Being Human in Hard Times

Recent years seem to have been accompanied by great uncertainty and precarity in the United States and around the world: whether political strife within and between nations, volatility of economic markets, sexual harassment and assault, actions related to immigration and immigrant families, or violations of human rights, to name just a few issues. With the ripple effects of these events across the globe, our big world has at times never felt so small.

And yet, perhaps in the larger arc of human history, change is simply a universal theme—as each generation or society faces, or feels, the unique circumstances of a time. No matter what one’s view of the human condition, times of instability can push human beings to, or beyond, their limits; demand adaptation, coping, and resilience; undermine trust, erode hope, and prompt despair. But times of instability can also foster social relationships and support, ignite social movements, generate new ways of thinking about life, and of living it, and yield innovative solutions to personal and social problems.

For this reason, we have invited scholars to take a fresh look at some of the essential but underexplored aspects of human experience. We have asked authors to be visionary—to reflect on why the phenomenon they chose is crucial today, how it matters for development across the life span, how it comes about and what consequences it brings, and how it might be better theorized, measured, and analyzed to advance knowledge and its application. Some phenomena are naturally more negative, and others more positive. Either way, it is our aim to probe these phenomena with an eye to how they might be fostered or managed to promote and optimize the wellbeing of individuals, families, communities, and nations.

Self-Reflectiveness and Wisdom

Monika Ardelt and Sabine Grunwald (2018) emphasize the need for self-reflection and awareness, which are foundational to positive social relationships and important in nurturing development during adulthood. How we perceive ourselves as unique from others, and how we perceive ourselves in communion with others, shapes our beliefs, values, and behaviors. They advocate various forms of mindfulness practices for raising self-reflectiveness and awareness, which in turn increase resilience amid hardship and recovery from trauma. These are inescapable parts of being human.

Self-reflection and awareness are also central mechanisms for cultivating and applying wisdom, as noted in the article by Robert Sternberg (2018). Wisdom-based skills are necessary if individuals are to use what they know to not only benefit themselves and their friends and family, but also to serve the larger common good. Sternberg argues that societies underestimate the significance of these skills, and that this is a serious mistake. These skills can be taught. But to do so will require nations, states, and local districts to rethink their educational goals, school curricula, and testing. From preschools through higher education, educational systems emphasize too narrow a set of cognitive and academic skills and rely too heavily on standardized tests. As a result of these misplaced priorities, generations of students, he says, end up “smart but also foolish”—and worse still, “toxic” to themselves and others.

Self-Interest

Self-reflection, awareness, and wisdom are challenged by the rise in self-interest, which Michael Lewis (2018) argues is a source of great trouble in our world. Rampant self-interest fuels a clash between authenticity (being honest to oneself and others) and deception (at least deception that is meant to prevent harm to oneself and others) and is ultimately a primary source of shame. Recent generations of parents, he argues, have been major culprits in the rise of self-focus because they have created it in their children: in providing excessive praise, in rewarding of individuality, and in excepting their children from social conventions and standards, such as etiquette. The end result is that people do and say what they want, and they do not consider, let alone prioritize, the needs of others through shared rules of behavior.

Gratitude and Compassion

Overcoming self-interest is necessary to create a more humane world. Giacomo Bono and Jason Sender (2018) emphasize how gratitude connects human beings to the best in themselves and others. Gratitude is the feeling people experience when they receive a benefit that is given altruistically by another person, or when people appreciate the beneficial role that events, things, relationships, places, or groups have in their lives. Bono and Sender describe how gratitude brings many positive benefits for individuals and the quality of their relationships—and, by implication, societies. There is strong and growing evidence, for example, that gratitude reduces antisocial behavior and pathology, protects people from stress and supports resilience, promotes physical and mental health, and improves social relationships.

Robert Roeser, Blake Colaianne, and Mark Greenberg (2018) similarly turn attention to a related capacity: compassion. They, too, summarize the strong and growing evidence base on the benefits of compassion and outline the prospects that health promotion efforts might bring in fostering compassion in caregivers, as well as in children and adolescents. These efforts, they argue, will bring cumulative lifelong benefits for those individuals and, in aggregate, for society.

Procrastination and Serendipity

Procrastination is a widespread problem that has largely been studied among students in educational contexts and, to some extent, among employees in work contexts. But as Oliver Kaftan and Alexandra Freund (2018) argue, adults of all ages today must assume a bigger and more active role in pursuing their developmental goals as the life course has been deregulated and as life expectancy has increased. This rests on having stronger self-regulatory skills, as successes and failures become—or are interpreted as—our own doing. When self-regulation fails, people may postpone important goals and experience negative psychological, physical, and economic consequences.

