It feels like everyone I know is at some kind of inflection point in their life. For some it’s material: moving cities or apartments, changing careers, going back to school, or adjusting to new health challenges. For others it’s relational: finding our ‘tribe’, navigating shifting group dynamics, searching for love, getting married, or turning inwards to rediscover ourselves.
These changes come with a lot of emotional turmoil, and I’ve been trying to decide whether the modern flavors of Big Angst™ are actually new, or if we’ve just repackaged the same problems that have plagued our forebears ever since they made the fatal error of inventing agriculture.
I recently came across the work of psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, which suggests that our current woes are actually a recent invention, specific to this era of the Anthropocene. In the late 90s Arnett studied young adult psychology, interviewing 300 Americans between the ages of 18 and 29. He coined the term “emerging adulthood” to describe this range, which comes after the dependency of adolescence, but before the enduring responsibilities of normative adulthood (childrearing, homeownership, etc). He observed some common attributes of emerging adults:
1. Identity exploration, answering the question “who am I?” and trying out various options, especially in love and work
2. Instability, in love, work, and place of residence
3. Self-focus, as obligations to others reach a lifespan low
4. Feeling “in-between”, in transition, neither adolescent nor adult
5. Possibilities/optimism, when hopes flourish and people have unparalleled opportunity to transform their lives
He also found that regardless of their social background or economic prospects, emerging adults tend to expect a lot from their lives. In his 2006 book Emerging Adulthood, he cites a national survey of 18-to-24-year-olds, in which 96% of respondents agreed with the statement “I am very sure that someday I will get to where I want to be in life.”
Arnett writes: “Emerging adults look to the future and envision a well-paying, satisfying job, a loving, lifelong marriage, and happy children who are above average […] The dreary, dead-end jobs, the bitter divorces, the disappointing and disrespectful children that some of them will find themselves experiencing in the years to come—none of them imagine that this is what the future holds for them.”
He thinks that our high expectations set us up for proportionally crushing disappointments: “If happiness is the difference between what you expect out of life and what you actually get, a lot of emerging adults are setting themselves up for unhappiness because they expect so much”.
I feel like an outlier in this regard, because I’ve always had pretty low expectations for how happy, successful, or fun my life will be. As a depressive adolescent they hit rock bottom. I was fairly certain that I would never find love, or achieve artistic success, or even attain basic financial stability. When I was twelve I spent a summer learning to forage for food, because I thought that my brain chemistry rendered me so profoundly unemployable that I would literally starve to death if I couldn’t learn to “live off the land”.
With the benefit of hindsight I can see that I was overly pessimistic. It turns out that I’m perfectly employable, if only because I love to be on the computer. Turns out I’m perfectly worthy of being loved, because of, uh… reasons. I’m not sure, but whatever they are, I’m glad that they exist. Today I have more, materially and relationally, than I ever thought possible.
The tricky thing is, when you set your sights as low as I originally did, if you achieve those ultra-moderate goals (avoiding starvation, in my case), you’ll eventually need to come up with new goals to replace them. We need some kind of pursuit to catalyze our actions, and fill the void of meaning in our lives. As Ernest Becker wrote in The Denial of Death:
The defeat of despair is not mainly an intellectual problem for an active organism, but a problem of self-stimulation via movement. Beyond a given point man is not helped by more “knowing,” but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way.
“Knowing” that you’ve already achieved things beyond your prior-self’s wildest dreams does not staunch the need to dream further, to reach higher. It’s like the hedonic treadmill, but for individual achievement. The critical practice, then, is to make sure that the things we’re reaching for are good things, ideally for more than just ourselves.