For a Time Such as This

We live in a time in which many feel lonely our youth especially struggle with depression and anxiety. Young adults or emerging adults are especially at risk for feeling isolated and overwhelmed by the life choices they are having to make at this crucial life stage. Emerging adults are defined as people in a transitional life stage between adolescence and young adulthood, approximately 18 and 29. In this life period emerging adults are exploring their identity and life options and choices, especially in the areas of love and career. It’s a time of great instability and uncertainty. In this stage of life most individuals will make their initial move away from home and statistically will continue to move more than at any other stage of their lives.[1] It can be a time of increased social isolation with mental health challenges. Fragmented social relationships induced by increased mobility and modern technology can contribute to weakened connections and increased loneliness. Psychologist Todd Hall writes that over the past forty years and especially since Covid-19, loneliness has increased to the point that it is a “growing health epidemic.”[2] In fact, the number one prescription for college students is neither acne medication nor birth control but antidepressants.[3]

Furthermore, in our postmodern individualistic American culture, people are less likely to have a sense of social identity which in premodern traditional societies was cultivated through membership to various social groups. Identity today is formed by individual personal choices creating a fragile subjective and disconnected sense of self.[4] In fact, individualization in identity development leads to two possible outcomes: anxiety or apathy.[5] While it may seem liberating to self-create and define ourselves by our own measures, it actually creates a recurring need to recreate ourselves to our best possible self and therefore producing an anxious sense of  “I am not enough” and “I must continue to think ahead about how to do better.”[6] Apathy, on the other hand, leads to finding one’s identity in a passive conformity to our present consumerism society through acquisition of consumer products and various forms of “impression management.”[7] Therefore as emerging adults traverse this life stage of great instability in which they will make major life choices determining the trajectory of their lives, they need a spirituality that grounds their sense of identity in belovedness, securing them in God’s love for a life of flourishing with purpose and meaning.

[1] Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from Late Teens Through the Twenties, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press) 2024, 8-9.

[2] Todd W. Hall and M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall, Relational Spirituality: A Psychological-Theological Paradigm for Transformation, (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic) 2021, 1.

[3] David P. Setran and Chris A. Kiesling, Spiritual Formation in Emerging Adulthood: A Practical Theology for College and Young Adult Ministry, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic) 2013, 60.

[4] Setran and Kiesling, Spiritual Formation in Emerging Adulthood , 58-59.

[5] Setran and Kiesling, Spiritual Formation in Emerging Adulthood, 59.

[6] Setran and Kiesling, Spiritual Formation in Emerging Adulthood, 59.

[7] Setran and Kiesling, Spiritual Formation in Emerging Adulthood, 60.