Blooming Generation Appears More Educated Than Endangered

By taking longer to educate themselves and test out their aptitudes and interests, the Endangered Generation will be better able to “package” themselves for fluid careers. Given the necessity to “free-lance,” they are already far more flexible than the baby boomers before them. They see an America beyond the shells of big corporate culture where anyone smart will want to be a free agent. With any talent, why go to work as an insect under the dinosaur foot of a Time Warner or MCA? These kids are making their own movies and pressing their own records.

Today’s twentysomethings will also be on the cutting edge of burgeoning fields like brain research and biotechnology. And they should be the first to hit the ground running when the earthquake of fundamental economic changes in the world settles down and the Digital Revolution finds mass applications. Everything will be different, from the way we do business to the way we shop, farm, entertain ourselves and take care of our health.

Once, power in the world of cyberspace was wielded only by “propeller heads” - stereotyped as computer geeks who wore beanies with pinwheels. Many of these young men who went to work for the pioneering on-line companies don’t read books or dream of writing the great American novel. Their natural skills are not social but numerate. They are the polar opposite of the garrulous, glad-handing traveling salesmen who were the communication system of two post-World War II generations.

These people communicate in symbols. But they are the power of the future. They speak the new electronicspeak, and they can write code. From them will come the instructions for how to communicate in their countercultural world that disregards day and night, penetrates national borders with complete immunity, promulgates visual pornography without regard to community standards, and can crack open almost any information bank they wish.

The popularity of the Internet has already spread to regular kids - not only computer geeks - all over the globe. Once the electronic superhighway becomes established as the new trade route for buying and selling goods, services and information, members of the Endangered Generation will be the natural merchants and mechanics. They will own the future.

The fact that this generation is marrying later and even more selectively also bodes well for their personal security. The one preventive measure against divorce that holds for every generation is this: The older we are when we marry for the first time, the less likely the marriage is to end up on the trash heap.

The real division between the boomers and the “busters” is that the busters are still young. With a slow but steady economic recovery in progress in the ‘90s, those in the Endangered Generation may yet end up living better than the boomers. And they may savor their success all the more because they expect it less.

A dramatic shift in psychological maturity appears to occur today in most young people toward the end of their 20s. Kathleen Malley, who has conducted extensive research on maturation in young adults, observes, “The breaking point is somewhere around 29, 30. There’s something about seeing another zero roll up.”

Before the shift, men and women feel unable to make clear choices or cope with life’s vicissitudes without expecting some help from parents. After the shift they feel confident enough in their own values to make their own choices and competent enough in life skills to set a course - even if that course clashes with a parent’s wishes.

Prolonged adolescence ends, finally, when we are not afraid to disappoint our parents.

MEMO: Excerpted from “New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time,” by Gail Sheehy.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate