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.