In a world where young adults face unprecedented pressures and distractions, a new book offers timely wisdom for navigating the journey to adulthood with purpose and joy.
The Young Adult Playbook: Living Like It Matters, co-written by professors Anna Moreland of Villanova University (Pope Leo XIV's alma mater!) and Thomas Smith of the Catholic University of America, provides much-needed guidance.
It’s a great gift for any high school or college student, especially as graduation season is upon us.
Drawing from decades of teaching experience, the authors have crafted a practical guide that speaks directly to the challenges facing today's young adults.
Unlike many self-help books that focus solely on career success or productivity hacks, Moreland and Smith dive deeper. The Young Adult Playbook addresses fundamental questions about what truly constitutes a happy life.
Curious to learn more? Here’s our conversation with author Anna Moreland.
What inspired you to write The Young Adult Playbook?
Tom and I had been listening to our students for decades and growing in our concern for them. They arrive on campus over-prepared in a lot of ways — study skills, organization habits, intelligence — but also seriously underprepared in other ways. They come ill-equipped to answer deep identity questions about who they are and who they want to become.
This book helps them walk intentionally through the college experience and equips them with the necessary tools to enter adulthood in a way that will both make them happy and serve the common good.
Your goal is to help guide young adults toward a happy life. Why is this an important message for young adults to hear today?
Young adults today have given up way too early on meaningful work, on worthwhile leisure practices, and on real and lasting relationships. Our book provides new vocabulary, examines personal practices, and offers concrete strategies to help young people cross the threshold into a fully flourishing adulthood. We provide hope and doable pathways through this challenging terrain.
What are the elements that you have identified that give life meaning?
The three building blocks to a life worth living are a meaningful job that works toward the common good, healthy leisure practices that actually restore, refresh, and are meaningful for their own sake, and real human relationships built on vulnerability and honesty. Young people suffer from acute risk aversion in all three areas. This book helps them overcome this aversion to risk and open themselves up to a life worth living.
Why do you argue that settling for surface desires is an obstacle to finding true happiness?
This is what I say to young adults:
It’s easier to follow the well-worn paths to jobs that adults are expecting you to take rather than dig deeply and ask yourself what you want to do with your life.
It’s easier to scroll through social media and binge-watch Netflix than it is to get up off the couch and find people to play pickup basketball.
It’s easier to either hook up, stay home, or watch porn than it is to make yourself vulnerable and ask someone out for coffee.
But staying on the surface does not fulfill you. In the long run, it leaves you feeling empty. Young adults who actually take the necessary risks to build a meaningful life report to me how much happier they are.
Why did you decide to focus the book on the three main areas of work, free time, and romance?
Well, when I look back on my own life, I’ve noticed that these are the three key ingredients that make me grateful for my own life. And my co-author, Dr. Smith, agrees with me!
What impact do you see social media having on the younger generation as they start to make important life choices?
There is so much to say here, that it is tough to know where to begin. Let me recommend another recent book: Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU who tracks the transition from a play based childhood to a phone based childhood and how that has wreaked havoc on this younger generation’s lives, in particular their mental health. This “great rewiring of childhood” has damaged children’s social and neurological development.
I have a phone hotel in my classes where students deposit their phones on the way into class. They call it phone jail. That tells you something about their relationship to their phones.
Young people know they are exhausted by their phones. But aren’t we all? It’s tempting when talking to young people to assume that we have to help “them” with “their” problems. It’s often the case that we have to start by looking within and examining our own relationship to social media and our phones.
Check out The Young Adult Playbook, perfect for a young adult you care about or to read for your own enjoyment and benefit.
