What Helps Young Adults Flourish?

At some point in your life, you have almost certainly been asked when you will (finally) graduate, get a “real job,” get married, have a baby, or buy a house. These questions can feel cutting, even when they aren’t meant to be, because they signal that you aren’t “there” yet. You haven’t done all the things you are supposed to do.

The reality is that contemporary young people transition to adulthood slowly. It takes a long time to get the education or training needed to build a career. It takes a lot of self-exploration to feel confident and comfortable building a life with another person, becoming a parent, or embracing singlehood. Researchers call this elongated path to adulthood emerging adulthood—a developmental period between ages 18 and 29 when many people lean into identity exploration, getting an education, and exploring life’s possibilities. Emerging adulthood is a time of instability and transition because people are often in progress on some of the most important building blocks of adult life: education, work, and love.

For a long time, scholars have approached studying the transition to adulthood as a series of developmental milestones to hit. They look for people to become financially independent, become employed full-time, finish their education, and start a family. Once all those boxes are ticked, the assumption is that a person will have made a successful transition to adulthood.

The problem is that this approach doesn’t account for whether a person feels good about their job, relationship, or educational outcomes. It only matters whether they have completed the task or not.

In a recent study with Jonathon Beckmeyer and Cindy Hartman, we tried to address this problem by exploring whether a person’s feelings about different areas of their lives mattered more or less than whether they had achieved milestones in that domain. Using data from 857 young adults ages 18-35, we explored whether satisfaction with education, work, their love lives, and their leisure experiences was associated with flourishing (i.e., their overall sense of well-being).

Why Flourishing?

Social scientists commonly use negative indicators of well-being like anxiety, depression, or loneliness as outcome variables in their studies. In some ways, this approach is important because it helps us identify people most at risk of problems in the hopes of developing appropriate supports for them.

However, negative measures don’t tell the whole story about well-being. A person can lack indicators for depression or anxiety and still be struggling or stagnant. Flourishing measures the extent to which people feel good about their lives and feel a sense of purpose and optimism about the future. The scale we used asks questions like: Do you feel respected? Do you contribute to the happiness of others? Do you feel like a good person? We used flourishing as our outcome because we believe it is critical to understanding whether someone has made a successful transition to adulthood.

What Promotes Flourishing?

Participants were flourishing when they felt good about their experiences in education, work, love, and leisure. These subjective assessments of satisfaction mattered more than whether they had accomplished objective markers of success in each area of their lives. These findings were consistent across men and women and across ages.

Did achieving a task make young people feel subjectively better about it? Yes. That means that it is important to continue building systems that help young people reach their goals. However, even if a task is not finished yet, it can still be a meaningful part of flourishing. Although we did not include it specifically in this study, we think progress likely yields some important benefits.

Key Takeaways

In achievement-oriented cultures, it can be easy to overlook how something feels in favor of the results or outcomes it produces. For young people working toward their goals, stopping to assess whether they are satisfied and find meaning in work, education, love, and leisure is an important part of satisfaction and well-being.

Happiness Essential Reads

A Detour on the Path to Happiness

The Happiness Taboo

For people navigating the delicate transition of parenting young adult children, it may be helpful to prioritize asking them about how a certain part of their life is going rather than when they will graduate, get a job, or get married.

Reaching goals matters, but feeling good about where you are matters more.

Facebook image: Zamrznuti tonovi/Shutterstock

LinkedIn image: Daniel Hoz/Shutterstock