When you’re a student, life is station to station. There’s always the next assignment, the next test, the next admissions application to structure a student’s schedule and energies. Social life has its dramas, but at least it’s laid out right there in front of you in the dining hall and the dorm.
Then, from the most structured and supervised childhood in human history, you get spit out after graduation into the least structured young adulthood in human history. Yesterday parents, teachers, coaches, and counselors were all marking your progress and cheering your precious self. Today the approval bath stops. The world doesn’t know your name or care who you are. The person on the other side of the desk at every job interview has that distant Kanye attitude—there’s a million of you; there’s only one of me.
In centuries past, emerging adults took their parents’ jobs, faiths, towns, and identities. But in the age of “I’m Free to Be Myself,” you are expected to find your own career path, your own social tribe, your own beliefs, values, life partners, gender roles, political viewpoints, and social identities. As a student, your focus was primarily on the short term, but now you need a different set of navigational skills, to the far-horizon goals you will begin to orient your life toward.
The average American has seven jobs over the course of their twenties. A third of recent college graduates are unemployed, underemployed, or making less than $30,000 a year at any given moment. Half feel they have no plan for their life, and nearly half of people in their twenties have had no sexual partner in the last year. These are peak years for alcoholism and drug addiction. People in this life stage move every three years. Forty percent move back in with their parents at least once. They are much less likely to attend religious services or join a political party.
People in their odyssey years tend to be dementedly optimistic about the long-term future. Ninety-six percent of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds agree with the statement “I am very sure that someday I will get to where I want to be in life.” But the present is marked by wandering, loneliness, detachment, doubt, underemployment, heartbreaks, and bad bosses, while their parents go slowly insane.
THE AESTHETIC LIFE
Some people graduate from college with the mindset of daring adventurers. This is the time for fun before real life settles in. Marriage and a real job will just arrive in the mail one day when they are thirty-five. In the meantime, they’re going to have experiences.
These are the people who at age twenty-three go teach English in Mongolia or lead white-water rafting trips in Colorado. This daring course has real advantages. Your first job out of college is probably going to suck anyway, so, as the impact investor Blair Miller advises, you might as well use this period to widen your horizon of risk. If you do something completely crazy you will know forever after that you can handle a certain amount of craziness, and your approach to life for all the decades hence will be more courageous. Furthermore, you will build what the clinical psychologist Meg Jay calls “identity capital.” At every job interview and dinner party for the next three decades, somebody will want to ask you what it was like teaching English in Mongolia, and that will distinguish you from everybody else.
This is an excellent way to begin your twenties. The problem with this kind of life only becomes evident a few years down the road if you haven’t settled down into one thing. If you say yes to everything year after year, you end up leading what Kierkegaard lamented as an aesthetic style of life. The person leading the aesthetic life is leading his life as if it were a piece of art, judging it by aesthetic criteria—is it interesting or dull, pretty or ugly, pleasurable or painful?
Such a person schedules a meditation retreat here, a Burning Man visit there, one fellowship one year and another one the next. There’s swing dancing one day, SoulCycle twice a week, Krav Maga for a few months, Bikram Yoga for a few months more, and occasionally a cool art gallery on a Sunday afternoon. Your Instagram feed will be amazing, and everybody will think you’re the coolest person ever. You tell yourself that relationships really matter to you—scheduling drinks, having lunch—but after you’ve had twenty social encounters in a week you forget what