David Brooks has a thought-provoking column today on what he calls the "odyssey years":
There used to be four common life phases: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age. Now, there are at least six: childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age. Of the new ones, the least understood is odyssey, the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood. During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another. Their parents grow increasingly anxious. These parents understand that there's bound to be a transition phase between student life and adult life. But when they look at their own grown children, they see the transition stretching five years, seven and beyond. The parents don't even detect a clear sense of direction in their children's lives. They look at them and see the things that are being delayed. They see that people in this age bracket are delaying marriage. They're delaying having children. They're delaying permanent employment. People who were born before 1964 tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments - moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family."
Globalization, modernization, and historically unprecedented levels of affluence and education have given rise to an ethos of "expressive individualism" among young people in the United States and Western Europe in particular, but also among young people wherever those large, impersonal forces and the cutting edge of modern American culture have shaped peoples' lives - in other words, pretty much everywhere in reach of the Internet. Brooks's column is worth reading - at the moment it's number one on the Times's most emailed list - because he's the first to articulate the boundaries of this most recent generational divide. Or almost the first to do so, anyway. In 2004, Joseph Epstein wrote a Weekly Standard essay on the odyssey years. Except he didn't refer to them as the "odyssey years." He referred to them as the age of "perpetual adolescence."