Young people today are bombarded from all sides with messages about how to be more beautiful, smarter, and more successful. Social networks and media offer us ten tips for a happy life, ten tips for a healthier life, ten tips for a more effective life, how to impress, how to break through, how to never give up... It is precisely this well-known phrase „never give up“ in connection with the goal pursuit of young adults that we will address. Because under the influence of fast-paced Western culture, we sometimes forget that with unattainable goals, it is sometimes better, more functional, and even healthier to let go of such goals, thereby saving resources needed for pursuing other, more realistic goals.
Twentysomethings in the Period of Young Adulthood
Young adulthood is defined in the professional literature as the age range between 20 and 30 years of age. It denotes a developmental period that is an intermediate stage between adolescence and adulthood. The young adult gradually breaks free from parental regulation and applies their own self-regulatory behavior. In doing so, they gain freedom and transform from a dependent adolescent into an independent young adult (Tanner, 2006). In this context, Salmela-Aro (2010) specifies that the period of young adulthood is the most important for setting long-term life goals. It is good for individuals to manage their lives by planning and pursuing goals throughout the life cycle; however, in the period between the ages of 20 and 30, these processes influence not only their current life situation but especially their future direction (Nurmi, 2004).
The developmental period of young adulthood can be defined by five basic features (Arnett, 2015). The first feature is identity exploration. Similarly to adolescence, the young adult continues searching for and exploring the possibilities that life offers. Arnett explains that compared to adolescence, this period offers greater space for completing identity development, since at this age individuals become independent from their parents, gaining greater freedom and emancipation. The second feature is instability. Instability is common among young adults (Macek, Bejček, & Vaníčková, 2007). Young adults are aware of the necessity of at least a rough life plan, but they change these plans quickly and flexibly (Brandstätter & Herrmann, 2015). This is also reflected in the fact that young people try multiple jobs, are not afraid to change their place of residence, switch partners, or change their lifestyle (Winpenny et al., 2020). The third feature is self-focus, which encourages the building of self-sufficiency and autonomy. According to Arnett, self-focus between the ages of 20 and 30 is the strongest it will be over an individual's entire life. The fourth feature is feeling in-between. The young adult no longer feels like an adolescent, but not yet an adult either. They are aware of their partial dependence in decision-making or in the economic-financial sphere. They also perceive that they are not fully prepared to take responsibility for their own behavior. The last feature is defining young adulthood as an age of possibilities, opportunities, and experimentation. Of all developmental periods, young adulthood offers the widest range of open possibilities and opportunities. A young person at this age has room to experiment, but must gradually realize the impact of their decisions and take responsibility for them.
Besides the mentioned features, the young adult must also cope with significant social pressure in the form of expectations to meet specific developmental milestones: becoming independent, completing education, finding employment, building a partnership, entering marriage, and starting a family (Shulman & Nurmi, 2010). Achieving at least some of the mentioned developmental milestones is socially expected and is a prerequisite for young people to successfully enter adulthood, a sign of adaptation to the adult role (Negru, 2008). However, young adults do not succeed in meeting all societal pressures, which is why Arnett (2015) also refers to this age with the term „emerging adulthood“.
Crisis in Achieving Goals and Fulfilling Social Expectations in Twentysomethings
Studies (Ranta, Dietrich, & Salmela-Aro, 2014) show that the personal goals of young adults are primarily about education and finding a profession. The third most important goal is building romantic relationships. In addition to achieving the aforementioned developmental milestones, they also consider pursuing goals focused on personal growth and building leisure activities as important (Salmela-Aro et al., 2012).
