When I was in college, each year at the beginning of the year was a campus-wide symposium centered on a book or books that everyone read over the summer. I think it was my sophomore year that the topic was summarized as "Who am I? Where am I going?" -- absolutely spot on for 19 year olds struggling to figure out who we were.
But these questions are the questions for a lifetime, not just for the emerging adult to wrestle with. There is an emerging notion that the goal of life is happiness, that anything short of happiness in life is indicative of some disorder, some brain dysfunction. There is a Brave New World quality to that, a denial of the value and meaning in our unhappy times, in our valleys.
Jung notes:
In the secret hour of life's midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life's fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die. Waxing and Waning make one curve.
In the second half of life, that long span from 40 to 90, where we spend most of our adult lives, we come face to face with disappointment and defeat. Marriages fail, parents die, friends die, careers wane or fail. But this is as much a part of the natural curve of life as are the acquisitions of the first half of life.
The turns of the second half of life when seen as depression, as a problem to be solved, made to go away may yield short term satisfaction. If instead we take them as a call to deepening, to enrichment and meaning, then what was a crisis becomes an opportunity.