In my youth, everything was different. Mental processes associated with the determination of future professional activity

29.09.2019

In this material we will tell you what adolescence, childhood, youth are. Let's take a brief look at each period of human life, point out the generally accepted age distinctions.

Childhood

Ah, childhood ... It's a bright and beautiful time when a little man grows up. Step by step he gets acquainted with the world around him. This is a period when the baby begins to develop skills: he learns to speak, walk, read, count, dress himself. At this time, too, the baby begins to recognize, study and assimilate those cultural skills that are inherent in the society in which he exists. In different epochs of the development of mankind, among different peoples, the period of childhood implied unequal social, and most importantly, cultural content. As history progresses, the understanding of childhood changes. As an example, we can cite such a proverb, which was often applied to this stage in ancient Russia: “From birth to five years old, treat the child like a king-father, from seven years old to twelve - like a servant, and after twelve - like to equal." Currently, the sciences that study the period of childhood include pedagogy, psychology, sociology, history, ethnography, each of which considers this age period in its own way.

adolescence

The next stage that follows childhood is adolescence. The child grows, develops, learns and learns to learn to communicate. It is conditionally possible to divide this stage into two segments: elementary school, when teaching is the leading activity, and secondary school, where communication is dominant. Adolescence age in different historical periods has changed, now this period is determined from seven to fifteen years of a child's life. This stage of a child's life is also called adolescence. What is adolescence? This is also the period of development when a person becomes sexually mature. Irritability and hypersensitivity, slight excitability and restlessness, aggressive self-defense tactics and melancholic passivity - all these extremes in just such a combination are characteristic of this period of life. This is how modern society works, that every teenager strives to acquire the status of an adult as soon as possible. But alas, such a dream is inaccessible. As they say, year after year under its own power. Therefore, as often happens, a teenager at this stage of his life acquires not a sense of adulthood, but a feeling of inferiority.

What is adolescence? This period is characterized by the influence of sign systems: a teenager becomes a consumer. Consumption is the meaning of his life. In order to maintain his sense of identity and gain significance among his peers, a teenager becomes the owner of a certain set of things.

Youth

After adolescence comes youth. The main and most important feature of this period is the transition to an independent adult life. This is the so-called stage of maturity. By the end of adolescence, by about twenty-two years, the process of maturation of the human body is completed: growth, puberty, the formation of the musculoskeletal system. Facial features become defined. During this period, the degree of personal maturity is significantly inferior to the maturity of the organism. Professional self-determination at this stage is the leading criterion. This moment is a significant step towards independence. Many types of mental functions, such as attention, sensorimotor reactions, and some types of memory, reach their maximum development. The ability to lead an independent lifestyle, which during this period requires responsible behavior and initiative from boys and girls, is the main sign of social adaptation and, in general, shows a positive course in the development of a young person's personality. Personal attachments are prioritized over collective relationships.

So, childhood, adolescence, youth are the most important years in the formation of a person's personality.

growing up years

All three stages can be broken down into the following approximate timeframes:

Childhood, which covers the years of a child's life from birth until about the age of seven.
Adolescence is given years from the age of seven to fourteen.
From fourteen to twenty-two - twenty-three years old, time belongs to the stage of youth.

The described age limits are not strictly defined, for each culture and country they can be slightly shifted. But in general, the picture of age differentiation looks exactly like this, and it is currently well-established.

Instead of a conclusion

So, in the article we examined what adolescence, youth and childhood are. Each of these stages of life is important on the basis of what impact it can have on the formation of a person's personality as a whole, determining his professional development path, assimilation of universal human values, the formation of moral consciousness and the choice of citizenship.

I am not subject to nostalgia for bygone times and calmly relate to the ongoing changes. But there are events in life that pop up in the memory as something expensive, significant, when it seemed that time had already erased them forever. And they are connected not with something special, but with simple human relationships, which we often do not pay attention to at all.

I grew up in a small village in the Far East. In the mid-sixties, having finished eight grades, I wanted to continue studying, but there was only an eight-year school in the village. My parents had to enroll me in a ten-year school at which there was a boarding school. This school was located in another village, thirty kilometers from ours.

In modern times, this is not a distance at all, but in the sixties, in places where there were no normal roads, and the bus ran twice a day ... The village was called Valdgeim, which in Yiddish meant - House in the forest (for the exact I can’t vouch for the translation, experts will correct it).

So, on August 31, 1965, I arrived with things in this village and settled in a one-story brand new wooden building in the school yard - this was the boarding school. A plump, pretty woman met us, boys and girls who came here to study, and settled us in our places.

And late in the evening she brought two full buckets of selected prunes and put one in the room for the boys, and the second for the girls. It was the harvest of her own garden, which, by the way, was behind a fence right behind the boarding school.

I also remember spring, the month of May, when I was finishing the ninth grade. We were asked to help the collective farm clear the new fields of rhizomes and stumps left over from uprooted trees and shrubs. We started working at sunrise, as was customary in the villages. It was about six o'clock in the morning, and at twelve o'clock they announced a lunch break. Local schoolchildren took food from home with them, and we were given one boiled egg, a piece of dry smoked sausage and a piece of bread.

It is clear that after six hours of physical work in the fresh air, we swallowed this breakfast-lunch in one sitting, without feeling full. And then the "gazik" of the chairman of the collective farm drove up and stopped at a distance. The chairman, together with the driver, pulled a piece of tarpaulin out of the car and spread it on the ground. Then they poured a bag of sliced black bread on him, and then put three milk cans side by side. Two of them contained boiled milk. And in the third, fresh honey, only from the apiary ...

The chairman of the collective farm was a special person: a participant in the Great Patriotic War, a scout, a holder of three orders of glory, but this must be discussed separately.

It was necessary to see then with what care and gratitude he looked at us when we dipped bread in amber-colored honey and washed it down with milk from tin mugs brought by him.

Those times of the sixties in the former USSR were called the era of romantics, and all of them were imbued with this spirit: the songs of those years, and films, and books, and people. And this short and wonderful time was the result of a great grief experienced, which rallied those who survived. And it forced them to treat life and each other with special care. And you can’t return this time back, and you don’t need to - each era has its own purpose.

I think that today's relationships between people can be called an era of disappointment. When the desire to live better and richer came into conflict with the desire to live happily.

To live better is to be happy from the fact that you feel that someone needs you just like a person needs a person. And you can take care of someone just as a person takes care of a person.

We publish a fragment from the book "Encyclopedia of Youth" - a joint autobiography of the writer Sergei Yurienen and philologist, philosopher Mikhail Epstein. Their friendship began in 1967, in the first year of the philological faculty of Moscow State University, and has continued for more than forty years, now in the USA. This is not just a double and dialogical autobiography, but an encyclopedia of the most mysterious, searching, passionate, tormenting, selfish, crisis, metaphysical age - youth. This is a dialogue of peers (E Yu), speaking from within youth - and at the same time about it, placing it in the perspective of subsequent life experience.

