In a famous statement, Sigmund Freud, when asked to sum up the definition of ideal mental health, answered with the simple words, “the ability to love and work.” Let’s now look at finding ourselves in the world of work.

When did you begin thinking about your career? What influences are drawing you to psychology, nursing, or business—a compelling class, a caring mentor, or the conviction that this field would fit your talents best? How do young people feel about their careers, their futures, and working?

To answer these kinds of questions, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Barbara Schneider (2000) conducted a pioneering study of teenagers’ career dreams. They selected 33 U.S. schools and interviewed students from sixth to twelfth grade. To chart how young people felt—when at home, with friends, when at school—they used the experience-sampling method (discussed in Chapter 9). Now, let’s touch on their insights and other studies as we track young people entering and moving through the emerging adult years.

Almost every teenager, the researchers found, expects to go to college. Almost everyone wants to have a professional career. The tendency to aim high appears regardless of gender or social class. Whether male or female, rich or poor, adolescents have lofty career goals. Moreover, I believe that the experts who view today’s young people as over coddled (Levine & Dean, 2012), narcissistic (Twenge, 2006), and “basically” unmotivated are unfair. Due to the lingering effects of the Great Recession, young people face a far harsher economic climate than we baby boomers encountered when we emerged into adult life (Economic Policy Institute, n.d.). In one survey of U.S. college freshmen, young people reported being more driven to work hard than their counterparts in previous years (Pryor and others, 2011).

The real problem, however, is that teens are (naturally) clueless about what it takes to implement their dream careers. Can someone who “hates reading” really spend a decade getting a psychology Ph.D.? What happens when my students learn they have to have a GPA close to 3.7 to enter our university’s nursing program, or they can’t go to law school because of the astronomical costs? Career disappointment can lurk right around the corner for young people as they emerge from the cocoon of high school and confront the real world. How do people react as they enter their college years?

Interestingly, one U.S. survey showed that self-esteem dips dramatically during the first semester of college (Chung and others, 2014) and then gradually rises over the next few years (see also Wagner and others, 2013; Higher Education Research Institute [HERI], 2013). Because students tend to inflate their academic abilities (Chung and others, 2014), it can be a shock when those disappointing first-semester grades arrive. The other bad news is that, due to the well-known social reinforcement in college for activities such as binge drinking (recall the previous chapter), emerging adulthood offers ample room for addictions to flower (Sussman & Arnett, 2014). Still, as the research described in Figure 10.2 shows, there is diversity, with some people getting unhappier and others improving in mental health from age 18 to 22 (Frye & Liem, 2011).

Who thrives? The figure implies that personality matters. Young people who enter emerging adulthood upbeat and competent are set up to flourish when confronting the demands of college life. In their study, Csikszentmihalyi and Schneider (2000) called these efficacious teens “workers”—the 16-year-olds who amaze you with their ability to balance band, a part-time job, and honors classes. It’s also a no-brainer that succeeding at academics boosts self-esteem (Chung and others, 2014). But, the most interesting discovery of the studies tracking people as they traveled through their early twenties was the impact of having a stable love relationship on young people’s self-worth.

You might think finding love would be especially important for females. You would be wrong. Interestingly, men, in particular, felt especially good about themselves if they were in a caring relationship by age 23 (Wagner and others, 2013).

In what ways do people change for the better during this landmark decade? Growth is most apt to occur in a temperamental dimension that researchers call conscientiousness—becoming more reliable; developing self-control (see Cramer, 2008; Donnellan, Conger, & Burzette, 2007; Walton and others, 2013); being better able to manage your emotions (Zimmermann & Iwanski, 2014); reasoning in more thoughtful ways (Labouvie-Vief, 2006; more about these qualities in Chapter 12).

To explain this rise in executive functions—what you and I would call “maturity”—adolescent specialists might look to the fully developed frontal lobes. But an equally plausible cause lies in the wider world. Shedding an unproductive adolescent risk-taking identity in college (recall Jason’s story in the previous chapter) or finding a satisfying job can transform troubled teens into “workers,” in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s terms (Dennissen, Asendorpf, & van Aken, 2008). A powerful inner state—also spelled out by Csikszentmihalyi—can help transform us into “workers” and lock people into the right career.

Think back over the past week to the times you felt energized and alive. You might be surprised to discover that events you looked forward to—such as relaxing at home or watching a favorite TV program—do not come to mind. Many of life’s most uplifting experiences occur when we connect deeply with people. Others take place when we are immersed in some compelling task. Csikszentmihalyi names this intense task absorption flow.

Flow is different from “feeling happy.” We enter this state when we are immersed in an activity that stretches our capacities, such as the challenge of decoding a difficult academic problem, or (hopefully) getting absorbed in mastering the material in this class. People also differ in the kinds of activities that cause flow. For some of us, it’s hiking in the Himalayas that produces this feeling. For me, it has been writing this book. When we are in flow, we enter an altered state of consciousness in which we forget the outside world. Problems disappear. We lose a sense of time. The activity feels infinitely worth doing for its own sake. Flow makes us feel completely alive.

Csikszentmihalyi (1990), who has spent his career studying flow, finds that some people rarely experience this feeling. Others feel flow several times a day. If you feel flow only during a rare mountain-climbing experience or, worse, when robbing a bank, Csikszentmihalyi argues that it will be difficult to construct a satisfying life. The challenge is to find flow in ways related to your career.

Flow depends on being intrinsically motivated. We must be mesmerized by what we are doing right now for its own sake, not for an extrinsic reward. But there also is a future-oriented dimension to feeling flow. Flow, according to Csikszentmihalyi, happens when we are working toward a goal.

