Young people and the new semantics of the future

Abstract

Young people in the new century find themselves having to define their existential choices within a social landscape that is strongly characterized by the acceleration of change. Contemporary time seems to erase temporal continuity and the notion of the life-plan as developed in first modernity. The article analyses how this process impacts the biographical constructs of young people and how the changing experience of time affects the transition to adulthood and the spread of new values. The hypothesis is that the positive relation among life-plan, biographical time, and identity encounters difficulties when the future is shortened. Planning capacity is compromised and life-projects depend more on subjective factors than on completion of the canonical life-stages marked by institutional times-frames. As a result, young people “navigate by sight”, dealing with uncertainty, rather than following pre-established routes. But the redefinition of the relationship between identity and social time does not only consist in a growing focus on the present; it also implies a reconstruction of the relationship with the future. In a nutshell, a significant part of the “new youth” seems to possess sufficient capacities to be able to govern the dynamics of the high-speed society in which young people find themselves living.