4.  It’s all up to me but who am I?

Emerging adulthood is a time of searching for concrete answers to big questions.  Faced with the necessity of mapping out their future and in the absence of contextual support on how to do that, the only person emerging adults can turn to for answers is themselves.  Finding their way in life becomes a lengthy do-it-yourself project.

Discovering what life is all about for these young people begins with finding out who they are and what they can do.  This is another defining characteristic for these emerging adults.  At the start of their twenties they, by their own admission, don’t know who they are, what they can do or what they should be doing with their lives.  The famous philosopher Rene Descartes wrote centuries ago cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.”   Today’s emerging adults are more likely to exclaim with some frustration: “I think and think, and think, but I still don’t know who I am!”   Discovering what life is all about for these young people begins with discovering their identity.  Identity exploration takes up much of their time and effort during their twenties.

3.     Homeless

Young people usually leave home at the start of their twenties.  In that sense they become homeless, i.e. cut off from the place in which they were born and not settled in the place in which they will spend their future.  But there is another, perhaps even more profound sense in which they become homeless.  In our culture they are considered to be adults at 21. No one will tell them any longer what to do, when to get up, what to eat, how to keep house or what to live for.  They can be single, married, cohabit, go to school, or not, live anywhere in the world, and believe, doubt, or question anything they want.   They are given much freedom of choice and little is expected of them except that they make their life choices on their own.

In addition, today’s emerging adults are faced with an overwhelming overload of choice.  To give just one example, they have over 800,000 possible careers to choose from.  That can make deciding on a life’s vocation a daunting task.  Making decisions in the other areas of their life like whom to marry, where to live or what philosophy of life to commit themselves to is no easier for them in today’s world.

With all the privileges they enjoy these young people frequently express feeling a deep sense of existential loneliness.  In the absence of mentors helping them find their way, they are often at a loss what to do or where to turn.  They experience the world as an unpredictable, foreign place in which they do not feel at home and it is hard for them to make up their individual minds.

What young people experience most today is a dearth of ends rather than means.  They are smart enough to get from A to B, provided that they would know why they should go there.  They often lack a vision for the future and no one is inspiring them.  “I wish that someone would tell me how to live my life”, one emerging adult exclaimed recently.  “I would like to be a fish in a fish bowl: open to the world outside, but safe in the water, protected by the bowl.”[1]

 We live in a world where there is a plurality of vision.  Truth has become a matter of opinion, of how you look at it.  What’s true for me may not be true for you.  In a world in which there is an absence of indubitable facts and of over-riding values it is easy to feel homeless.

2.     In between

We all live our lives in between what is no longer and what is not yet.  But being in between defines the lifestyle of today’s young people in their twenties.  For about a decade they live in between the dependence of adolescence and the dependability of adulthood.  Emerging adulthood is a historically new developmental stage in the life span.  The previous generation (today’s parents, teachers and employers) never had to deal with this period of emerging.  They moved directly from adolescence into young adulthood.  Which may be why they want today’s young people to get on with it and to grow up.  But for all sorts of historical reasons today’s young people have no choice but to spend a lengthy time emerging into adulthood.  Living in between lives for a time is developmentally inescapable for them.  That first of all.

Second, this in between life is also a period of uncertainty.  For about a decade they live their lives between a childhood certainty and an adult certainty.  As children these young people accepted what their adults told them and that settled the matter.  What they had was an unquestioned certainty. They could be sure about something if mom, or dad or the teacher said so.  That all changed during adolescence when they developed the ability to think for themselves.  This led them to question the validity of their childhood certainties, which was a healthy process because this questioning formed a necessary bridge between the innocence of their childhood and the formation of a more realistic adult outlook on life.  For most of their parents this shift to an adult outlook on life occurred in late adolescence or early twenties.  But most of today’s young people do not arrive at this new understanding of life until their late twenties or early thirties.  Their questioning continues for another decade, which predisposes them to live in between lives.

Third, young people generally use the experience of their parents as a template for finding their own way.  Stories about what their parents experienced during their twenties and how they behaved form a kind of prototype for what they can expect and how they should behave.   But, their parents’ experience of life in their twenties was in many ways substantially different from the challenges facing today’s emerging adults.  Their parents needed less education, had more job security and married earlier than today’s young people.  All this leaves these twenty-somethings without a roadmap on the way to adulthood.  Even if they wanted to do no more than imitate the developmental trajectory of their parents they could not.  The map and the territory do not match.  This is yet another way in which they are compelled to live in between lives.

Finally, the personal development of individuals is greatly influenced by the cultural-historical unfolding of the society in which they live.  This is true also for the development of today’s emerging adults.  However, they have the misfortune of living their youth at a time in history when society is in the process of exchanging one generally accepted outlook (modernism) on life for another (postmodernism).  It is clear to many people in the know today that the old ways of looking at life are no longer adequate to the challenges of the day.   However, it is not at all clear to them what world and life view should take its place.  In the words of Arthur Zajonk: “ The old forms rattle and the new delay to appear.”   The tragedy of today’s emerging adults is that they were “born too late for the old and too early for the new faith.”

On being twenty-something in the 21^st Century (20+/2012)

1.          Emerging

People in their twenties are said to be emerging.  We do not say that about any other age group in life.  But for about a decade that is what these semi-adults appear to be doing.  They are emerging.  It is the first characteristic that uniquely depicts their lives.  Development defines their existence. They are perpetually on the way.  They live lives in transition. Their lives are in flux; everything about them is fluid and dynamic.  They move from place to place and from time to time.  They leave home to move to college, in college they typically change their majors a number of times, at work they never stay long in any one job, in the social arena they change friends, lovers, partners, relationships more than once and they tinker with their worldview or life perspective throughout their twenties. 

