One of the important larger conditions that is necessary to grasp

in order to understand emerging adult life is…the contemporary

cultural crisis of knowledge and value.

Emerging adults have been raised in a world involving certain

outlooks and assumptions that they have clearly absorbed and
that they in turn largely affirm and reinforce. Stated in
philosophical terms, their world has undergone a significant
epistemic and axiological breakdown. It is difficult if not
impossible in this world that has come to be to actually know
anything objectively real or true that can be rationally maintained
in a way that might require people actually to change their minds
or lives.

Emerging adults know quite well how they personally were raised
in their families, and they know fairly well how they generally
"feel" about things. But they are also aware that all knowledge
and value are historically conditioned and culturally relative and
they have not, in our view, been equipped with the intellectual and
moral tools to know what to do with that fact. So most simply
choose to believe and live by whatever subjectively feels "right" to
them, and to try not to seriously assess, much less criticize,
anything else that anyone else has chosen to believe, feel or do.
Whether or not they use these words to say it, for most emerging
adults, in the end, it's all relative. One thought or opinion isn't
more defensible than any other. One way of life cannot claim to
be better than others. Some moral beliefs may personally feel
right, but no moral belief can rationally claim to be really true,
because that implies criticizing or discounting other moral beliefs.
And that would be rude, presumptuous, intolerant and unfeeling.
This is what we mean when we use the terms crisis and
breakdown.

Such a condition arguably encourages the true virtues of humility

and openness to difference…[b]ut when life's push comes to shove
for emerging adults, such a condition also thwarts many of them
from ever being able to decide what they believe is really true,
right, and good. Thus, their commonly unsettled lifestyles are
often accompanied by a troubling uncertainty about basic
knowledge and values.
Very many emerging adults simply don't know how to think about
things, what is right, or what is deserving for them to devote their
lives to. On such matters, they are very often simply paralyzed,
wishing they could be more definite, wanting to move forward, but
simply not knowing how they might possibly know anything
worthy of conviction and dedication. Instead, very many emerging
adults exist in a state of basic indecision, confusion, and
fuzziness. The world they have inherited, as best as they can
make sense of it, has told them that real knowledge is impossible
and genuine values are illusions.

Behind this, we think, are in part the powerful influences of

various intellectual and cultural movements that have saturated
the institutional worlds in which most emerging adults have grown
up. One of those is academia's wave of deconstructive
postmodernism, which has sought to reduce all knowledge and
value claims to arbitrary exertions of power and control. Another
is the glut of fragmentation of information on the Internet and
elsewhere, which lacks authorized gatekeepers to judge, evaluate,
and rank the merits or value of its excess of data. Yet another is
the diffuse influence of anthropological and sociological teachings
on social constructionism and cultural relativism, which undercut
any sense of objective standards for evaluating self and others.
Still another influence comes from various multicultural
movements, particularly as taught in schools—many of which we
think have real value but which also, in their less thoughtful
modes, often degenerate into mere assertions that all differences
of any type must simply be accepted without reflection, dialogue,
or assessment.

Whatever the relative worth of these various movements and

trends, their intended and unintended effects have clearly
powerfully shaped emerging adults today. In some ways, this has
been for the good, we think. But in other ways, the effects have
been confusing and debilitating. Emerging adults struggle
earnestly to establish themselves as autonomous and sovereign
individuals. But the crises of knowledge and value that have so
powerfully formed their lives leave them lacking in conviction or
direction to even know what to do with their prized sovereignty.
Emerging adults are determined to be free. But they do not know
what is worth doing with their freedom. They work very hard to
stand on their own two feet. But they do not really know where
they ought to go and why, once they are standing. They lack
larger visions of what is true and real and good, in both the
private and public realms. And so, it seems to us a small set of
predefined default imperatives quickly rush in to fill that
normative and moral vacuum.

One of those is mass consumerism's slavish obsession with

private material comfort and possessions, the achieving of which
nearly every emerging adult views as a key purpose in life. Other
imperatives, in the meantime, may be the amusements of alcohol
and drug intoxication, and the temporary thrills of hook-up sex.
Yet even in the early emerging adult years, signs were evident to
us that many already find these culturally given, default purposes,
amusements, and thrills unsatisfying, if not outright wounding.
Many know there must be something more, and they want it.
Many are uncomfortable with their inability to make truth
statements and moral claims without killing them with the death
of a thousand qualifications. But they do not know what to do
about that, given the crisis of truth and values that has
destabilized their culture.

And so they simply carry on as best they can, as sovereign,

autonomous, empowered individuals who lack a reliable basis for
any particular conviction or direction by which to guide their lives.