A few excerpts from “Emotions, Career Development, and Youth Programs,” an original essay

It is arguably impossible to determine where people will go from here, who they will become, and how we can best support them. Younger folx currently alive, and future generations to come, are populations that we can expect to experience life in ways that are significantly different from ways older folx currently alive and past generations experienced life. However, we can also expect younger folx and future generations to experience life through a multitude of parallels and overlaps with older folx of present and past days. While technology, architecture, art, romance, and even friendship may look different in the future, emotions will exist as a constant. Subsequently, the impact of youth programs will exist as a constant.

In this essay, I briefly argue that various kinds of human behavioral trends in society play an integral role in how youths are experiencing life in large urban cities. I argue that analyses of various human behavioral trends should be incorporated in efforts aimed at designing youth programs, especially youth employment programs. These analyses are best conducted and included in youth program design efforts by seeing the world as a place where all dimensions of human development are driven by emotion. To start, I’d like to address the role of emotion in career development. Afterwards, I will proceed to articulate the relationship between youth programs and career development and describe a way of thinking about youth program design in large urban cities that is grounded in emotion theory.

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Backed by decades of experience with observing and researching embodiments of human emotion, my intuition tells me that the years within the first decades of people’s lives will continue be tumultuous, filled and guided by emotions. Even with incredible technological advancements underway in the present moment, emotions will continue to fill and guide people’s lived experiences. This has been the case for all of human history thus far, so we can expect it to be true moving forward. In the meanwhile, we may entertain ourselves with the question of “should things change?”—and ask ourselves some more questions: Should we distance ourselves from emotions? Is it even possible to distance ourselves from emotions?

More to come (maybe)!