Today, when great changes are taking place in economy and population structure, younger Americans are drawing a new 21^st-century road map to success, a latest survey has found.

Across generational lines, Americans continue to value the traditional aspects of a successful life, including getting married, having children, owning a home, and retiring in their sixties. But while young and old mostly agree on what makes the finish line of a life of accomplishments, they offer totally different paths for reaching it.

Young people who are still getting started in life were more likely than older adults to put personal achievement in their work in the first place, to believe they will improve their careers most by regularly changing jobs, to favor communities with more public services and a faster pace of life, to agree that couples should be financially secure before getting married or having children, and to maintain that children are best served by two parents working outside the home, the survey found.

From career to community and family, these differences suggest that as the result of the Great Recession, those just starting out in life are defining priorities and expectations that will increasingly spend through almost all corners of American life, from consumer preferences to housing choices to politics.

Young and old converge on one key point: a large number of people in both groups said they believe it is harder for young people today to get started in life than it was for earlier generations. While younger people are somewhat more optimistic than their elders about the future for those starting out today, many in both parties believe those “just getting started in life” face a tougher climb than earlier generations in reaching such meaningful achievements as securing a good-paying job, starting a family, managing debt, and finding affordable housing.

Pete Schneider considers the climb tougher today. Schneider, a 27-year-old auto technician from the Chicago suburbs, says he struggled to find a job after graduating from college. Even now that he is working steadily, he said, “I can’t afford to pay my monthly loan on my own, so I have to rent rooms out to people to make that happen.” Looking back, he is surprised that his parents could provide a comfortable life for their children even though neither had completed college when he was young. “I still grew up in an upper middle-class home with parents who didn’t have college degrees,” Schneider said. “I don’t think people are capable of that anymore.”

To control the nation’s growing problem with food wastage, the South Korean government has started a special initiative (倡议) ---“Pay as You Trash”. According to the initiative, the South Korean government has three methods in place to charge citizens for the food thrown away. One is through an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) card — when users tap this card over a specially designed food waste bin, the lid will open. This waste is automatically weighed and recorded in the user’s account. The user needs to settle this bill every month.

The second billing method is through pre-paid garbage bags. These specially designed bags are priced based on the amount of space. For instance, in Seoul, a 10-liter garbage bag costs around 190 won (less than $1). There’s also a bar code management system in place, in which residents (居民) throw food waste directly into dustbins and pay for it by buying bar code stickers attached to the bin.

Even before the pay-by-weight system was introduced, South Koreans were still being charged for food waste — the cost was simply divided equally among the residents of each apartment block. The new system is not only fair, but is also designed to make consumers really feel the pinch of too much waste. The more food they throw out, the more they end up paying.

Thanks to the initiative, residents like Seoul housewife Ms. Kwan are now adopting creative methods to avoid food waste. She makes sure to pour all the liquid out of leftover food before throwing it away. While preparing vegetables, she tries to use as much as the eatable parts as possible in order to reduce waste.

Does adversity (逆境) warm hearts or harden them? Recently, my graduate student Daniel and I set out to explore the relationship between adversity and compassion (同情).

We conducted a study online and reached more than 200 people from all walks of life. After asking them about the hardships they faced and how often they experienced compassion, we offered them the chance to donate some of the money they were about to be paid for taking part in the study to help people in need. The result showed that those who had faced serious adversities in life feel more compassion for suffering people. And as a result, they donated more money.

Now, if experiencing any type of hardship can make a person more compassionate, you might assume that the compassion would be reached when someone has experienced the exact misfortune that another person is facing. Interestingly, this turns out to be dead wrong.

In an article recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Kellogg School of Management professor Loran Nordgren and his team found that the human mind refuses to work as usual when it comes to remembering its own past hardships: it regularly makes them appear to be less painful than they actually were. Therefore, recalling a bad experience in your own past may make you underestimate (低估) the difficulty of others’ challenges. You overcame it, you think; so should he. The result? You lack compassion.

Our findings, taken together with those of Professor Nordgren and his team, are that living through hardships doesn’t either warm hearts or harden them; it does both. Knowing suffering in life usually enhances the compassion we feel for others, except when the suffering involves specific painful events that we know all too well.