Lost In Transition Chapter Summary

Lost in Transition, written by Christian Smith, is a book that talk about the new mindsets that children today are emerging with when transitioning into adulthood. Throughout the book, Smith identities the major problems with those transitioning into adulthood in today’s society. He breaks it down into five issues: a lack of morality, a life of consumerism, intoxication, sexual liberation, and civil and political disengagement. The first chapter, “morality adrift,” defends a simple argument. It states that the morality of emerging adults is changing. Morality is becoming more of an individual belief, rather than a widely accepted idea. Smith said this referring to interviews with emerging adults, “They said that morality is a personal choice, entirely a matter

Smith shares that even though there is this dark side of liberation, most of these emerging adults do not have any open regrets from their experiences. However, there are some who do have regrets. These regrets have been determined to be from the lack of emotional connections that people have in sexual encounters. “It was totally for my self-esteem. If I saw someone that I thought was absolutely gorgeous, it would be my goal to be able to get him, like a fun game thing.” (p. 174) The emerging adults of today do not fully know how powerful sexual relationships can be. The fifth and final chapter of Lost in Transition is about the political disengagement that is so prevalent among young adults. Smith breaks the disengagement down into several different groups or sections. The apathetic, the uninformed, the distrustful, the disempowered, the marginally political, and the genuinely political. Apathy has overtaken emerging adults more than any other emotion. There are still the ones who genuinely care, but out of all the emerging adults that smith interviewed, only 4% fall into that particular