Youth: definitions

"Youth is retribution" Henrik Ibsen. At that time I did not know in what context Ibsen had this, but, as an epigraph to Blok's "Retribution", this saying haunted me with its vague rightness. I had two guesses.

1. Youth is a retribution for the serenity of childhood, the golden dreams of the unity of the “I” and the world and its all-good guardianship. Youth reveals a split in the foundation of the “I”, its sudden detachment, rootlessness neither in the family, nor in the family, nor in the house, the loneliness of wandering to nowhere.

2. Youth is a retribution for the old and mature, for those who have settled in their homes, bedrooms, cares and services - and youth comes to ridicule, despise, question all this, take away the existential comfort from these who buried themselves alive.

It turned out that youth is retribution for childhood or retribution for the older generation. From the play "The Builder of Solnes" it is clear that the second, simplest interpretation is correct. Solnes. Youth is retribution. She is leading the revolution. As if under a new banner.

But even then, in my youth, I came to the third meaning: youth is retribution to herself. She torments and suffers, she imagines herself to be the heyday of life, the best age, the sharpest joy, but meanwhile it turns out to be the time of the most cruel torments. She chokes, falling to the cup of life, and at the same time she vomits and feels sick from overdrinking. Can't drink. From hunger all the time sucks in the pit of the stomach, but the stomach has not yet become tinned. Youth is a drinking bout 5-7-10 years long, which for others stretches for a lifetime. And at the same time it is an attack of vomiting, turning inside out to devastation, to an existential ulcer, heartburn and readiness for suicide. Chad, fumes, sleep of the mind and toothache in the heart.

But this was permanent extremism in everything. Although I reminded myself (in a broader sense): "Dostoevsky - but in moderation," however, half-measures could not be observed in anything. If reading (or playing cards), then before dawn, when it's time to get up and go to the faculty. If alcohol, then to complete amazement. If sex, then three days non-stop until complete zeroing. But if discipline, then to complete anchorage, experienced by me after the end of my relationship with Lena on Severnaya Street in Solntsevo.

Youth is not so much retribution. First of all, youth is a danger. Deadly and total threat. From all sides. From within. That's exactly what the stomachs are not yet tinned: how many times have miraculously saved me in hospitals. Infectious poisoning in a student canteen on Michurinsky, a month on Sokolina Gora (I ate pickles). After two courses, I brewed coffee in a 1953 tin teapot - gastric bleeding, lost two liters of blood. Deprived of conscious suicidal complexes, I cannot but mention here all the peers who did not survive their youth, suicides, all those who broke, drowned, crashed, as they say, "foolishly", all those who unsuccessfully stormed their own limits. But outside too. How many times have they tried to kill me! Adults - for being young; peers - for dissimilarity, for otherness, and sometimes for no reason, just to catch up and experience the very youthful joy of killing, sticking a long German bayonet, or turning your head in group football, so priceless, but only for you, into a crushed mass, incompatible with later life.

Being inside adolescence, I did not rule out that I would not survive it physically. Too unexpectedly and often, a thin film broke through, behind which quite serious, finally capital things awaited us, completely unprepared for this - death, non-being, nothing. Since then, it never occurred to me to thank my fate, my demon, my guardian angel for something that was not without loss, but nevertheless carried me beyond the borders of that joyful and ferocious period, where in our peaceful times it was not so and few peers. So here it is: thanks angel.

Youth: metaphors

What would you compare youth to? Is there any image, symbol, emblem, metaphor that you could use to convey the peculiarity of this age?

In youth, everything is so sonorous, vociferous, and at the same time so vague, indefinite, scattered, that Gogol's image suggests itself: "the string rings in the fog." It's from the Notes of a Madman. But youth is a kind of madness, legitimized by biological nature and social custom. The one who does not go crazy in his youth, does not behave eccentrically, extremely, does not give himself up to passions, does not run away from home, does not make scandals, does not bring loved ones to fainting - he is considered indeed not quite normal, and all this is expressed by verbs with the prefix "re-": go crazy- calm down; will grind - flour will...

In my own experience, I would replace "fog" with "chad". Fog is cool and arises from the accumulation of ice crystals and water droplets in the air, while fumes are the result of fire, incomplete or improper combustion: acrid, suffocating smoke from damp firewood, unburned coal. Youth, of course, is not cold, but fiery, and that is why its vagueness is not fog, but waste. The mind is burning, the heart is burning, but this flame is difficult to connect with the substance of existence, still damp, green, and therefore produces waste, shreds the living and torments the lungs with suffocation. Whatever I took on in a hurry: writing a story, speaking at a seminar, personal relationships, political conversations, public and scientific projects - everything gave off some kind of fumes and brought suffocation, and I could not understand where this sour taste. After all, I am burning, why is the whole world not burning with the same pure flame? But he did not want to, resisted my fire. That's when you burn for several years, then the substance around you will dry up, to which you will gradually transfer the temperature of your body; and then it can burn with you easily and cleanly, warming the universe and not leaving stinking, black particles, shredded corpses of fiery violence. This is my metaphor - an amendment to Gogol's.

An exact, full-length metaphor that cancels all other, approximate ones ... Can I repeat after Kazakov - “blue and green”? I lack something inflamed and fiery in this spectrum. Whether to paraphrase Steinbeck (i.e. Shakespeare, "Richard III", now is the winter of our discontent…): « Spring our anxiety?

Anxiety is a stronger word than discontent - it is quite appropriate here, because anxiety is a property of youth, which was also noticed in the Soviet thaw period by the sensitive Pakhmutova / Oshanin tandem - I mean "Song of Anxious Youth" (1958), which worried me on the outskirts of youth: “And the snow, and the wind, and the night flight of stars ... my heart calls me to the disturbing distance ...” No doubt, the distance of youth turned out to be very disturbing, but the most alarming there is an existential nearness, a soul.

Youth and youth

How do we define youth within the boundaries of our lives, in what years? How does it differ from previous and subsequent ages? Is it different from youth?

In the schemes of scientific and psychological periodization, adolescence is usually defined as 17-21 years for boys and 16-20 years for girls. For myself, I would definitely add one more year before graduation: 17-22. But even 2-3 post-university years for me were still transitional from youth to youth. Actually, youth begins for me at the age of 25, with the creation of a family, and continues until about 30 years old, until the birth of the first children, when, also gradually, a state of maturity is established. So my youth - from 17 to 25, youth - from 22 to 30, each period of eight years, of which for three years they overlap each other, creating a gateway, a system of transitions. All these boundaries are conditional and make sense only in the psychodynamics of individual age development. Youth is a force that does not yet know what to do with itself, pokes its way into all corners and nooks and crannies, fills bumps, spends as much, if not more, than it acquires. Youth is a force that already knows what it needs to do with itself, or at least knows what it doesn't need to do, and my span of three years was precisely the transition from negative to positive knowledge. Youth is just as noisy, turbulent and wide-ranging in its changes, like youth, but it has a vector. The centrifugal movement of youth is replaced by a centripetal one, and the scattering of stones left by the previous generation is replaced by collecting one's own and building one's own house. When the house is more or less completed and there is someone to live in it, maturity begins.