Although Kaftan and Freund argue that people need to play a stronger role in their own goal pursuit today, what about the role of chance? Chance will always play a prominent role in human lives. But a person’s actions and chance are not unrelated. In his article, Christopher Napolitano (2018) advances the provocative idea that an individual’s actions shape the positive effects of chance events. He argues that serendipity is an intentional process that involves the interaction of self-regulatory actions with unexpected, non-normative life events – and, therefore, that some of the things that stem from “chance” events are not ultimately due to chance, but to how we respond.

Adversity, Resilience, and Coping

That human life is riddled with uncertainty—uncertainty created by other human beings—is powerfully demonstrated in the article by Salwa Massad, Rachael Stryker, Sylvie Mansour, and Umaiyeh Khammash (2018), which turns attention to children and youth who live in conflict zones. Approximately one fourth of children around the world live in these areas, which compromise their safety and bring devastating consequences for their physical and mental health. Massad and her colleagues focus on Palestinian children and youth who face extraordinary violence and resistance in their daily lives. The authors convey important lessons about the value of a resilience paradigm (over a vulnerability paradigm), and how to leverage preexisting community strengths, to better ensure positive outcomes for children and youth in conflict zones throughout the world.

The everyday adage that “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” reflects what psychologists have called “post-traumatic growth” or “transformational coping.” That is, positive outcomes can lay in the wake of adversity. Eranda Jayawickreme, Jessica Rivers, and Julia Rauthmann (2018) argue that methodological limitations in how we study post-traumatic growth have made it difficult to adequately examine these effects. In particular, research has focused on perceptions of growth that follow adversity rather than actual changes in psychological traits and resources. The authors address how the field might overcome the limitations of commonly used retrospective assessments, such as the Post-Traumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI), to build stronger measures of post-traumatic growth. Stronger measures are critical to knowing if, when, and how post-traumatic growth might be brought about.

Racial and Cultural Identity

Responses to adversity are often moderated or mediated by personal characteristics. Michael Cunningham, Samantha Francois, Gabriel Rodriguez, and Xzania White Lee (2018) examine African American high school students in a large southern U.S. city, where students are subject to many overt and covert forms of racism. African American youth are also exposed to high levels of community, gang, and family violence. Cunningham and his colleagues ask how racial identity might enter the relationship between negative life experiences and beliefs about aggression and retaliation. The results support the idea of “identity as coping,” meaning that a strong sense of identity—in this case, racial identity–might buffer significant adversity. Much remains to be learned, however, about how these dynamics might play out differently for African American boys and girls, given that these boys and girls face unique challenges with respect to how they are viewed in the world around them.

Indeed, it is precisely this issue–what gets attributed to and by different cultures via social interactions and language—to which Cynthia Garcia Coll, Arlene Garcia Miranda, Ibelis Buzzetta Torres, and Jaleishly Nogueras Bermúdez (2018) turn our attention. Within the first years of life, children quickly become “cultural beings.” By kindergarten, children can see, define, and adopt social categories on which they form prejudices and biases. This is problematic in an increasingly pluralistic society and world. Garcia Coll and her colleagues share some compelling ideas about how to alter early socializing contexts in ways that open children’s minds and hearts—whether in desegregating neighborhoods, promoting multiracial relationships, creating gender inclusive environments, better appreciating diversity in learning styles and cognitive capacities, and encouraging the learning of a second language.

Transitions in a Uncertain World

Social inequalities in a multicultural, multiracial society create great uncertainties for those who are less privileged or marginalized. In the United States, this has been particularly visible in the fluctuating legal statuses of gay and lesbian families and of immigrant families. With respect to immigration, Roberto G. Gonzales, Basia Ellis, Sarah A. Rendón García, and Kristina Brant (2018) examine how the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) prompted a status change in being “undocumented” to being “DACAmented.” DACA brought the right to drive, pursue education, and work and provided the security of personal documents and protection from deportation. These things altered the life trajectories and social integration of beneficiaries. However, limitations of the program have continued to keep all DACA beneficiaries in a kind of limbo. For many of these children, late adolescence was accompanied by the shocking realization that their families were never really “legal.” As they inherited this status from their parents, their transition into adulthood suddenly involved new struggle: learning how to be illegal.

These “(un)authorized” legal transitions described by Gonzales and his colleagues are excellent examples of a key message that Richard A. Settersten, Jr., and Asia Thogmartin(2018) convey in their essay on “flux”: That life course transitions are often conceptualized and studied as individual experiences but in reality are relational. That is, transitions are experienced with and alongside other people in states of interdependence. Family and other kinds of social relationships can be key sources of support in transitions but also sites of resistance and risk. In addition, inequalities in resources and opportunities often result in very different transition experiences. In today’s rapidly changing world, it is imperative that we look outward, beyond individuals, to see how transitions are social phenomena with social determinants and outcomes.

Together, these articles—whether they raise disturbing trends or report signs of hope—illuminate many important aspects of human experience today, and they point to things we can do to better help children, adults, and families successfully navigate their lives in our seemingly uncertain and unstable age.