Young People and the Future

Abstract

Young people’s temporal orientation is now a major focus of youth studies. A central research question in this area is whether or not young people treat their futures as ‘choice biographies’ to be planned as a personal project. In this article I suggest that this focus has emerged in part from a misreading of contemporary sociological theory and I attempt to widen the focus of inquiry. Drawing on a qualitative interview with 50 young people in Australia aged 18 to 20, I highlight two significant elements of temporal orientation obscured by a focus on planning versus not planning. First, that young people mix multiple temporal orientations and strategies, of varying degrees of discursive explicitness, concurrently and as such can be present and future oriented at the same time. Second, that thinking about and shaping the future and enjoying, and coping in, the present are not individual pursuits but shaped collectively with significant others.