The laws of gravity that form the pattern you suggested do not have the same attractive power in my case. I am a man of the Air, I do not build from stones. My image of the house is an air castle (in French - chateau d "Spain, again a castle, but - Spanish). And again, it was not by chance that ether lay in wait for me beyond the threshold of youth - subversive, I mean. In these airs I he succeeded so much that only by a miracle he saved his literature and life from complete well-being in them.

Youth: her legacy

Who have we left from youth, what are the companions of life, thoughts, imagination? Who has not left us and whom we ourselves would not want to leave? And who and why have we discounted the most, peeled off the soul?

Since my youth, I have left very few close people with whom I still have external and internal communication. There are no others, and those are far away. You stayed. Ira Pankratova / Muravyova remained (although at the university we did not communicate much and became close only in America).

Valentin Evgenievich Khalizev, my supervisor, I rarely communicate with him, but I hold his image firmly in front of me. Olya Sedakova - there is no regular communication, but when we meet, I hear blood in her, the “chronosomes” of our generation, it is easy for us to understand each other, and the further, the more.

Andrey Bitov - I still appreciate communication with him and love what he wrote then, although I am less receptive to the next one. All other close people were acquired either relatedly, earlier, or later in friendship, in youth and maturity.

As for the companions of thought and imagination, Plato, Montaigne, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Bakhtin remained forever, admiration for A. Solzhenitsyn remained, but the fascination with "left" and "new left" thinkers, such as Sartre and Marcuse, came to naught , and the brilliant Nabokov also began to interest me less, as well as the literary and artistic avant-garde.

It seems that thanks to my third marriage, I jumped out of my generation - twenty years ago. In addition, interpersonal relationships by this point have almost completely virtualized. I can’t say that I have cooled off, let alone fallen into misanthropy and ceased to be “greedy for people.” But in this sense, the supposedly "live" magazine, LJ, fully satisfies the need for communication. With other people who are not indifferent and dear to me - and they are all “far away” - like the writer Anatoly Kurchatkin, my first publisher - communication is again computer-based. Even with his younger brother - a graduate of the Mekhmat of Moscow State University and an eyewitness to his elder brother's Moscow youth. Even with my mother - at 88, my mother is still quite an eyewitness.

If we talk about those who are not close, but those with whom he was friends, met and simply neighbored in the Main Building of Youth, some left the track prematurely (in Ivdel, the starting point of his transatlantic "journey" - he worked both in Peru and Cuba, - Yura Tokarev died; Andryusha Vanenkov, mentally broken by Bratislava, disappeared without an echo; both are wonderful polyglots-nuggets); others, I hope, are well, but quite silently. My reputation as a defector writer, broadcasting on shortwave in the name of Svoboda itself, protected me from excessive communication under the Soviet regime; apparently, this reputation continues to exert its influence in the new conditions of electronic surveillance, and this is understandable - our generation, in its average mass and in its youth, was very prudent and prudent, what can we talk about now, when it enters the “third age” marked by conservatism. .. But sometimes anonymous sounds are heard from there, according to which I state: the “silent majority” of the generation is alive. With others that appear in the same LiveJournal, I myself prefer not to enter into relationships, because I remember their winding-reptilian Komsomol-career youth - "boys-what-if-you-will."

Direct meetings have become generally rare - and here, in America, from the contemporaries of my youth, I meet live, perhaps only with you.

And you are one of the “companions of thought and imagination” that I have saved: I continue to read you.

As well as Norman Mailer, by the way - he died when I was already in America and just discovered the place where he was born; Marina and I often go there, in the town blown and washed by the Atlantic, we make the “Moss mile” along the boardwalk, sunbathe, swim, swim; and his books are always with us.

However, it is easier for me to list those whom I have stopped reading. While I follow the current world literature, especially Russian, American, to a lesser extent French, I - to some extent keeping Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Hemingway - have lost interest in a number of magnetic names of youth: Faulkner, Gide, Cortazar, Camus, Sartre, Celine, Nabokov... keeping, of course, the grateful memory of "how it was for the first time."

Fedor Mikhailovich, Lev Nikolaevich? They have become so inward, so integrated into my composition, that it seems mecum porto, even for years without removing it from the shelf.

As for pure philosophizing, in this respect philosophy decisively gave way to esotericism.

Youth: loss

What are our biggest losses since our youth? Can and should they be returned?

Perhaps all the best things that happened in my youth later remained with me or returned to me: discoveries of love, friendship, faiths, books, artistic and mental worlds, the joy of knowledge, wandering, meetings. Of course, I would not refuse to revive the feeling of "first-timer" with which I entered your much more adult world; the recognition and empathy with which I read A. Bitov, Yu. Kazakov, V. Aksenov; the admiration with which he discovered V. Nabokov and A. Solzhenitsyn; those life-opening conversations that he had with Sasha Bokuchava, and funny and cheerful conversations with Sasha Nikolaev. Those secrets that suddenly shone in women's faces. Those free wanderings around people, that unpredictability in meetings that could turn into new love or friendship, maybe for life. But I also remember that over time, all this openness began to turn into emptiness, heaviness and even despair. And therefore, my gratitude to youth does not arouse in me the desire to repeat it, to be in the place of that youth who greedily absorbed the world around him and with his greed often ruined what he had to keep clean from himself.

I can observe the younger generation among my American students, which means that it differs from ours not only in history, but also in geography, and the ground for comparison slips away. It seems to me that the metaphor of a string ringing either in a fog or in a frenzy does not apply to them at all. Young Americans begin to integrate into professional and social structures much earlier than we do, and they do not have such confusion, erosion, as in our youth, especially as our free tribe of philologists had (and there is no combined philology here as a discipline, there is a separate linguistics and literary studies). They give themselves - sometimes between school and university, but more often between university and graduate school or further careers - a year or two, when they "live to live", gain experience real life. But this is precisely a conscious, planned sewerage youth in the gap between the steps of a career. They cannot be blamed for this, because the density of social life and the tightness of the professional ranks here are incomparably higher than in the USSR, where socialization was imposed from the outside, superficial, and that is precisely why it prolongs youth from the inside, justifies its idleness, vacillation, mediocrity, aimless dispersion. You can envy the local youth in almost everything, and wish only for a greater breadth of thinking, bypassing the professional cells. But if this good wish can be fulfilled only at the cost of slipping into a formless, carbon monoxide, bohemian spirit, then it is better not to be fulfilled.

