20-Something, 20-Everything: A Quarter-life Woman's Guide to Balance and Direction

I'm not big on self-help books, but facing a mountain of student loans and no permanent full-time job offers was enough to make me seek out self-help book recommendations. I ended-up with this one and can't say that I feel really improved from having read it. 20 Something, 20 Everything is less than 10 years old, but is extremely dated due to the current state of the economy and how Hassler discusses the work force.

Additionally, this book isn't really geared towards all 20 something women. Its geared more towards middle class, college educated women. This comes through primarily in the interviews with various women that Hassler has peppered throughout the book. I only ran across one woman who I figured was making about minimum wage (a show more waitress) and don't remember any of the women described as having anything less than a bachelors degree. Furthermore, the women who were interviewed primarily had white collar jobs where they were probably making about 30k or more. That's all fine and dandy if you're in that particular group of women, but if you're not, parts of this book will probably just make you feel worse than helping anything.

However, despite all my gripes with the book, there were snippets that I found interesting. I suppose I'll leave this review with one of the quotes that I did find helpful.


"As we journey into adulthood, we evolve away from lives in which everything was planned for us and taken care of by our parents, into college lives where we enjoy some freedom but our general structure is set, and finally into a reality that is devoid of a set curriculum. This absence of structure drives many of us right into planning mode. But what do we miss along the way? Does over-planning cause us to miss the very important steps of truly evaluating what we want and easing into our experiences?

To east the woes of our twenty-something crisis, we can remind ourselves that just making the best decisions that we can every day is good enough. If we stop, take a deep breath, and check in with the present moment more often, a lot of knots in our stomachs will loosen. A lot of us daydream about how things could be different or better in our lives because we hate our current circumstances. Although daydreaming can be valuable, true sanity comes from contentment with where we are." (pg 91) show less

I couldn't even get past the intro. This book was written for the woman who wants the "Sex in the City" kind of lifestyle, which I certainly do not.