Goal setting and subsequent goal attainment is a natural tendency of every human being. However, obstacles along this path are also a natural part of pursuing goals. Not all goals proceed smoothly. Some goals even prove unattainable due to obstacles (Sheldon & Elliot, 1999). Through the accumulation of repeated failures or multiple obstacles during goal pursuit, the individual finds themselves in a situation referred to as an action crisis. Brandstätter, Herrmann, and Schüler (2013) define an action crisis as a critical phase in goal pursuit during which the individual decides whether to continue striving for a long-term, difficult-to-attain goal or whether it would be better to give up on the goal. Action crisis is generally perceived negatively because it can lead to abandoning a desired goal. Negative consequences of action crisis include a decisional conflict between the individual's interests and their goals; reduction of means to achieve the goal; decreased value and desirability of the pursued goal; or devaluation of goal attainability (Herrmann, Brandstätter, & Wrosch, 2019). However, action crisis also has its positives. It activates the individual's self-regulatory processes and objectivizes goal pursuit by prompting the individual to reevaluate the costs and benefits of the pursued goal (Herrmann, Baur, Brandstätter, Hänggi, & Jäncke, 2014). Action crisis can mediate early „sobering up“ and rapid discontinuation of pursuing especially unrealistic or unattainable goals. This makes it possible to save resources that would otherwise be wasted in futile striving for an unattainable and unrealistic goal.
Čopková and Kováčová Holevová (2021) examined the determinants of action crisis in 264 young people in Slovakia, aged 15–30, emphasizing that depending on the characteristic life challenges of this developmental period, the experience of action crisis relates primarily to relationship and academic goals. However, besides the type of personal goal, they redirected their attention more toward the type of obstacles. At the same time, the triad associated with obstacles—negative emotions, have-to motivation, and goal conflict—was identified as a risk factor for experiencing crisis. We may consider this a confirmation of the research by Milyavskaya et al. (2015), who found that individuals motivated by „have-to“ as opposed to „want-to“ motivation encountered a greater number of obstacles in achieving their goals. The occurrence of crisis in young adults, also termed „quarter-life crisis,“ has been studied by Millová and Svárovská (2020) among our neighbors in the Czech Republic. The authors point out that the course of quarter-life crisis in Czech young people is comparable to other countries where this concept is given more attention than in the Czech Republic (and Slovakia).
An action crisis can be overcome in three ways. If the person still cares about the pursued goal despite obstacles, they mobilize their resources and continue pursuing the goal. The second alternative response is to continue pursuing the goal, but slightly adjust it. The last strategy for overcoming an action crisis is to terminate, abandon the pursuit of the problematic goal, and subsequently redirect resources (e.g., time, energy, money, knowledge) to a new, alternative goal.
Preference for these three approaches is individual and may vary. Wrosch and Miller (2009), however, surprisingly found that individuals who managed to discontinue particularly problematic goal pursuit had a better quality of life than those who only modified the problematic goal. Goal disengagement is very relevant also for young adults, since goal pursuit itself is an important part of forming their identity. It may take the form of experimenting and trying out new possibilities that life brings, or reacting to not always intrinsically motivated goals that society expects of them as „adults“. Situational obstacles that acutely prevent the feasibility of a given goal also come into play. For some, this might be unsuccessful studies, clinging to an unattainable profession, artificially prolonging a long-dysfunctional relationship, or investing in unprofitable economic endeavors. Abandoning a desired goal is often accompanied by feelings of failure; however, when it is followed by the formation of a new goal, from a long-term perspective it improves the individual's subjective well-being (Wrosch, Miller, Scheier, & Brun de Pontet, 2007).
Conclusion
Timely disengagement from pursuing especially an unattainable goal represents an adaptive strategy with the prospect of a „better future.“ In a study with young adults, Brandstätter and Herrmann (2015) pointed out that action crisis led to abandoning the original goal and re-engaging in desirable alternatives, thereby ensuring progress on the individual's path toward identity formation. The adaptive function of action crisis was applied, and thus the reevaluation of goal pursuit and subsequent goal disengagement proved beneficial. Young adults were able to commit to more attractive goals, which had an impact on their happiness and identity development. A challenge for further research remains the examination of disengagement from socially expected developmental milestones. The question of whether giving up on selected developmental goals is beneficial for young adults or not remains unanswered. Similarly, answering the question of how to support the achievement of social milestones despite the obstacles that may interfere with their attainment remains open.
MSc Natália Sabolová Katedra psychológie, Filozofická fakulta, Univerzita P. J. Šafárika v Košiciach Grant support: APVV-19-0284 Faktory výberu a dosahovania dlhodobých cieľov u mladých ľudí v období prechodu do dospelosti
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