From my youth, I have retained a desire for the big, the great, some kind of gigantomania, which actually interferes with specialization and success in the field of specific disciplines. Deep down in my heart I do not feel like a philologist, nor a philosopher, nor a culturologist (although these specializations are too broad) and I don’t know who I am at all, although I interfere little by little in everything, including linguistics and even psychology. I have defined this for myself as the field of "humanities", but I am constantly trying to expand it with new disciplines, which I myself produce as needed. This can be seen as the influence of the utopian Russian, messianic Jewish or collectively Soviet utopian messianic mentality, which sought to resolve all issues on a "world scale". But this can not be thrown off for time and origin, but attributed only to oneself and considered juvenile. I still scatter the same way, working on dozens of projects in parallel and alternating them sometimes within the same day. And in each area I am only concerned with the world, the global, the turning point and the revolutionary. Adults usually don't behave like that, they finish one thing and only then start another, and they focus on the details, go deeper into particular issues. If my youth was infantile, then maturity, turning into old age, is juvenile, such is the lag in phase. Probably, I would like to acquire more adulthood, empiricism, specialization, but not at the expense of the youthful "everything" - but now it's too late.

young man

I Misha

“I” sticks out of the young man so much that it is just right to rename “youth” into “yness” (I-ness), and the young man into young man. I-burden is really a heavy burden both for oneself and for others. In adolescence, the “I” is already awakening from the dreams of childhood, already finding itself in a bitter feud with the world, but it is still so shy, shy, lonely, squeezed or driven into itself that I want to sympathize with it, patronize, stroke the poor shorn head. And you can’t stroke the young man anymore - he is with a revolver. The difference is like between Ilyusha Snegirev in The Brothers Karamazov and Ippolit Terentyev in The Idiot. And it doesn't matter if this revolver shoots bullets, thoughts, words, at itself or at others, it is a weapon. Yanost is the most criminal, terrorist age, when the strength of the janos is already almost equal to that of an adult, and the experience is still almost equal to that of a teenager. This divergence of strength and experience, the ability to remake the world without understanding and respect for the world, for things-in-themselves and people-for-themselves, is the source of juvenile crime, aggression against the world order.

By upbringing and character, I was a rather meek young man, but the “I” of me was like a pearl, especially in the first year, when I suddenly saw how much I lagged behind my peers in terms of male development, and decided to immediately catch up and overtake them. Perhaps the most disgusting memory of my life is when our group or course was sent to the Novy Arbat (1967), which was then under construction, to clean something, sweep on the upper floors of skyscrapers. There, among the dry leaves, mice rustled, and since I had a shovel in my hands, with a sudden joy of bitterness, I began to hit the animals with it and bloodied, and maybe even killed several. For some reason, it suddenly occurred to me that these small pests should be attacked with a mousetrap, a cat, or, at worst, a shovel. Of course, this mouse fight was happening in front of the girls and for some reason it had to portray how tough and courageous I am. Perhaps, at the age of 11-12, such vile “coolness” could still be understood, but I was 17! The very next day I thought about it with shame. And recently, at a bus stop in Moscow, one kid of five or six years old began to stomp on ants that had paved their way along the asphalt, and very carefully press them down with his frisky leg. I made a remark to him, one, two, three, all the more insistent, and then his mother got scared, deciding that I was crazy and dangerous, and took him away from me. This anger, as I now understand, was related not so much to the baby, but to himself, who once crushed mice with a shovel. And, of course, it's not just about mice - these were the years of some kind of hysterical compensatory "superhumanity" from which I myself suffered, as from stuffiness, stuffiness, isolation of my "I". When I read Nietzsche's exaltations: "why am I so smart", "why am I so strong", etc., I sometimes recognize this intoxication-I-ness of delayed "energy", which has overflowed in 30 and 40 years and finally breaking his mind.

Then, in my youth, I doubted the commandment "Love your neighbor as yourself." Not because "love" - that was certain. But because my attitude towards myself could hardly be called love, and I did not understand how to learn from it a lesson and a model of love for others. I understood and did not understand myself, I was afraid, I loved, yes, I loved, but I also despised, and hated, and was surprised at myself, and yearned for myself. Yes, my mother would not love someone like me if she knew me from the inside! However, I would love it. After all, when my daughter was born, I also changed this commandment: "Love your neighbor as your child." And then, in fact, he could be guided by her and love some previously unloved people, representing them as children.

I, Seryozha

To begin with, I myself have never addressed myself by my first name. Of course, I got used to it, but I don't really like it. So what if it's Roman generic? And the fact that this is Pushkin's patronymic does not justify him. Moreover, it was compromised by Yesenin: not that I was an opponent of his poetry, but I did not want to evoke associations associated with his way of life and death. When I chose freedom in France, they did not yet know about political correctness, and in the prefecture they renamed me Serge. It was more convenient for the French, but also for me: no connotations, except to say that offensive un beau Serge, "handsome Serge"1 - how the older generation of Frenchmen of both sexes almost automatically reacted.

However, in the days of my youth, only Aurora, the author of the attached picture, called me Serge. For others, I was or Sergey - it's a shame, because it's tight and sharp, like a trigger (because gay did not yet know en masse) - or as this subchapter of mine is called, but it had only a conditional relation to that trembling of will, fear and hope, to that excitement of being / non-being that filled that young man old times- as we can safely say. All he wanted to do was write. All that was expected from life was love. All that I was afraid to even hope for was freedom. Well, the favor of fortune is all that I hoped for. Sometimes, on the heavenly floors of Moscow State University, I looked out the window at the rain, and my reflection in the glasses split in two, showing me a double with the same name, and, leaving the world of dreams, I remembered that this is how it is, that in fact I am Sergei Sergeevich.

At that time I did not yet know about the mystical-occult belief that if one of his relatives dies at the birth of a person, the energy of the deceased multiplies the vitality of the newborn.

Youth: lessons and a view from here

Do we love our youth, and what is in it, and what do we not love and do not accept?

You can't say that I love my youth. More precisely, I do not like myself in it - but I love much of what she sent me and with what she brought me together. Of all the ages, I least of all accept myself as I was in my youth, for me it was the most spiritually difficult age. Cruelty in trying to be strong; insensitivity in an attempt to inspire and evoke feelings; pride in an attempt to know and embody one's "I"; gluttony in an attempt to satisfy the hunger for impressions and sensations. Perhaps my childhood was too long, I entered my youth a few years late, and it was complicated for me by adolescence that had not been fully experienced, with its critical, crisis worldview. To the sufferings of young Werther, the sufferings and temptations of Dostoevsky's adolescents were added.

I am ambivalent about many things in my youth. I regret that I was furious - and that I didn’t go crazy enough: the way of life that you led in the hostel remained inaccessible to me in my home shell, and therefore the relapses of youth, like illnesses, overtook me later (although it is more likely that a person stuck in such a way of life, then it is more difficult to get out of it). And most of all, I value three things in my youth: the sacrament of love and friendship, and the fact that loved ones and friends treated me more generously and more tolerantly than I deserved; the joy of work, mental concentration, free choice of topics and directions of thought; the fact that through folklore expeditions and summer trips I discovered the village, the people, the songs, the vast world of people unlike myself.

My youth didn't really know what they were doing. There is a French saying Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait - and, by the way, Tolstoy mentions it in his Youth. The second half of the proverb is not yet fully relevant for us, we are still capable of some deeds, while the first half is “If only youth knew” ...

