At 40, Soo Sen Sun, a Vancouver lab technician with an MSc in Microbiology, has eschewed her two university degrees and her stable science career in favour of returning to school. She’s going to become a recreational therapist.
Her story is not uncommon. The workforce is crawling with career-shifting adults of all ages; the era of the lifelong career is over.
We all know a few computer programmers-turned-entrepreneurs, pharmacists-turned-lawyers, lawyers-turned-interior designers, addictions workers-turned-editors, or engineers-turned-doctors. Yet millennials — 10 to 20 years younger than Soo Sen — are getting a rather bad rap for being a generation notorious for not settling down into one stable (or at least successful) career path.
In May 2013 clinical psychologist Meg Jay presented a Ted talk urging 20-year-olds to stop wasting their time, to make more meaningful career decisions, to work harder at life. It went viral. That same month, psychologist Jeffrey Arnett released his book for exasperated parents of non-committal millennials: When Will My Grown-Up Kid Grow Up? Loving and Understanding Your Emerging Adult.
This social current is powered by what sociologists call “the changing timetable of adulthood.” Five traditional sociological milestones mark adulthood: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In September, Amanda Bast published an article on Converge that surprisingly took the Internet by storm, hitting just under one million views in one week. Readers resonated passionately with the sentiments of this young, unmarried, childless writer from Ontario.
Indeed, I barely know any 40-year-olds who have attained all five milestones, much less any 26-year-olds.
I wonder if this topic is hitting a raw nerve because it signals a deeper social current: our response to socially fabricated rules associated with numerical age. Maybe in our digital era, numerical age has actually become less rather than more important. The ubiquity of information blasts open choice for everyone, not just for young people.
Is adulthood starting earlier rather than later? Maybe age divides are arbitrary. We all know some very responsible 20-year-olds and we all know some very irresponsible 60-year-olds. Maybe North America as a whole is just getting more adolescent.
Online and media discussion about millennials has picked up warp speed over the past few years. But if you look back in history every generation gets labeled the “me” generation in its early adulthood. I suspect the mud-slinging has something less to do with age and more to do with the changing face of society.
Ceilings are higher, income gaps larger, standards harsher. Globalization simultaneously shrinks and expands our world. Most people, in any age group, feel unstable, struggle with career fulfillment or career competition, and experience unstable relationships.
Let’s hold back the age-defined mud. And let’s wade through it together.
Flickr photo (cc) by JimLeach89
