Our profession posits the existence of many features of social life. I’m interested in the synchronization of free individuals over their lifecourse. But whatever one’s topic of study, if it takes place in an advanced society of today, the connection problem remains to be answered. What is it that binds people together? If the facts we find cannot be linked to coercive institutions – the structural explanation – or explained by restrictive civilized culture – some -ism or -archy – our social science has got an explanation gap. How do autonomous individuals relate to each other across many varied phases of life and contrasting conditions? Every pattern sociologists find, from the smallest fad to the biggest macro trend, poses the same problem of connectivity. How are these people communicating? In our complex societies, how do patterns in private life exist at all?
This is the Hobbesian problem of social order writ large. Hobbes wanted a solution based on coercion – the Leviathan. Locke offered a solution based on shared, enlightened interest through property ownership. But today’s life demands explanations that are infinitely more detailed and reaching separate individuals. And, at the same time, our explanations must recognize differences over time. Individuals and generational cohorts innovate collectively across each decade. What is more, these manage to be collectively orderly. How can this be explained?
Where can our missing connectors be found? Let’s take an example of transition from courtship to committed relationship. Lydia Kiesling gives us a biographical account of her finding ‘the one’ at age 23 in a sudden revelation after a period of wild dating (The Cut 2019). Lydia knows she’s out of sync with her peers; too precocious early on, and too quick to commit to a life partner and enter the next phase. Other undergraduate students reading this account, circa 2020, recognized this girl as being out of sync too. Her age is essentially still undergraduate college, with today’s five and six year graduation rates in mind.
So one individual is free to be out of sync. But, at the same time everybody, individual and observers alike, knows what the normal and expected chronology here really is. What does this example tell us about generational sync overall?
What is the cause of it? Should we describe it as ‘normative’? This seems too strong by half. Our protagonist is not harmed in the least by being in breach of any such norm; she knows she has been ‘wild,’ but can do what she wants and end up with a happy result that suits her and her partner equally. What is the power of a norm if it doesn’t matter to the people involved?
But, apparently contradicting this, everybody shares a consensus understanding of what the right age is for each stage of the life course; this is a collective awareness held by the whole cohort. And this shared perception is validated by the fact that the average age members of one generation complete each phase of life close to the same age. People pair up in budget-sharing couplehood in their mid 20s, and marry at around 30. What is more, these age synchronizations are not inherited. They are different from their own parents’ age timing and in the content of their courtship process. e.g. the rules of dating, breaking up, and finding new suitors.
What conclusions can we draw from the facts we have found here? The evidence of collective sync suggests that some kind of norm or rule exists. We see this in one of young people’s most important choices – the selection of their life partner. On the other hand, breaking the chronological rule appears to be totally without any penalty. Apparently, the obedience to timing is completely optional. This latter implies that norms or rules carry no reward or cost for breaking them. How does something with no consequences get created and how can it be influential? This is part of a problem sociologists face in trying to understand what connects people in private life. Young people appear to be collectively coordinated by age, but in practice individuals are evidently free to operate separately. They can create their own futures, heedless of others. What sociological principle is at work here? Whatever connects people must be a new kind of order. It cannot be one of culturally defined rules of the type enforced by state civilizations. Nor can it be a principle of rational action based on reward or loss – of the economic kind. Youth courtship shows us neither norms, nor rewards and punishments. Fixed civilized fixed rules for everyone, or self-interest in the economy, just don’t seem to apply here.
So what should sociologists do? Do we throw our hands in the air and despair of ever explaining what goes on in private life? Should we retreat and confine our studies to politics and formal organizations? Is it just safer to pick topics that aren’t sociological – that are political and economic – because, and here is the huge paradox, sociologists are afraid to study topics that are sociological? They find that blaming problems on the economy and institutions is much easier to do! Trying to be a sociologist of the real lives of youth today may take you into a difficult terrain where rules exist but are optional for individuals. This new zone isn’t based on morals. Nor can we easily see good or bad consequences. It lacks all current explanation. In sum, it’s too hard for the modern mind to grapple with personal relationships and it appears only fiction writers and entertainers can present it – as drama and not social science. Can sociology as a discipline just accept that it has been defeated by this?
This author admits to being unconventional for a sociologist. I believe social science can escape from its ‘connection problems’ if it ventures into a new explanatory framework. If we take our entire private lifecourse as one topic and study it within its own relationship rules and logic, I feel confident that this will show us how private connections stand in the center of social life. And this, I believe, will reveal youth and lifecourse to be their own, shared sociological sphere.