Meg Jay

Might these things be true one day?

Which of these things do I really care about?

What about after work?

Who do I come home to?

Do I have a partner?

What does that relationship look like?

How does it look different or similar to the ones that I saw growing up?

Are there kids in the picture?

How old was I when I had my first child?

How old might I be when that child goes to college or has their own kids?

And of course, am I happy?

Am I healthy?

And what exactly do I do or not do that makes me happy and healthy?

So the idea here is just to try to get to know your future self, because when we spend time connecting with that person, we do some reverse engineering and we start to ask our present self questions about how our present and our future can come together or meet somewhere in the middle along the way.

We start to ask questions like, how is everything I think I want going to fit?

Or what does all this mean about what I need to be doing now?

Or here's one of my favorite questions to ask yourself at any age.

If I'm in a job or a relationship or a situation I would like not to be in in five years, then how much longer am I going to spend on this?

So like I said, many of these are tough questions.

But 20 years of doing this work has taught me that 20-somethings aren't afraid of being asked the tough questions.