The availability of multiple interpretations of a life story is particularly important in how the generations communicate with each other. When we, as parents, talk to our children about our lives, there is a great temptation to edit out the discontinuities, to reshape our histories so that they look more coherent than they are. But when we tell stories to our children with the zigzags edited out, it causes problems for many of those children. A lot of young people have great difficulty committing themselves to a relationship or to a career because of the feeling that once they do, they’re trapped for a long, long time. They feel they’ve got to get on the right “track” because, after all, this is a long and terrifying commitment. I think it is very liberating for college students when an older person says to them, “Your first job after college need not be the beginning of an ascending curve that’s going to take you through your life. It can be a zigzag. You might be doing something different in five years.” That’s something young people need to hear: that the continuous story, where the whole of a person’s life is prefigured very early on, is often a cultural creation, not a reflection of life as it is really lived.