Introduction to the special section: life design interventions (counseling, guidance, education) for decent work and sustainable development

Excerpt

In the fifth century BC, the Buddha left his home in search of answers to suffering of mortality, morbidity, and ignorance faced by humanity. Today in the twenty-first century, as humans we find ourselves grappling with the same questions. The increasing human displacements due to environmental crisis and conflicts in the last decade, growing precarity of employment, the refugee crisis, the recent pandemic, and war have forced us collectively as a human race to accept the certainty of two things: the reality of unpredictability and the human fragility in the face of it. These global shifts have also exposed the widening social and economic inequalities across lines of geography, ethnicity, race, gender, and ability, to name a few, and the adverse impact of these changes for the next generation and the generations to come. …