Why Do Today’s Emerging Adults Need a Playbook? A Q&A with Anna Moreland

In this month’s Q&A, contributing editor Kelly Hanlon interviews author Anna B. Moreland about her new book, co-authored with Thomas W. Smith, The Young Adult Playbook: Living Like It Matters (CUA Press, 2024).

Kelly Hanlon: What inspired you to write The Young Adult Playbook?

Anna Moreland: Tom Smith and I had been colleagues and friends for a long time, and we’d been listening to our students for decades. The book came out of this deep practice of listening to our students and becoming increasingly concerned about their hopes and dreams, and generally, about them as people.

One day, I walked into Tom’s office and asked, “You want to write a book with me?” And it was a wonderful experience, the process of writing the book; I’d never written a book with someone else. As it evolved, the practice of including student voices made it much stronger because it’s a book not just from two middle-aged faculty members who have been listening to those students for decades, but it is really, in part, written by young people for young people. I think that’s what makes it truly powerful because the young people who have read the book—high school students, college students, and young people in their twenties—have felt seen and heard in the book in a really powerful way.

KH: I like the form of the book: there’s the philosophy, some of the questions or key insights, and the students’ stories. And I thought even in my limited interaction with our younger staff members and with college-age students, a lot of those stories (or parts of them) were familiar. I thought that was powerful.

AM: It was really important to Tom and me for the book to be hopeful. There are so many books that diagnose the problem, such as The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, which is a great book. But there is not enough creativity about how to offer emerging adults concrete strategies so that they can build lives worth living. That’s the heart of the book, and that’s the heart of our project.

KH: There are, as you said already, a lot of diagnoses about what’s wrong with young people today, like in The Anxious Generation and Jean Twenge’s research, which you cite. How do you view your book fitting into that larger landscape of the literature on young people?

And I will add, as an offshoot to that question, that it read to me as though the book is actually geared toward the young people themselves, which I thought was useful, as opposed to parents, teachers, educators, and those interacting with young people.

AM: To your first question, there’s a lot of helpful social scientific research. There is a wide swath of books, along with the one you mentioned, that address the challenges emerging adults are facing. These books are highly diagnostic in nature. Our book comes onto that scene much more as the remedy than the diagnosis. It’s truly a self-help book, but in a way that we are hoping is not cringeworthy. We do diagnose the problems, but we focus a lot on the remedy. We think there are many reasons for hope.

Jonathan Haidt’s book, as excellent as it is, is not very hopeful. I teach students day in and day out. I spend a lot of time with college-aged people, and I have a lot of reasons for hope. They really are seeking the good, the true, and the beautiful. Their hearts are in the right place. 

It is true that it’s a book directed at emerging adults, but it is also really helpful for the adults who care about them and who don’t understand what’s going on. I’ve given it to therapists, school counselors, parents, and grandparents. When we talk about the book across the country, audience members will often end up in tears because it’s like we’re putting our fingers on a raw nerve either in their own lives or in the life of someone they love.

KH: Can you frame each of the three major sections in the book: work, leisure, and love? Why these three sections? Why not something else?

AM: Tom and I are convinced that the three main building blocks of a good life are meaningful work, healthy leisure practices, and love—both romantic love and friendship. That’s why the book has three sections. Each of those sections is organized in a similar way. We offer new vocabulary to talk about each of these areas, concrete strategies, stories, and journal reflections. The book has a workbook feel to it because it’s made for engagement. It works as an introspective tool, so it gets you to think about your own life in a concrete way, your own hopes and dreams. We are convinced that emerging adults have given up too early on their dreams, and we want to put those dreams in the driver’s seat.

KH: Can you say more about that? You talk about the fears that young people have about not finding the perfect career, not finding the perfect spouse, not knowing how to spend their leisure time. Can you pick one area and introduce some of the strategies you suggest to help young adults?

AM: Sure. For example, in the work section, we talk about what concrete steps you can take to seek meaningful work. We have a couple of steps in the work section that are rooted in Ignatian discernment practices. There are a lot of philosophical and religious themes that run throughout the book, but they run with a light touch, so you don’t have to be philosophically, theologically, or religiously inclined to gain a lot from the book.

The first step comes from a problem we identified with young people and their imaginations. They’re smart and industrious, but they have an impoverished imagination when they think about what they can do with their lives. It’s an imagination that we have fed to them, because the adult world has said that there are only a couple of meaningful work paths. The first step for them is breaking the framework and increasing their imaginations; this is based on Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries.

In step two we focus on a decision. When they recognize that they have to make a decision about work, we walk them through a discernment practice that gets them to look at this decision in terms of two different sets of goods at play on either side of the decision. We try to encourage them to move away from pro–con lists and realize that when they’re making a deep decision about work, there are true goods at play in option A, and there are true goods at play in option B.