If my youth knew what I know now ... There is a temptation to say: probably - and not probably, but of course! without any doubt! - many of my "choices", in Sartre's expression, would be different. The very quality of relations with those whom I loved would be different: after all, I would “know”, secured by the experience of mistakes. These are the "correct", or rather, corrected elections , according to the "butterfly effect", would have resulted in a completely different story of Jurjenen than the one that remained in his irreparably stormy youth against the backdrop of a stagnant era. Would I risk living an alternative history, "another life"? With all its super-barrier mood - perhaps in the imagination. But the regret that formed this saying is nonetheless with me. And at least this already proves the inconsistency of the semi-conscious conviction that possessed me in my youth - that I, contrary to all mankind, having in mind the historically dead, live my only, unique life correctly.

instead of a conclusion. youth and metaphysics

There is such a discipline - developmental psychology, which studies the psychosocial characteristics of each age. What is inherent in one age, looks like an anomaly for another. It is absurd for a child to look like an old man, and for an old man to look like a child. Usually youthful creativity is characterized as "immature" in terms of professional samples. But after all, each age can be considered as a special cultural formation that lives according to its own stylistic laws. The youthful poems of almost all poets are inferior to their adult creations, but if we consider them not from a professional literary point of view, but as examples of youthful culture, they deserve special attention. In this book, we are trying to understand youth as a special cultural and psychological formation - not through research and generalizations, but from the inside, on the experience of our own youth, while simultaneously contemplating it from our different age distance, from a distance of forty years.

Contrary to the established opinion about a “beautiful and happy” youth, this is a difficult and painful time when a person discovers his alienation to the world, difficult compatibility with it, goes through doubts about his own value, through a painful experience of dislike for himself, which is sometimes compensated by the delirium of the unrecognized or future greatness. Youth is a dream and a force that does not know what to do with itself and how to apply it to reality, and therefore languishes without a goal and constantly looks back at itself. This is eccentricity mixed with egocentrism, an attempt to break out of the circle of the established and generally accepted with the inevitable abutment in - and repulsion from - oneself. Here is the exact portrait of youth given by Leo Tolstoy in the very first chapter of the story of the same name: “Outside of teaching, my studies consisted: in solitary incoherent dreams and reflections, in doing gymnastics, in order to become the first strong man in the world, in loafing without any specific goal and thoughts in all the rooms, and especially in the girl’s corridor and in looking at myself in the mirror, from which, however, I always walked away with a heavy feeling of despondency and even disgust. Incoherent dreams, wandering without a goal, the accumulation of strength and looking at oneself (and, of course, girlish) - this is Tolstoy's formula of youth.

Henrik Ibsen gave an exact and ambiguous formula for this age: "Youth is retribution." This definition is correct in three senses. Firstly, youth is a retribution to the adult settled world, the values of which it challenges and blows up with its impatience, maximalism. Secondly, youth is a retribution for the young themselves, a terrible discovery of their lostness in a world that until recently was so adapted to the serene fairy tales and myths of childhood. Thirdly, youth is a retribution to the world as a whole, for the fact that it does not understand and does not love me, it is jealousy, irritability, sometimes anger even towards friends, lovers, reality as such.

Youth is the most nutritious age for any radicalism, extremism, terrorism; this is the most criminogenic age - and at the same time favorable to terror against oneself, suicide. Youth, unlike childhood and adolescence, already has strength, but unlike maturity and old age, there is no experience yet. Strength without experience is susceptible to chimeras, the temptations of destruction and radical alteration of being. Youth is carried away by the ideas of transforming the world, because the world is not yet dear to her, she has not got used to it, and she has already gained strength to defeat it. Youth is often carried away by broadcast ideas, which are based on dislike for the existing world: totalitarian, fascist, communist ideas - and becomes the mainstay of such regimes. According to Mayakovsky, "communism is the youth of the world, and it must be built by the young." Therefore, the totalitarian government from time to time arranges "purges" or "cultural revolutions" (Stalin, Mao Zedong) for the sake of generational change, in order to destroy the elders and elevate the young, and thereby raise strength over experience, the idea - over being.

The happiness and misfortune of our youth is that it fell on old age, the end of the 1960s - the beginning of the 1970s. It fell to us to be young in the era of decrepitude of communism. While we were growing up, everything around us was rapidly deteriorating: ideas, leaders, values, morals, the system itself, which turned 50 years old in the year we entered the university (1967). Therefore, our youth did not have access to social action, we were mortally bored in the society of "mature" (and already "overripe") socialism. The sluggish pace of the surrounding life lagged behind the biologically accelerated rhythms of youth, and we did not know what to do with ourselves in this inert or, as they later began to say, "stagnant" state of society. Youth is the rapids of time, when it flows with special speed and pressure, and we are caught in timelessness. This was our misfortune.

But it also turned out to be a rare success. For the first time in the history of the totalitarian 20th century, a generation has grown up that, with its youth, rejected the “youth of the world”, refused to participate, fight and be inspired. This generation broke the connection of communist times, the continuity of Soviet generations. The previous generation, the “sixties”, born in the thirties, was still carried away by the revolutionary project, still sang of the “Island of Freedom” and the “Bratsk hydroelectric power station”. The next generation, the eighties, which consisted of the children of "glasnost and perestroika", had already moved from the Komsomol to commerce, had already mastered, in the range from pragmatism to cynicism, the values of the market.

Our generation, having fled from the advanced "constructions of the century", hung in a pause between two epochs of offensive social action: from capitalism to communism - and back from communism to capitalism. We found ourselves in a no man's land, a neutral zone, where, as you know, "flowers of extraordinary beauty." We have come to the era of retreat as representatives of a new species - "a man who capitulates." “Retreating, a person learns to recognize his minimum, his limit. The limit of man is you, man! Retreating man. Homo capitularens,” ended my 1971 diary.

We are the generation in between, when all that was left to do was listen to the absurd ticking of the clock on the frozen dial of time. This was luck: to crawl into the crack between two historical epochs and hear silence, hear the conversation of the great and eternal, not drowned out by the noise of fast-flowing time. Social stagnation had its own depth, its own star-filled abyss. Timelessness is a parodic monument to eternity.

It does not follow from this that our youth was distinguished by high morality or creative productivity. There were generations that were much more cultured, well-read, smart, gifted, determined, and productive. But there was something that distinguished us from at least two previous and two subsequent generations: an interest in metaphysics. I would even say: the necessity of metaphysics, experienced in our own skin, because we tried to jump out of the historical skin of our time - and put on something else, more subtle, sensitive and durable. By metaphysics, I mean far more than philosophy and its most speculative section, the doctrine of the basic principles and principles of the universe. Metaphysics is not only in philosophy, but also in literature, in history, war, painting, theater, in the family, in everyday life, in money, even in sports. Metaphysics is an interest in the stable, eternal, timeless foundations, structures, and purposes of any experience or activity, be it politics, literature, or cooking. Previous generations lived in the grip of historicism, they politicized all problems, including metaphysical ones, and tried to solve them with social action. This is true not only of the Soviet, but also of the Western generations of the 1910s-1960s, including our peers from the "first" world. For the first time in several decades, our generation in the USSR developed a taste for metaphysics, a metaphysical thirst, and in this we, over the heads of all the revolutionary and post-revolutionary, pre-war, military and post-war generations of 1910-1960, echoed the generation of Russian philosophers, idealists, symbolists, existentialists of the early 20th century. And through them - with German and English romantics, American transcendentalists, French symbolists. We didn’t know much about them, we were far, half a century behind our Western peers in the circle of reading, but metaphysical thirst is not born by books, it searches for and chooses them itself, and we eagerly read everything that we managed to get in samizdat, tamizdat, thenizdat (pre-revolutionary publications) and spetsizdat (short-circulation publications for a narrow circle of specialists and ideological workers).

Traces of this metaphysical thirst, the "eternal" approach to everything from academic subjects to romantic feelings, from everyday trifles to life and professional vocation, are scattered throughout this book. This is her style and understanding of youth as the most metaphysical time, when the awareness of life as a whole is born, when even the most private, personal, practical questions reveal their metaphysical underside. It remains only to thank our stagnant time for the fact that, having driven us into a historical dead end, it allowed us to fulfill the vocation of youth: to comprehend the world as a whole without a hasty attempt to remake it, to bend it for ourselves.

Throughout adolescence - 15 - 20 years - a person achieves a high level of intellectual development, enriches his mental experience, for the first time significantly considers his individuality, his own inner world, forms a holistic self-image, self-determination is carried out in professional and life plans, his own view is consciously directed into the future, which indicates her transition to the stage of adulthood.

Diverse as an individual demographic, socio-psychological group, inherent in the language and norms of behavior, special values, determination in the implementation of ideas, leisure, style, determination, is a sign of the psychological, social situation of development peculiar only to him.

In the period of adolescence, a person reaches the threshold of relative maturity; in this period, her first socialization, the unrestrained development and growth of the organism are completed.

Self-determining and asserting themselves in the worldview, striving for individual uniqueness, girls and boys show a higher level of communication and learning activity compared to adolescence, in their vision of the future they coordinate the distant and near perspectives, often experiencing an identity crisis.

In adolescence, the specificity of mental development in most cases is associated with the specificity of the social situation of development, the basis of which is the setting by society of a vital, urgent task for young people - to accept, directly in this period, professional self-determination, while it is in terms of a real choice.

During the period of this age, a change in the hierarchy of needs is actively carried out, the process of complication, the formation of personality. Adolescence is of particular importance in solving the problems of choosing a life path, self-realization and self-determination associated with choosing a profession.

cognitive changes

In high school, education is associated with an impressive complication and changes in the content and structure of educational material, an increase in its volume, as a result, the level of requirements for students increases. Expect from them clarity, universality, independence in solving cognitive problems, flexibility, productivity of cognitive activity.

Orientation to the future, setting goals for personal and professional self-determination is reflected in the entire process of mental development, including the development of cognitive processes. Educational and professional activity becomes the main one.

High school students, in comparison with adolescents, significantly increase their interest in learning and school, as learning accumulates a direct life meaning associated with the future. In turn, there is a significant interest in various information sources - books, television, cinema. There is an increase in the need for individual acquisition of knowledge, a conscious attitude to learning and work is growing, cognitive interests are becoming broad, effective and sustainable. Personal selectivity and orientation of interests are connected with life plans.

During this period, there is an increase in the quality of the memory of schoolchildren - the amount of memory increases, the methods of memorization change. Simultaneously with involuntary memorization, there is an extensive use of expedient methods of arbitrary memorization of material. High school students acquire metacognitive skills - self-regulation and self-control, which affect the effectiveness of their cognitive strategies.

Cognitive development in adolescence is characterized by formal-operational, formal-logical thinking. This is a theoretical, hypothetical-deductive, abstract thinking that has a connection with certain environmental conditions that exists at the moment.

During adolescence, a significant new formation of the intellectual sphere is theoretical thinking, the process of its development. High school students and junior students are more likely to be concerned about the question “why?” Mental activity is more independent and active, there is a critical attitude towards the content of acquired knowledge, teachers. The idea of interest in the subject has changed - adolescents appreciate the passion for the subject, its descriptive and factual aspects, high school students are interested in unexplored, ambiguous, something that requires reasoning. In value is the non-standard form of presentation of the material, the erudition of the teacher.

Another characteristic of the intellectual sphere of this age is a pronounced desire to search for common principles and patterns that stand behind certain truths, a craving for generalizations. So, like high school students, no one gravitates towards "cosmic", global generalizations, does not like "big" theories. At the same time, in adolescence there is a combination of a breadth of interests with a lack of method and system in acquiring skills and knowledge - intellectual dilettantism.

The third feature is a well-known youthful predisposition to exaggerate one's own mental abilities and the strength of one's intellect, independence and level of knowledge, a craving for fictional, ostentatious intelligence. In almost every senior class there is a certain number of bored, indifferent schoolchildren - education for them is primitive and ordinary, the material supplied by the teacher is axiomatic, boring, long known to everyone, unnecessary and having nothing to do with intelligence, real science. High school students love to ask teachers tricky questions, and when they receive an answer, they shrug and shrug their shoulders.

During adolescence, there is also an increase in the indicator of individualization in abilities and interests, while the difference is often supplemented, compensated by negative behavioral reactions. Therefore, a high school teacher can easily single out a group of careless but capable students, a group of chronic C students, excellent intellectuals.

Intellectual development in this period is also the accumulation of skills and knowledge, a change in the structure and properties of the intellect, the formation of a special line of intellectual activity - a peculiarly individual system of psychological means used by a person, spontaneously or consciously, in order to better balance one's own individuality with external, subject conditions. activities.

The mastery of complex mental operations of synthesis and analysis, theoretical abstraction and generalization, bringing and argumentation improves. For girls and boys, systematicity, independent creative activity, installation of cause-and-effect relationships, criticality and stability of thinking are characteristic. A tendency is emerging towards an absolute and holistic assessment of various phenomena of reality, towards a generalized understanding of the world. J. Piaget believed that the logic of adolescence is a thoughtful correlated system that differs from children's logic; it is the essence of adult logic and the source of elementary forms of scientific thinking.

There is an active development of special abilities, in most cases associated with the chosen professional field - pedagogical, technical, mathematical. Ultimately, in adolescence, cognitive structures acquire the most complex structure and individual originality.

The variation of cognitive structures serves as a condition for the formation of the ability to reflect, introspection. Actions, feelings, thoughts of boys and girls are the subject of their mental analysis and consideration. Another significant side of introspection is associated with the ability to distinguish between inconsistencies between words, actions and thoughts, to use ideal circumstances and situations. There is an opportunity to create ideals - a person or morality, family, society, for attempts to implement them, to compare them with reality.

Often, without knowledge of the prerequisites, on limited factual material, young men and women tend to theorize the hypotheses put forward, to formulate extensive philosophical generalizations.

In the future, in youth, the intellectual sphere implies a higher and higher quality development associated with the formation of creative abilities, as well as the assimilation of information, the manifestation of mental initiative, the creation of something new - the ability to detect a problem, reformulate and raise a question, find original solutions.

Self-awareness is a process of becoming between the ages of 15 and 20

One of the significant psychological processes during adolescence is the formation of a stable image of "I", self-consciousness.

For a long time, psychologists were worried about why the development of self-consciousness takes place directly at this age. Based on the results of numerous studies, they concluded that the following circumstances predispose this phenomenon.

The intellect continues to develop. The emergence of abstract-logical thinking contributes to the manifestation of an acute desire for theorizing and abstraction. Young people spend hours talking and arguing on various topics, in fact, not knowing anything about them. They are strongly fascinated by this, since an abstract possibility is a phenomenon without limits, except for logical possibilities.
At an early stage of youth, the opening of the inner world is carried out. Young people immerse themselves in themselves, enjoy their own experiences, their view of the world changes, new feelings, sounds of music, the beauty of nature, sensations of their own bodies are learned. Adolescence is sensitive to internal, psychological problems, therefore, at this age, young people are interested not only in the eventful moment of the work, the external, but to a greater extent the psychological aspect.
The image of a perceived person changes over time. Its acceptance is carried out from the position of mental abilities, strong-willed qualities, outlook, attitude to work and other people, emotions. The ability to accurately and convincingly present the material, analyze and explain human behavior is strengthened.
The manifestation of dramatic experiences and anxiety in connection with the discovery of the inner world. Simultaneously with the realization of one's own uniqueness, dissimilarity with others, uniqueness, a feeling of loneliness or fear of loneliness arises. The “I” of young people is still unstable, indefinite, vague, therefore, there is a feeling of inner restlessness and emptiness, which, like the feeling of loneliness, must be got rid of. They fill this void through communication, which is selective at this age. However, despite the need for communication, the need for solitude remains, moreover, it is vital.
Youth is characterized by an exaggeration of its own uniqueness, but this passes, with age a person becomes more developed, finds more differences between peers and himself. In turn, this leads to the formation of the need for psychological intimacy, which allows a person to open up, penetrate into the inner world of other people, thanks to which he comes to realize his own dissimilarity to others, an understanding of unity with other people, understanding his own inner world.
There is a sense of stability over time. The development of time perspectives is due to mental development and a change in life perspective.

Of all the time dimensions for the child, the most important is "now" - he does not have a sense of the passage of time, all his significant experiences are carried out in the present, the past and future are vague for him. The perception of time in adolescence covers the past and present, the future is perceived as a continuation of the present. During adolescence, the time perspective expands both in depth, including the past and future, and in breadth, covering social and personal perspectives. The most significant dimension of time for young people is the future.

Due to these temporary changes, the need to achieve goals increases, the orientation of consciousness towards external control is replaced by internal self-control. There is an awareness of irreversibility, the fluidity of time and one's own existence. The thought of the inevitability of death in some causes a feeling of horror and fear, in others the desire for everyday activities and activities. There is an opinion that it is better for young people not to think about sad things. However, this is an erroneous opinion - it is the realization of the inevitability of death that pushes a person to seriously think about the meaning of life.

Personal development includes the formation of a stable image of "I" - a general idea of \u200b\u200bthemselves. Young people are beginning to realize their own qualities and a set of self-assessments, to think about who they can become, what are their prospects and opportunities, what they have done and can do in life.

Appearance, both for girls and boys, is important - growth, skin condition - the appearance of acne, acne is perceived acutely. A significant problem is weight - often girls, less often boys, resort to different diets, which are strongly contraindicated in their youth, because they cause significant harm to the developing organism. Actively involved in sports, young men build up their muscles, and girls, striving to have a graceful figure, "adjust" it to the standard of beauty, which is heavily imposed by the media and advertising.

The properties of a person as an individual are recognized and formed earlier than personal ones, therefore the ratio of the moral and psychological components of the “I” and “bodily” differs in youth. Young people compare the appearance, the structure of their own body with the peculiarities of the development of their peers, worry about their own "inferiority", having discovered shortcomings in themselves. In most cases, in youth, the standard of beauty is unrealistic and overestimated, because these experiences are often groundless.

With age, concern for one's own appearance disappears, a person acquires greater self-confidence. Moral and volitional qualities, relationships with others, mental abilities acquire importance.

During adolescence, changes are made in the general perception of the image of the "I", which is reflected in the following circumstances.

Over time, the cognitive complexity, the separation of the elements of the image of "I" change.
Integral tendentiousness is activated, which determines the integrity of the image of "I", internal consistency.
Over time, the stability of the image of "I" changes. Describing themselves, adults are more consistent than children, adolescents, and young men.
Changes are being made in the clarity, concretization, degree of significance of the image of "I".

Mental processes associated with the determination of future professional activity

During adolescence, professional, personal self-determination is carried out. In accordance with the concept of I.S. Kona, professional self-determination is divided into a number of steps.

Child Game. Trying on the playing role of a representative of various professions, the child "loses" any elements of the behavior associated with them.
Teenage fantasy. Adolescent child imagines himself in the role of a profession that interests him.
Approximate choice of profession. When considering specialties, young people are guided at first by their own interests - “I am interested in mathematics. I will be a teacher of mathematics”, then with my abilities – “I am good at mastering a foreign language. I will become a translator”, and then a system of values - “I want a creative job”.
Practical decision making. Specifically, the choice of a specialty is carried out, which includes the following components: the choice of a certain profession and the determination of the level of labor qualification, the duration and volume of training for it.

The choice of a profession is determined by social and psychological conditions. The social conditions include the educational level of parents - their higher education increases the likelihood that children will have the desire to study at a higher educational institution.

Components of psychological readiness for self-determination:

development at a significant level of psychological structures - the foundations of civil and scientific worldview, theoretical thinking, developed reflection, self-awareness;
the formation of needs that contribute to the meaningful fullness of the personality - the need for work, communication, to take the internal position of a member of society, time perspectives, value orientations, moral attitudes;
the emergence of the prerequisites for individuality, which is facilitated by the awareness and development of one's own interests, abilities and a critical attitude towards them.

Professional self-determination is extremely difficult and is determined by several factors: age; the level of claims and the level of awareness.

For developmental psychology, social aspects are essential. For the most part, personal qualities are highly ambiguous and determined by social and environmental circumstances. Thus, to characterize the age, it is necessary to take into account both social and psychological data.

During adolescence, in the pattern of self-consciousness, the process of reflection intensifies in a sharp form - the desire for self-knowledge of one's own personality, for assessing one's abilities and capabilities - this condition is a required condition for self-realization. The subject of attention and careful study are their own thoughts, aspirations and desires, experiences. In youth, a strongly pronounced tendency towards personal self-affirmation is formed - the desire to show one's own originality, dissimilarity to others, to stand out from the general mass of elders and peers.

When choosing a specialty, the level of awareness of young people about themselves and their future profession is important. In most cases, young people are poorly informed about the labor market, the content, nature and conditions of work, professional, personal, business qualities that are required when working in any specialty - this leads to a negative impact on the correct choice.

An important significance in choosing a profession is acquired by the level of personal claims, which includes an assessment of abilities, objective capabilities - what a person can actually do.

