The story of your life may change dramatically, tragically, or so quietly you don’t ever notice. It’s never any fun, but it can’t be avoided.
The work involves great change, turmoil, and often a crisis — a simultaneous feeling of rock bottom and the urge to bust out.
With the help of our knowledge bank, you can choose for variations in your new neighborhood by:
But to zero in on the best place for you you’ll have to visit and schedule time to explore potential new homes in a region.
Oh, darn!
Adult Life Stages
Part One: She’s Leaving Home, Not Living Alone (Buy Buy)
Part Two: Failing at Growing Up
Part Three: Love, Marriage, Baby Carriage, or …
Gail Sheehy made the “Catch 30s” transitional stage popular .
Basically, it’s a period of turmoil and transformation occurring at roughly the halfway mark during Erik Erikson’s Early Adulthood life stage which ranges from ages 20 to 39.
You’ll recall that Early Adulthood is a time of dating, marriage, family and friendships.
Erikson said by successfully forming loving relationships with other people, individuals are able to experience love and intimacy.
Those who fail to form lasting relationships may feel isolated and alone.
Sheehy described the Catch 30s transition as a time when 20-somethings feel narrow and restricted.
You know you experience it when you realize it is time for something else.
It’s a time for revisiting and sometimes dramatically tearing up choices you made during your traditional school-to-work transition.
A time when you trade in the restricting voices of teachers and parents for bosses and co-workers.
And a time when a new vitality springs from within us them as you approach age 30.
John Hodgman. “There are transitions in life whether we want them or not.
You get older.
You lose jobs and loves and people.
The story of your life may change dramatically, tragically, or so quietly you don’t ever notice.
It’s never any fun, but it can’t be avoided.
Sometimes you just have to walk into the cold dark water of the unfamiliar and suffer for a while.” pg. 238 – 239.
Life happens to you.
Early adults experience the Catch 30 transition usually between ages 28 to 32 when they suddenly realize they’ll no longer be 20 years old.
They’re getting older.
For most, it is the first of other life’s transitions to come.
Transitions usually bookend the entrance to or the exit from a developmental life stage.
As you approach your 30-somethings during this transition your first impulse may be to blame others.
For what feels like relentless turmoil.
Crisis.
Often the restrictions boil down to career and personal choices of the twenties.
They may have been choices perfectly suited to that stage, but now the fit feels different.
No one loves change thrust upon them at any age.
Especially triggered by a significant disaster that forces those changes in your life.
Like the loss of your mother.
Hodgman. “What more is there to say than it was traumatic, a moment that breaks your life in half?
That you never heal from it, and it blankets your life in sadness and fear forever?” pg 225
“I was twenty-nine when she died.
She was fifty-eight.
I had been married to my wife less than a year, but we had been together already for ten.
In many way she had become my mom’s daughter too.” pg 225
“A month later my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer and eight months later she died.
My father attempted to go to the house a few times but found it emotionally unbearable, and so he offered it to us for a dollar.
At the time I was a freelance writer for magazines, and I think he presumed – reasonably – that this would be my one chance to ever have an asset in my life.
He asked if we could keep up with the taxes and expenses, and the answer to that was no.
But I did have a dollar, and I missed my mom, so I took it.” pg 225
Navigating through this transition means concentrating on a ourselves.
Reflecting upon what is important and what no longer is.
Making new or renewed choices.
Like each generation before them, millennials are poised to pass through the early years of adulthood almost in lockstep over the next two decades.
And, given we live in a new era those new or renewed choices look different from the outside.
Especially as they emerge.
Especially to empty nest parents.
Chris Erskine. “The lovely and patient older daughter now makes more money than I do yet seems to lead a life of semi-retirement.
I know she works very hard, but her Snapchat account is brimming with photos of boiled crabs and smiling boyfriends.
Evidently, she is dating a tray of frozen margaritas.
She lives like the characters in a Kristen Wiig movie, except her friends have sunburns, like real people, and their smiles are more authentic.
As you can see, this roommate situation is working out pretty well.
No one has stolen anyone’s bank card, and there have been no attempted murders over who ate the last yogurt.
To be fair, their relationship benefits from the fact the younger daughter spends about half her nights back at our place (mostly because she misses her dad so much).”
Over time each generation further segments into single, couple or family lifestyles.
This begins to get complicated, but stay with me.
Within the Claritas psychographic and demographic segmentation the Catch 30s enter a 30-year age range, 25-54.
They enter Erikson’s Early Adulthood ( ages 20 – 39) and grow into Full Adulthood (ages 40 – 64).
Why is this important?
We use Claritas lifestyle segmentation profiles to evaluate best places for relocation to more authentic, quality-of-life communities.
And, if your community already includes the following profiles, you’ll have a better understanding of what’s going on in your neighbors’ lives.
Here come further complications.
The lifestyles.
Fourteen, if you are keeping track.
- Seven mainstream single lifestyles.
- A single couple lifestyle.
- And six mainstream family lifestyles.