When they think about a decision that way, they can recognize the tragedy of walking away from the option they didn’t choose. They’ve named the set of goods they’re leaving behind, and they can recognize that in making these decisions, they are simply weighing goods.

Third, we talk about identifying resources—that is, the trusted, wise people in these young adults’ lives. Not all voices are worth listening to, but there are some really important voices that are good for young people to turn to when it comes time to make an important decision.

In step four, they actually make the choice. In the book, we look at this through the framework of Ignatian detachment. It is important for the young people making decisions to look at what they’re attached to in this choice, do a little interactive work, and ask: “Is money my main concern? Is power? Is prestige?” If the answer to any of these is “yes,” that’s something to investigate. And that gives them the freedom to move toward a deeper good.

KH: You’ve hinted at this, but I think your response on work and the four steps points to a couple of concrete areas where older adults can have an influence. Those are: helping young people expand their social imaginations, and then, serving as a resource for these younger people.

AM: It is true that if you care about a young person, you can read this book, and you, too, can gain the tools to help young people more effectively. 

KH: You’re a professor at Villanova. Tom Smith was there, and now he’s at the Catholic University of America (CUA). There is a religious philosophy in the background of the book, but it’s never explicit. Most of our audience is practicing some sort of orthodox religion. How does that play into the life of young people today, especially when we hear all the media reports of the rise of the “nones”? Is there anything you want to say about the role of religion or faith in the lives of young people or as it relates to the topics in the book?

AM: We were very careful about the tone in which we wrote the book, because we wanted it to reach the “nones” you mention. We think that as Simone Weil said, and I paraphrase, “don’t worry about believing; if you seek after the truth, it will be not long before you’re falling into the arms of God.”

In an important sense, the book works as a pre-evangelization tool so that young people can get their houses in order and open themselves up to the good, the true, and the beautiful (and, ultimately, Jesus). But I want to say this: I know that the data about young people and religious faith is depressing, but I see them every day, and there’s an undeniable hunger. We just have to keep trying. When we talk to them about our faith, they respond, because they feel the hollowness of what the culture is offering them. 

KH: We talk about this at the Witherspoon Institute. We’re always pointing to the transcendent. It’s not like students are coming to Witherspoon for a Bible study, but we do pose questions in our seminars like “What does a life well-lived look like? Can we know truth? Can we know beauty? Can we know goodness?” It’s through these questions that we point to something bigger than ourselves.

My next question relates to women specifically. Young women, especially today, are told by the culture that they can “have it all.” They can have a healthy marriage and a family and a career, and yet, so many women feel discouraged and put off dating, marriage, and family. Do you have any advice for young women specifically as it relates to the themes covered in the book?

AM: I think our culture is selling young women a bill of goods. We mention in the book that at age twenty-eight, your biological clock starts to tick differently. That is a data point that nobody talks about, and by failing to do so, we are doing a radical disservice to this generation, especially to this generation of women who do want families. They’re told that before they start a family, they need to have their professional lives fully worked out, they need to pay off all their debt, they need to buy a house, and then somehow, like in a romantic comedy, some perfect guy is going to walk into their lives. They’re encouraged to work hard on their careers, but there’s this myth that somehow, romantic relationships don’t also require work. I’m utterly astonished by it. 

I also want to encourage women to take matters into their own hands. Women need to ask men out on real dates because men aren’t asking them. I want to encourage them to take the reins: not to complain that there are not enough conservative men out there who are looking for a relationship, but to go out and find them.

KH: You said that you’re hopeful about young people. Is there a single piece of advice that you would leave them with?

AM: You deserve more. I say that to them every day. Don’t give up on your hopes and dreams, because you deserve more with respect to work and leisure. Once you start to dig into the leisure piece, it really rocks their world. We tell them to recover leisure practices from their childhood. It’s not just about putting away your phone. We talked about pruning and planting in the book: they should be paying attention to what leisure practices they want to plant and cultivate, because they grow with you.

With respect to love, the loneliness epidemic is real. And that affects not just romantic relationships, but friendships as well. At the end of the day, life is a gift, and the center of life is who you love. That doesn’t start happening when you’re in your mid-thirties. It starts happening now. Take risks in work, take risks in leisure, and take risks in love, because on the other side of that is a life well-lived.

KH: I love that message of risk-taking. It seems to me that the young people I encounter are terrified of taking risks. They’re afraid of making the wrong choice, and it leads them to a state of paralysis. In my opinion, it’s a habit, it’s a muscle that you have to exercise, or it atrophies. And the best time to learn to do that is as a young person when you take small risks that aren’t life-altering. 

AM: They feel life-altering to them, but they’re small risks that make a big difference.

KH: Exactly. Do you have any final comments?

AM: Tom and I have a website with our contact information. We would be delighted to interact with anybody who reads the book, wants to provide feedback, or wants to connect with us.

Image by  Drobot Dean and licensed via Adobe Stock.