The Role of Desired Future Selves in the Creation of New Experience: The Case of Greek Unemployed Young Adults

Abstract

RECONSTRUCTING PAST AND FUTURE TO CREATE NEW EXPERIENCE The reconstruction of past and future is a central topic of research in both psychological and historical science. Psychological research on time perspective indicates that while imagining the future and remembering the past are common processes people engage in, some people are more disposed to orient toward the future than others (Boniwell and Zimbardo; Vowinckel et al). Imagining the future is similar to remembering the past in the sense that both processes involve an interpretation from the point of view of the present. Life review, that is, a structured form of reminiscence, is based on the principle that the meaning of past actions and events well the can be rewritten. This notion of rewriting the self (Freeman) is based on an analogy between life and story. In the narrative approach we adopt here, the is defined an evolving story (McAdams), which is multivoiced (Hermans and Kempen), and validated in social interaction (Gergen). In telling, writing, and sharing stories about themselves and their life world people constitute who they are and are not; what they desire, seek, and imagine; going beyond the present; and integrating cultural memory and historical consciousness (Brockmeier 79). More particularly, life review draws on strategies to revise the in such a way that more acceptance and integration of negative life events and more authorship of the life story is achieved (Westerhof and Bohlmeijer). Narrative futuring, for example, a guided process of writing from the future to the present (i.e., letters from the future) can be viewed the future-oriented counterpart of life review (Sools et al., Mapping Letters from the Future). An important function of incidentally occurring future imagination in everyday life, but even more so of its structured extension narrative futuring, is to guide present thought and action (Sools and Mooren). Narrative futuring offers a way to reconstruct the in light of desired ends in a process that involves the articulation of values and goals, and the means to achieve them. Hence, looking forward and looking back both depart from the present, but serve different functions. While the construction of the past and the future share present-centeredness, according to theoretical historian Koselleck these are not symmetrical complementary concepts [...] Experience and rather, are of different orders (260). While the past makes up a space of experience, the future should be more accurately conceptualized a of expectation, which directs itself to the not-yet, to the nonexperienced, to that which is to be revealed (259). The assumption that the future cannot be experienced in the same way the past has been dominating narrative theory and argumentation about the construction of past and future. The argument includes, There is a crucial formal difference between images and stories recollected and those projected. Those recollected are capable of high definition, a large measure of completeness. An image of the future is vague and sketchy, a story incomplete and thin (Crites 164-65). Narrative futuring, however, presents an alternative in which the future can become, at least partially, an experience (Sools et al., Mapping Letters from the Future, Tromp, and Mooren). This future-made present is achieved by constructing a future if realized, with a vivid portrayal of the future as an experiencing subject (Crites 167). By bringing future and present into a single imaginative and experiential plane, the potential of the penetration of the horizon of expectation necessary for the creation of new experience (Koselleck 260) comes closer into view. After all, a future that is fully founded upon past experience will result in the recurrence of that experience in the present. The unexpected, filled with an element of surprise, may create new experience. …