Life Advice

 Before “adulting” became an internet joke, psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett spent five years interviewing about 300 young people across the United States about what adulthood felt like. One description kept recurring. They felt “in between.” They were no longer adolescents. They were making more of their own decisions, taking responsibility for themselves and separating from the routines that had structured childhood. Yet many still did not feel completely adult. Arnett turned those interviews into the idea of “emerging adulthood,” which he formally proposed in a 2000 paper in American Psychologist . His original theory focused mainly on the late teens through the mid-20s and described a period marked by identity exploration, instability, self-focus, possibilities and the feeling of being somewhere between adolescence and full adulthood. The concept has limits. Arnett himself argued that emerging adulthood is not universal and is most likely to appear in cultures where young peo...