David Brooks in the New York Times explores a fairly recent addition to the considered ”stages of life.” Sandwiched within the traditional childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age, ”odyssey” and ”active retirement” are the newcomers to the spectrum.
Brooks specifically focuses on ”odyssey,” those wandering years after college and before structured adulthood. Given the shifting structure of the social and global environment, he doesn’t find the new stage much of a surprise:
Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods. . .but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering. Old success recipes don’t apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself.
Dating gives way to Facebook and hooking up. Marriage gives way to cohabitation. Church attendance gives way to spiritual longing. Newspaper reading gives way to blogging.
As you might imagine, this emerging life phase is already having an impact on traditional social institutions and norms (says Brooks: ”It’s a phase in which some social institutions flourish — knitting circles, Teach for America — while others — churches, political parties — have trouble establishing ties”).
While all such boundaries and taxonomies are constructs, not fact (Shakespeare suggested there were seven stages, the Greeks thought there were eight), they do provide another useful way to segment the challenges facing cultural managers.
Which stages comprise your core audience? Do you strive to serve more than one? If so, why should they care?
The movie “Into the Wild” is an extreme example of the odyssey stage. I’m currently, at age 64, in the ‘Active Retirement’ stage. After years of arts and nonprofit management, I’m taking arts courses and loving it.