Eric Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves.

If you're having a conversation with someone in speech, and it's not being tape-recorded, you can change your opinion, but on the Internet, it's not like that. On the Internet it's almost as if everything you say were being tape-recorded. You can't say, "I changed my mind.

We see a first generation going through adolescence knowing their every misstep, all the awkward gestures of their youth, are being frozen in a computer's memory.

The inability to move from one phase of life and change one's self-identity is, "the anxiety of always.

Over time, we transform a collection of parts into a comprehension of wholes.

It helps to distinguish between what psychologists call acting out and working through. In acting out, you take the conflicts you have in the physical reel and express them again and again in the virtual. There is much repetition and little growth. In working through, use the materials of online life to confront the conflict of the real and search for new resolutions.

Anthropologist Victor Turner writes that we are most free to explore identity in places outside of our normal routines, places that are in some way "betwixt and between." Turner calls them liminal, from the Latin word for "threshold.

The director of one of the nursing homes I have studied said, "We do not become children as we age. But because dependency can look childlike, we too often treat the elderly as though this were the case.

Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity.