My dad sent me Brooks today. Go read it.

What's annoying is that Brooks doesn't really make any strong claim why this is all happening. I agree it's a pretty dramatic shift -- so what's the cause?

This is just wank:

Through their work, you can see the spirit of fluidity that now characterizes this stage. Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods, Wuthnow observes, but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering. Old success recipes don’t apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself.

Well, maybe. But I think it's just demographics.

The workforce is clogged by boomers.

Look at this Forbes article:

The U.S. workforce grew at a rate of 30% in the 1970s, and at 12% in the 1990s through the present. But it's expected to slow to about 3% and to level off by 2010.

By 2010, the number of workers aged 35 to 44--or those typically moving into upper management--will decline by 19%; the number of workers aged 45 to 54 will increase 21%; and the number of workers aged 55 to 64 will increase 52%.

Follow the money. It's probably more complex than just that, but I imagine that one enormous reason for the changing of norms about what's expected of people in their twenties is that they just don't become embedded in organizations and companies like they used to - because there was little room for that to happen.

If that's true, I would expect this "odyssey phase" to be a short-term trend, fizzling out in the next ten or twenty years as the workforce opens up and people feel like they're valued by orgs and companies.

Also, it seems that there isn't much of an "odyssey" thing going in on the tech sector and Silicon Valley. I just never got that feeling, culturally, about the people I knew who worked there. Maybe these new companies didn't face the glut of embedded boomers that came in the 70s-90s -- that's why they're different.

Thanks, boomers. You fucks.*

*My parents are nice.

MORE: Dad adds this to the conversation:

I agree, boomers are a big factor. Also, changes in the nature of the economy, company consolidation, expectations of post-boomers, becoming a service economy, international outsourcing and other effects of globalization, immigration, life-cycle maturity of the society, individual wealth consolidation, lack of significant follow-up wars similar to WWII and Vietnam, society choices, political choices, and who knows what else. Boomers are taking jobs and they created the jobs and economy of which they are a part, so it is difficult to parse the negative from the positive. It is their life cycle.