Hello, I'm David Scott. You should accept no substitutes for Eric Scheske, but unfortunately, for the next few days you're going to have to. Here's something to get us started. At least it got my brain working a little on this Friday morning at the end of March, which, by the way is my wife's birthday. Say a prayer for my bride, Sarah, if you will today.
What do penguins, the shortages of priests and nurses, the always declining success rates for marriages, and the chronic job-hopping of the younger generations have in common? Carolyn Moynihan over at mercator.net, thinks it's all about fidelity and commitment. She might be on to something:
"The chief suspect is individualism, that dynamic in post-modern society that makes the world seem to revolve around personal choice. People have to be free to choose, of course, but today's freedom of choice tends to be freedom from commitment rather than for it.
Once, embarking on adult life was a matter of finding a place in society–in the workforce and in other social institutions, making their ethos and rules one's own. Now it is a question of selecting from society the elements of a unique personal lifestyle, or "life shopping" as British researcher Kate Fox calls it. And this can be a complex and lengthy process.
Fox, the director of the Oxford University Social Issues Research Centre, has studied the generation born between 1978 and 1994, the so-called Generation Y, noted their tendency to flit from one career or relationship to another in pursuit of an elusive ideal, and concluded that Y stands for young experimenting perfection seeker. Unlike the yuppies of the 1980s who were after money and status, "Yeppies are often not quite sure they want, some vague notion of fulfillment, usually, and even less sure about how to achieve it," she says.[10]
Whatever one thinks of such generalizations, it does appear that the freedom of choice they were brought up to revere and regard as their birthright is a mixed blessing for many young people, even a burden. A study of New Zealand school leavers finds them avoiding the notion of a career: "On the one hand the weight of possibilities puts pressure on them to make the best choices. On the other, the flexibility provided by choice is something they would not do without," says Dr Karen Vaughan.