Professional orientation is a part of social self-determination, as a result, a successful choice of a profession will be when young people combine social and moral choice with reflections on the nature of their "I" and the meaning of life.

Features of the cognitive sphere, which are important in making decisions in the course of a professional career, are relativism, decentralism, openness of the individual to change. And also, the ability to plan, the absence of dogmatism and rigidity, the feeling of a doer, the concealment of information, integration and differentiation, creativity, a sense of alternativeness. These individual qualities, in accordance with professional activities, are manifested in the following personal characteristics:

the ability to analyze information from the professional sphere;
the ability to analyze information about oneself, in the language of professional activity;
the ability to build professional plans suitable for implementation.

An essential condition for professional planning for young people is the awareness and establishment of life values.

Thus, a professional project is a unity of affective and cognitive components, a unity of continuity and discontinuity in the course of personal development.

Conclusion

Youth is a stage in determining the path of life - studying at a university, starting a family, working in a chosen specialty, serving in the army - for young men. This age is characterized by introspection and reflection. The adolescent period is characterized by increased emotional excitability. Also, with age, volitional regulation increases, there is a clear manifestation of an improvement in the general emotional background, the need to systematize and a tendency to introspection, generalization of one's own knowledge about oneself.

Demonstrates a desire for self-affirmation, there is a self-assessment of appearance. Self-respect is one of the significant psychological characteristics of youth. Youth is a key stage in the formation of a worldview. The ideological search is the social orientation of the individual, the recognition of oneself as part of a social society, the determination of one's own future social position and ways to achieve it.

When choosing a profession, the ability to purposeful, conscious behavior, to a greater extent depends on the maturity of the individual. For professional self-determination, the social maturation of young people is conditioned by the situation of preparation for choosing a profession and involvement in socially useful work. Age limits social maturation - conscious self-determination is impossible before a certain age. Consequently, readiness for a conscious choice of a profession is determined by individuality and is formed in the course of personality development.

Bibliography

Helmut Remshidt, Adolescence and adolescence. Problems of personality formation / Per. with him. M.: Mir, 1994. -320 p.
ON THE. Trenkaeva, Social adaptation in adolescence: opportunities and prospects for study // Siberian Psychological Journal. Issue. No. 23. - Tomsk, 2006. - 63-66 p.
A.V. Mudrik, Human socialization: Proc. allowance for students. higher textbook establishments. M.: Academy, 2004. - 304 p.
E.A. Klimov, Psychology of professional self-determination. - Rostov - on - Don, 1996. - 203 p.
I.S. Kon, Psychology of early youth [Text] / I.S.Kon - M .: Education, 1989. - 212p.
ABOUT. Darvish, Developmental psychology [Text] / O.B. Darvish - M .: Vlados, - 264p.

When thinking about what youth is, romantic songs, poems of poets, dates under the moon, high hopes and unlimited possibilities immediately come to mind. However, this is just the outer shell. Youth is a rather interesting and difficult period for psychologists to study.

What is youth: definition

Adolescence is a stage in the physical maturation of a person, as well as personality development, which lies between childhood and adulthood. From the point of view of psychology, this is a transition from the dependence inherent in a child to the independence and responsibility inherent in mature people. From the point of view of physiology, physical and puberty is completed at this moment. Such a concept as "youth" or "youth" is also characterized by achievement. Age limits are determined by the interval from 14 to 18 years, if we are talking about domestic psychology. Foreign experts believe that youth begins at the age of 16.

Approaches to the problem of youth

Given the need to acquire a profession, young age is accompanied by continuous learning. At the same time, it becomes more profound and conscious than at an earlier age. It is characterized by the following features:

broad and deep perception of educational material, aimed at the formation of future professional knowledge;
in addition to the passive perception of information, the individual resorts to an active and independent search for it.

Social motives of adolescence

Childhood, youth, maturity - each of the periods of a person's life is characterized by certain motives that determine his activity. Young people are full of aspirations and hopes for the future. In this regard, they are guided by the following factors:

conviction in the need for continuous development, which is achieved through continuing education;
professional self-determination, caused by the need to prepare for further independent life;
social motivation caused by the desire to benefit others.

Factors in choosing a future profession

Considering that a young person in his youth must choose a future occupation, psychologists pay great attention to motives. So, the main factors of choice are the following:

social - prestige and the opportunity to take a worthy place in society;
personal - the presence of qualities and traits of character necessary for a particular profession;
material - the opportunity to provide yourself and your family with a decent existence.

Main problems

A mass of life-giving problems characterizes such a period as youth. The years of a young person's life are made up of many key questions, the main of which are the following:

a preliminary choice of a future profession, which consists of a life position, abilities and a priority area of knowledge;
adherence to the values that determine the public consciousness, as well as interpersonal relationships;
the growth of social activity, which does not consist in a banal interest, but in the desire to take a direct part in events;
formation of a worldview on fundamental issues;
expansion of the sphere of interests, as well as vital needs, which leads to the need for more material resources;
social orientation of the individual, which implies the search for one's place in society;
search for an answer to the question of the meaning of life and the purpose of a person in it.

Formation of the personality of a young man

At a certain moment, a young person embarks on the path of becoming self-awareness, which is inextricably linked with the formation of the so-called "I". It takes place along the following lines:

the formation of a different attitude to the emotional sphere (feelings become not just a reaction to external events, but personal characteristics);
awareness of the irreversible passage of time (this fact makes a young person think more seriously about his future and drawing up an individual life plan);
the formation of a holistic view of not only one's body and internal structure, but also moral, volitional and intellectual qualities.

interpersonal relationships

During adolescence, a young person begins to reconsider relationships with others, in particular with peers. So, they are divided into two categories - friends and comrades. The former are the closest, those that have earned devotion and respect. With all the rest of their peers, young people build comradely relations that imply polite treatment, mutual respect and mutual assistance.

The tactics of communication and building relationships with peers are built largely on the basis of future well-being (both psychological and physical). The most interesting and "useful" people remain in the social circle. The rest find themselves in a kind of emotional isolation. Nevertheless, often youthful friendship is idealized and illusory.

Also, for a young age, the emergence of such a deep feeling as love is characteristic. This is connected not only with the completion of puberty, but also with the desire to have a close person with whom you can share problems and joyful events. A beloved person is a kind of ideal both in terms of personal and in terms of external qualities.

Youth in the modern world

What is a dynamic category that is not permanent. Over time, with the development of society, it changes significantly. So, in connection with the rapidly growing acceleration, youth comes much earlier. But social maturity comes a little later. This is partly due to the fact that modern parents take care of children for much longer.

As in any other time, young people strive to work in order to independently provide themselves with money. Nevertheless, the current trend is that young men do not want to do "dirty work", which brings little income and determines a low social status. There is a tendency to desire to get everything at once.

conclusions

Youth is the most beautiful time in a person's life. It is associated not only with romantic feelings and dreams, but also with great opportunities in terms of organizing your future. Research and recommendations from psychologists help guide young people in the right direction and push them to make the right decisions.