岁的马克（Mark）分享了至少对他而言，“事情感觉更多。”他说：“我整理了一台机器，终于得到了所需的所有零件。”
20年代动荡之后的松了一口气
As well as feeling as though they had accumulated the careers, relationships, and general life skills they had been working toward since their 20s, people also said they had greater self-confidence and understood themselves better.
36岁的乔迪（Jodie）感谢她在20多岁以外的生活中反思自己的生活时所获得的智慧：
“现在，您拥有十年的生活经验。您在20多岁时发现自己的发现不一定是您想要的是错误的。只是您有机会弄清楚您不想要什么以及什么对您不起作用。… So you go into your 30s, and you don’t waste a bunch of time going on half dozen dates with somebody that’s probably not really going to work out, because you’ve dated before and you have that confidence and that self-assuredness to be like, ‘hey, thanks but no thanks.’ Your friend circle becomes a lot closer because you weed out the people that you just don’t need in your life that bring drama.”
我们采访的大多数成年人似乎都认识到，他们30多岁的人比20多岁更快乐，这影响了他们如何看待他们开始遇到的一些身体衰老的迹象。例如，现年37岁的丽莎说：“如果我能够身体回去，但我也必须在情感和心理上回去……没办法。我每天都会服用松软的皮肤线条。”
Not ideal for everyone
我们的研究应有一些警告。
The interviews were primarily conducted with middle-class North Americans, and many of the participants are white. For those who are working class, or for those who have had to reckon with decades of系统性种族主义, established adulthood may not be so rosy.
It is also worth noting that thecareer and care crunch has been exacerbated, especially for women, by the COVID-19 pandemic。For this reason, the pandemic may be leading to a decrease in life satisfaction, especially for established adults who are parents trying to navigate full-time careers and full-time childcare.
At the same time, that people think of their 30s–and not their 20s or their teens–as the sweet spot in their lives to which they’d like to return suggests that this is a period of life that we should pay more attention to.
And this is slowly happening. Along with my own work is an excellent book recently written by Kayleen Shaefer, “但是你还很年轻，”探索人们30多岁的人。她在她的书中讲述了改变职业道路，导航人际关系和处理生育的故事。
我的同事和我希望我们的作品和散夫的书仅仅是开始。对成年的挑战和回报有了更好的了解，将为社会提供更多的工具来支持人们，以确保这个黄金时代不仅提供了我们将重新回顾的记忆，而且还为其余部分提供了坚实的基础我们的生命。
克莱尔·梅塔（Clare Mehta）是心理学副教授伊曼纽尔学院。
This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read the来源文章。