They are perpetual motion machines.  They see themselves as a work-in-progress.  They are constantly going somewhere but without the certainty that they will ever arrive.  Their lives are transitory.   Everything is for the time being only.  Nothing is settled.  Everything is still up for grabs.  But then, everything is also still possible for them.  Who knows?

More about this blog

After two years of talking, listening, and reading anything I could about young people in their twenties I have been forced to conclude that suits like me don’t understand anything about jeans like the occupiers.  People older than let’s say 40 have no clue of what’s going on with people younger than let’s say 30.

That should not surprise me. I am 75 years old and there is a half a century between me and these kids in jeans.  That’s a distance of twice their age!  Whatever I can realistically hope to know about them I can only know from the outside in, never from the inside out.

My surprise has to do with something else.  I really like these young people.  I like being with them.  And they with me, it seems.  But they are not like me.  They are different.  From my perspective they are wonderfully weird.  I dare say that this is how anyone over forty feels about anyone under 30.   The generations don’t get one another because they are just not like one another.  In the words of one parent: “Trying to understand our twenty-something son or daughter, is much like immigrating to a strange country.  We neither know our children’s language nor their customs.”   That was already the sentiment of Margaret Mead in 1971!  She stated that because of the rapid pace of change in our culture younger and older people live in different worlds.

It’s not as if the generations hate one another.  They just live alongside one another like two solitudes.  There exists a profound intergenerational disconnect between parents and children, teachers and students, employers and employees in our world today.

Perhaps the most fundamental way in which young people differ from older folk is that their lives are by and large characterized by what someone called “ the integrity of questioning rather than the certainty of knowing.”   Theirs is a probing generation.  They view testing things out as an authentic place to stand.  They like to live on the edge, to try new things, to walk in a space of not knowing, and to believe something tentatively for the time being to see where it leads them.  They are receptive to otherness, welcoming of diversity, open to dialogue, willing to be taught and ready to change their minds. 

They believe that all points of view are inevitably subject to revision and doubt that there are many prefabricated truths worthy to live by.

By way of contrast, their parents, their teachers and their employers have a stake in maintaining that some things must be true no matter what.  They feel uncomfortable with so much openness and uncertainty.  They tend to trust the validity of scientifically established facts more than their children and value historically established patterns of living.  It has taken them years to craft a credible way of living of their own and they feel that their life style is currently under attack.  They secretly want their children to adopt their values and their life style, to accept their worldview and follow in their footsteps but see very little evidence that this is happening.  In my experience it is troubling for many parents to watch their children’s lives go in a direction that is quite different from their own. 

By way of introduction to this blog

This blog represents a study of young people between 18 -30, the so-called emerging adult generation, and of the way they interact with members of older generations.   It contains a series of posts, each intended to describe what I perceive to be a central characteristic of the life style and experience of this age group.  Of course the lives of these post-adolescent semi-adults are far more complex than can be captured in the description of any one characteristic.  It is only through the cumulative portrait of all these items combined that it may become evident what these young people are all about.  Together these items can be likened to individual strands in a multi-coloured scarf my wife likes to knit in her spare time.

Furthermore, the posts are grouped under six headings to highlight the broader dimensions of the experience and life style of emerging adults.   One deals with basic characteristics of emerging adulthood.  Another describes the way these young people interact with information technologies, the impact of which is so pervasive in their lives.  A third set of items tells the story of a subgroup of emerging adults, the so-called hipsters, to highlight the place of irony in the lives of today’s young people.  Items under heading four chronicle the way this emerging generation interacts and communicates with preceding generations.  Then follow items under heading five in which I attempt to place this generation historically in relation to post-modernism.  Lastly, the blog ends with some concluding personal postscripts about what this all means for the way we intergenerationally live together in the twenty-first century.

The intent of this blog is to present successive posts featuring excerpts from the book for your response.  These posts are meant to be discussion starters only on intergenerational communication  I would welcome your comments.

The subtitle of my book is derived from something I wrote in Octber 2011 in solidarity with the Occupay Wallstreet movement

Jeans, Suits and Skirts

What’s with these young kids in jeans camped out in public parks all over North America, shouting occupy this and occupy that?  There’s hardly any of them over 30 in the lot.  Shouldn’t they be in school or working or something?   Don’t they know that winter is upon us and they could freeze to death?  They are not really homeless, are they? They have warm places to go to.  Why don’t they just pack up and leave?

It is indeed a crying shame that these young people are left with no other form of protest to get their voices heard by the politicians and pundits who run the world.  As it is, grownup men and women in suits and skirts, who are most often the parents of the kids camped out, appear to have no clue why their children are so upset.   Nor do they seem to care.  The best they offer them is condescendence and disdain.

In the mean time the world is going to hell in a hand basket, while the ones in the know, the suits and the skirts, seem powerless to stop it.  That scares these young kids in jeans enough to camp out in the cold. But no one is listening to them and that is a terrible tragedy, because these young people’s actions are the voices of our tomorrow. 

“If only they would more clearly tell us what they want!” we hear time and again. And that is so much nonsense, because it is crystal clear what they want.  They want an end to a system where it is normal for one to better him or herself at the expense of their neighbour and a start to a system where each of us is busy being our next-door neighbour’s keeper.  Now, don’t ask these kids in jeans how to put this into practice.  That is a job for us suits and skirts.