Lifestyle Profiles: 25-54
Mainstream Singles, Couples and Mainstream Families: Wealthy Influentials, Wireless Resorters, High Country Eagles and Permanent Temporaries.
Mainstream Singles
What happens when single Birds-of-a-Feather find each other?
Chris Erskine. “She is turning 31 and is full of blarney, with a flash of summer lightning in the eyes.
On the way to her birthday bash, she notes that Santa Monica is a dangerous mix of tourists and locals — too slow and too fast — making driving here pretty frustrating.
“But they bring the money in,” she says of the tourists, as if they are her city’s lifeblood, as if Santa Monica were a depressed Third World port sleepily awaiting the next cruise ship.
My daughter then asks me if Pabst is acceptable for her bash at the beach, making me secretly proud, for I always feared no one in the family shared my refined tastes.”
Where will you find other single Birds-of-a-Feather in Arizona, California, Colorado and Texas neighborhoods?
Consider these towns and seven lifestyle profiles for additions to your bucket list:
Wealthy Influentials
04Y2U1, Young Digerati – WIPL Portfolio Locals (Chandler, AZ)
16Y2U1, Bohemian Mix – WIPL Portfolio Locals (Huntington Beach, CA)
31Y2U2, Urban Achievers – WIPL Portfolio Locals (Tempe, AZ)
Wireless Resorters
23Y2T2, Greenbelt Sports – WRMR Maturing Resorts (Aspen, CO)
High Country Eagles
24Y2C2, Up-and-Comers – HCESC Satellite City-zens (Napa, CA)
35Y2C2, Boomtown Singles – HCESC Satellite City-zens (San Marcos, TX)
Permanent Temporaries
22Y2S3, Young Influentials – PTIMM Interim Middle Managers (Tempe, AZ)
Couples
Hodgman. “We were in our early thirties when we took on our house in rural western Massachusetts.
We were grown-ups, but only theoretically.” pg. 113
If instead John chose coupling Birds-of-a-Feather in California’s Sierra Mountain region he might enjoy the Lake Tahoe region.
Wireless Resorters
37Y1T2, Mayberry-ville – WRMR Maturing Resorts (Truckee, CA)
And let’s turn to what life’s like for six mainstream family lifestyles.
Mainstream Families
Chris Erskine. “Once you let them out of the cage like that, you never really get them back in that same cozy way.
But just when you come to terms with the change and adjust to a less kid-centric life, they are back.
Suddenly, the nest is no longer empty.
My life was once a convention of crying babies.
Now, 25 years later, my life is a convention of adult children living back home — of hangovers and job woes, of sleeping too late on Saturday mornings (them, not me).
There is almost a poetry to the parental plight.
Six potential bucket list neighborhoods with Mainstream Birds-of-a-Feather Families in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Texas and Utah
Wealthy Influentials
54F3U2, Multi-Culti Mosaic – WIPL Portfolio Locals (Lakewood, CO)
Wireless Resorters
32F3T2, New Homesteaders – WRMR Maturing Resorts (New Braunfels, TX)
33F3T2, Big Sky Families – WRMR Maturing Resorts (Park City, UT)
High Country Eagles
34F3C2, White Picket Fences – HCESC Satellite City-zens (Aurora, CO)
50F3T3, Kid Country, USA – HCERC Rural Cowboy (Coeur d’Alene, ID)
51F3T3 Shotguns & Pickups – HCERC Rural Cowboy (Surprise, AZ)
Whether you’re single, living as a couple or already begun your family what you have in common with each other at the Catch 30 transition is a growing dissatisfaction.
Choices perfectly suited to your 20s now the don’t fit as well.
Something feels different.
Some inner aspect that was left out is striving to be taken into account.
Until, like Jon Hodgman you find the motivation to pursue new competencies.
Hodgman. “I had been finishing my seventh year working at a literary agency.
I loved my colleagues and my clients.
I loved an industry that encouraged long lunches and still closed early on Fridays once the summer started sneaking up.” pg 225
Clearly he was unhappy.
Hodgman. “I wanted to be a writer, and that meant I could not be an agent in good faith and compete with my own clients.
Oh, I also was unhappy because my mom was dying.
So one Friday I left work and I did not go back.
I went home to help my father take care of her.” pg 225
Important new choices must be made, and commitments altered or deepened.
Sheehy. “The work involves great change, turmoil, and often a crisis — a simultaneous feeling of rock bottom and the urge to bust out.
One common response is the tearing up of the life we spent most of the 20s putting together.
It may mean striking out on a secondary road toward a new vision or converting a dream of “running for President” into a more realistic goal.
Consumed with the work of making personal critical life-steering decisions, the person demonstrates the essential shift at their age: an absolute requirement to be more self-concerned.”
John Hodgman returned to New York to his friends and colleagues and abruptly quit his job.
Hodgman. “I was back home in Massachusetts within a week.
A friend at a magazine assigned me to write an article about cheese for money.
I became a professional writer.
I spent the summer there with my dad and my wife.
I did not cry until the summer was over.
We went back to New York, and I started a new life.” pg 228
Part Five: Making It – Ages 30 – 38