Young people in their late teens and early twenties are confronted during the threshold period with profound decisions that may set the course for their whole lives. The conditions under which these people must make these decisions are daunting; in many cases terrifying.
Erik Erikson, whose work has given depth and shape to our view of the psychology of youth, remarks that the young person coming to the end of adolescence "now looks for an opportunity to decide with free assent on one of the available or unavoidable avenues of duty and service, and at the same time is mortally afraid of being forced into activities in which he would feel exposed to ridicule or self-doubt."
Erikson's comment is packed with meaning, and it resounds with ramifications of the dilemmas faced at the threshold of working life. For example, the term "available or unavoidable avenues of duty and service": Today, the whole world is assumed to open up before the young person, with an unlimited range of options. A couple of generations ago, the individual might have found the choices quite limited. Certain options were simply ruled out-because your family didn't have enough money, or because you hadn't gone to the right schools, or because people in your station of life did not aspire to certain careers, or because God had ordained otherwise for you.
Nowadays, people are relatively free of such limitations. The opening up of a wide range of options has been greeted with jubilation, as one of the triumphs of modern society. And, no question about it, it is a very good thing; but it has side effects. The concept of unlimited options can be difficult for people of any age; when you are young, it can be extremely severe. Those who stand on the threshold of working life can see career options all the way to the horizon. But they are all sealed boxes. You don't know what's inside, and you don't know whether the contents will be right for you until you open them.
The trouble is that you are burdened with the feeling that once you open one of the boxes, all the others are forever sealed to you. Worse, you have the feeling that if you open the wrong box, you will be trapped within that box for the rest of your life. So you have to think very clearly and very hard. This is a vital decision. But you find yourself in a state that is the seething opposite of the emotional tranquillity needed to deliberate and choose in important issues.
One of the authors was once aboard ship in a typhoon in the Pacific. Vital decisions had to be made about the course, speed, and ballast-sink-or-swim decisions. But how could anybody think with the wind shrieking in the rigging, the waves driving the hull over onto its beam-ends, the green water surging through the broken doors of the wheelhouse? Survival was pure luck.
Young people in the late teens and early twenties are likely to be going through similar emotional storms. They are striving, sometimes in agonizing turmoil, to get a sense of their identity, the new identity that will come with their first job.
In Identity: Youth and Crisis, Erikson writes: "In general it is the inability to settle on an occupational identity which most disturbs young people." (Emphasis ours.) Elsewhere (Toys and Reasons: Stages in the Ritualization of Experience), he writes: "The work role, which we begin to envisage for ourselves at the end of childhood, is, under favorable conditions, the most reassuring role of all, just because it confirms us in skills and permits us to recognize ourselves in visible works. But the unrest of puberty and the necessity to leave childhood behind, and the unrest of the times, combine to produce a variety of conflicting self-images, just at the age when we must envision ourselves not only as worker, but also as mate, parent and citizen. . . ."
So here is the person in the threshold stage:
- under pressure to make momentous decisions;
- lacking satisfactory information about the options available;
- undergoing the physical and emotional stresses that come with the emergence from the cocoon of adolescence;
- feeling naked and vulnerable;
- terribly afraid of making the wrong decision; one that will bring doom and a life of unhappiness.
It is no wonder that in this situation young people will often try to delay the decision for as long as possible. They stay in school, or take off, or drop out (before ever dropping in), or just do nothing.
The crises faced by those on the threshold of working life grow out of these factors. Overloaded by the responsibility for making profound choices, fearful of being trapped, striving to shape an identity, the individual comes up against challenges like these:
- Crises of compromise-in which the dreams of youth must be altered and cut down to fit the mold of practicality.
- Crises of judgment-in which the desire to be judged favorably is twisted by uncertainty as to who is doing the judging and by what standards.
- Crises of commitment-or lack of commitment- caused by aversion to the ultimate plunge into a life-channel.
- Crises of need for approval from a wider and more indifferent world than one has ever encountered before.
- Crises of identity, centering on the search for self.
Those who stand on the threshold know they will have to cross it. It is the mysterious darkness which lies beyond that underlies the greatest difficulties of this first stage.
