The_Odyssey_Years

By David Brooks

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 19 tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments—moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family.

In 1960, roughly 70 percent of 30-year-olds had achieved these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same.

Yet with a little imagination it’s possible even for baby boomers1 to understand what it’s like to be in the middle of the odyssey years. It’s possible to see that this period of improvisation is a sensible response to modern conditions.

You can see the spirit of fluidity that now characterizes this stage. Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods, but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering. Old success recipes don’t apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself.

Dating gives way to Facebook and hooking up. Marriage gives way to cohabitation. Church attendance gives way to spiritual longing. Newspaper reading gives way to blogging. (In 1970, 49 percent of adults in their 20s read a daily paper, now it’s at 21 percent.)

The job market is fluid. Graduating seniors don’t find corporations offering them jobs that will guide them all the way to retirement. Instead they find a vast menu of

1

baby boomer:这里指在美国1946年至19年的婴儿潮期间出生的人。

information economy options, few of which they have heard of or prepared for.

Social life is fluid. There’s been a shift in the balance of power between the genders. Thirty-six percent of female workers in their 20s now have a college degree, compared with 23 percent of male workers. Male wages have stagnated over the past decades, while female wages have risen.

This has fundamentally scrambled the courtship rituals and decreased the pressure to get married. Educated women can get many of the things they want (income, status, identity) without marriage, while they find it harder (or, if they’re working-class, next to impossible) to find a suitably accomplished mate.

The odyssey years are not about slacking off. There are intense competitive pressures as a result of the vast numbers of people chasing relatively few opportunities. Moreover, surveys show that people living through these years have highly traditional aspirations (they rate parenthood more highly than their own parents did) even as they lead improvising lives.

Rather, what we’re seeing is the creation of a new life phase, just as adolescence came into being a century ago.2 It’s a phase in which some social institutions flourish—knitting circles, Teach for America—while others—churches, political parties—have trouble establishing ties.3

But there is every reason to think this phase will grow more pronounced in the coming years. European nations are traveling this route ahead of us. Europeans delay marriage even longer than we do and spend even more years shifting between the job market and higher education.

And as the new generational structure solidifies, social and economic entrepreneurs will create new rites and institutions. Someday people will look back and wonder at the vast social changes wrought by the emerging social group that saw their situations first captured by Friends and later by Knocked up.4

(English Language Learning, 2/2008, P26-28)

2

美国社会心理学家格兰维尔•斯坦利•霍尔(Granville Stanley Hall)在20世纪初建立了青春期理论

体系，将青春期界定为12至21岁，明确指出这一阶段的人在社交和心理上具有的特殊性，他也因此被称为“青春期之父”。

3

knitting circle:编织组织；Teach for America:“为美国而执教”组织，帮助美国大学生毕业后自 be wrought by: 由„„形成；Friends: «老友记»，美国情景喜剧，1994至2004年间播出，共10

愿花两年时间到贫穷学校教书的非营利机构。

4

季236集，取材于三男三女六个朋友十年里的日常生活，表达了年轻人对各种人生问题的迷惑和思考；Knocked up: 2007年上映的美国喜剧电影，讲述一对青年之间由一夜情发展而来的真挚感情，以喜剧结尾。