For example, the idea that this book will be published two years from now is the goal that is pushing me to write this very page. But what riveted me to my chair this morning is the actual process of writing. Getting into a flow state is often elusive. On the days when I can’t construct a paragraph, I get anxious. But if I could not regularly find flow in my writing, I would never be writing this book.

Figure 10.3 shows exactly why finding flow can be difficult. That state depends on a delicate person–environment fit. When a task seems beyond our capacities, we become anxious. When an activity is too simple, we grow bored. Ideally, the activities in which we feel flow can alert us to our ideal careers. Think about some situation in which you recently felt flow. If you are in ruminative moratorium or worry you may be in career diffusion, can you use this feeling to clue you in to a particular field?

Drawing on the concept of flow, my discussion of identity, as well as recent economic concerns, let’s now look at two career paths emerging adults in the United States follow.

“I never want this kind of job for my kids.” This comment, from a 35-year-old high school graduate working at a construction job, sums up the contemporary feeling in the United States that college is vital for having a good life (Furstenberg, 2010). Actually, more than 2 of every 3 U.S. high school graduates enroll in college right after high school. However, as time passes, the ranks thin. For students beginning at four-year institutions, the odds of graduating within the next six years are about 3 in 5 (National Center on Education Statistics, n.d.). The graduation rates for their community-college counterparts are far lower than this.

People in the United States who don’t go to college or who never get their degree can have fulfilling careers. Some may excel at Robert Sternberg’s practical or creative intelligence (described in Chapter 7) but do not do well at academics. When they find their flow in the work world, they blossom. Consider the career of that college failure, the famous filmmaker named Woody Allen, or even that of Bill Gates, who found his undergraduate courses too confining and left Harvard to pioneer a new field.

Unfortunately, these famous college dropouts are a statistical blip. The bleak reality is that non-college graduates have a far harder time constructing a middle-class life. As you can see in Figure 10.4A, the well-known difference in earnings, based on education, has stayed relatively stable in the past 15 years. In 2012, the median income of people aged 25 to 35 with master’s degrees, who worked full time, was roughly $70,000 per year. Their counterparts, with only high school diplomas, earned less than one-half of that amount—$30,000 (National Center on Health Statistics, n.d.). And, of course, college graduates are more likely to find jobs. In 2013, in the age group of 25 to 34, roughly 1 out of 10 non-college graduates were unemployed. The comparable statistic for young people with a B.A. degree or higher was 6 percent (National Center for Health Statistics, n.d.).

Given these realities, why do many emerging adults drop out of school? Our first assumption is that most of these people are not “college material”—uninterested in academics, poorly prepared in high school, and/or can’t do the work.

True, to succeed in college, prior academic aptitude is important. As a C student in your public school class, your odds of getting a bachelor’s degree are less than 1 in 5 (Engle, n.d.). But, as Figure 10.4B shows, economic considerations matter greatly. The unfortunate reality is that talented, low-SES young people are far less likely to graduate from college than their affluent peers (Carnevale & Strohl, 2010).

When the Gates Foundation commissioned a survey of more than 600 young adults ages 22 to 30 who had dropped out of college, they discovered the same message—money matters. Only 1 in 10 students said they left school because the courses were too difficult or they weren’t interested in the work. The main reason was that they had to work full time to finance school, and the strain became too much (Johnson & Rochkind, 2011).

The silver lining is that most of these people did plan to return. And, as many nontraditional student readers are aware, there can be emotional advantages to leaving and then coming back. In Sweden, the social clock for college is programmed to start ticking a few years after high school (Arnett, 2007). The reasoning is that time spent in the wider world helps people home in on what to study in school.

Moreover, as you saw in the beginning chapter vignette, emerging adults can sometimes advance in their careers without a college degree. Employers look for reliability and a good work ethic, virtues that can be demonstrated once someone gets his foot in the door. When British researchers explored the qualities that distinguished people who left school at l6 and had gone on to do well economically during midlife (granted, during better economies), the main predictor that stood out was prior academic skills (Schoon & Duckworth, 2010). So, if a non-college graduate is a “worker” and intellectually competent, that person can sometimes succeed against the odds.

Table 10.4 summarizes the main messages of this section, by offering suggestions for emerging adults and society at large. Now, it’s time to immerse ourselves in the undergraduate experience.

So far, I’ve been implying that the only purpose of going to college is to find a career. Thankfully, in surveys, most U.S. college graduates disagree. They report the main value of their undergraduate years was to help them “grow intellectually and personally” (Hoover, 2011).

How does this inner growth progress during college? According to William Perry (1999), freshmen come in blindly accepting the facts that authorities hand down, and then they move to relativism (understanding that there are multiple truths); by senior year, they make their own ethical commitments in the face of appreciating diverse points of view.

Perry’s findings are based on studies conducted with Harvard undergraduates 40 years ago. But another longitudinal study (granted, also at a selective university) confirms that this inner development occurs—and most important—it takes place specifically during the undergraduate years (Bauer & MacAdams, 2010).

If you are a traditional college student, here are tips to make your college experience an inner-growth flow zone.

Question 10.9

Question 10.10

1. Juan is a “worker,” a person who thrives on mastering challenging tasks.

2. Juan gets good college grades.

3. Juan puts off having a close love relationship during these years.

Question 10.11

Question 10.12

Question 10.13

1. Get involved in campus activities.

2. Search out friends who have exactly the same ideas as you do.

3. Select the best professors and reach out to make connections with them.