Ko and Neuberg assemble an elegant synthesis: as priorities shift across the life course, people manage ecological affordances that enable or constrain their goals. Ko and Neuberg explicitly invite extensions beyond their exemplars; the present proposal accepts that invitation by treating volatility not as an ancillary context but as a constitutive condition for affordance management. Many apparent life-stage regularities were observed under historically unusual environmental stability. In contemporary conditions of high volatility, affordances do not simply change in salience for a goal-directed agent; their objective availability, reliability, and valence can shift fundamentally.

The most pervasive driver is ecological destabilization, including climate change and biodiversity loss (IPCC, 2022). Other disruptions, especially geopolitical cascades, often flow from these pressures by intensifying resource competition, precipitating displacement, and stressing institutions (IPCC, 2022; Mach et al., Reference Mach, Kraan, Adger, Buhaug, Burke, Fearon, Gleditsch, Hsiang, Maystadt, O’Loughlin, Seter, Theisen, Tir and Scheffran2019). While human history is replete with crises, contemporary volatility is qualitatively different because its drivers are global, creating interconnected systemic risks amplified by instantaneous information flows (IPCC, 2022; Mach et al., Reference Mach, Kraan, Adger, Buhaug, Burke, Fearon, Gleditsch, Hsiang, Maystadt, O’Loughlin, Seter, Theisen, Tir and Scheffran2019). This is not simply greater context sensitivity; it is a higher-order shift that alters the very structure of the affordance landscape. When predictability and safety erode, the background against which life-stage goals are pursued changes character, and environments become volatile in developmentally consequential ways.

Parenting, central in Ko and Neuberg’s evolutionary account of adult motivation, illustrates the point. Where climate hazards or conflict uproot communities, core caregiving affordances such as kin proximity, perceived safety, and reliable services can vanish. Even without immediate loss, anticipated climate shocks shorten planning horizons and heighten vigilance. In industrialized settings, fertility intentions are increasingly entangled with ecological futures; in fragile settings, conflict and forced migration make pair bonding precarious rather than stage-typical (IPCC, 2022; Dillarstone, Brown, & Flores, Reference Dillarstone, Brown and Flores2023). This is not an idiosyncratic deviation but a structural alteration of the opportunity structure for stage-linked goals.

At the same time, adult goal architectures are diversifying. Global fertility continues to decline (GBD 2021 Fertility and Forecasting Collaborators, 2024), and acceptance of voluntary childlessness is rising in many Western countries (Szalma et al., Reference Szalma, Takács, Spéder and Vignoli2025). These trends are not idiosyncratic. Systemic volatility compresses planning horizons and erodes confidence in long-horizon commitments. Emerging studies link climate concern to lower fertility intentions and childfree motivations in several populations (Dillarstone et al., Reference Dillarstone, Brown and Flores2023; Helm, Kemper, & White, Reference Helm, Kemper and White2021), while large international surveys document bleak future outlooks across diverse national contexts that unsettle young people’s lives, erode trust in institutions, and dampen motivation to invest in the future (Hickman et al., Reference Hickman, Marks, Pihkala, Clayton, Lewandowski, Mayall, Wray, Mellor and van Susteren2021; Ogunbode et al., Reference Ogunbode, Doran, Hanss, Ojala, Salmela-Aro, van den Broek, Bhullar, Aquino, Marot, Schermer, Wlodarczyk, Lu, Jiang, Acquadro Maran, Yadav, Ardi, Chegeni, Ghanbarian, Zand and Karasu2022). Moreover, in their more acute forms, these concerns have been connected to behavioral freezing, dampening age-typical action and commitment (Heeren, Mouguiama-Daouda, & Contreras, Reference Heeren, Mouguiama-Daouda and Contreras2022). Incorporating non-parental life courses, therefore, strengthens, not weakens, the framework’s explanatory reach.

Volatility also acts, psychologically, through uncertainty. Uncertainty is not merely aversive; it impairs the very capacity to project oneself into the future (Terpini & D’Argembeau, Reference Terpini and D’Argembeau2024), a process rooted in the neurobiology of threat anticipation (Grupe & Nitschke, Reference Grupe and Nitschke2013). Crucially, instability per se, not just static adversity, imposes mental-health costs (Nettle et al., Reference Nettle, Chevallier, de Courson, Johnson, Johnson and Pickett2025). This suggests a critical boundary condition for Ko and Neuberg’s framework: under extreme volatility, the psychological response may shift from adaptive flexibility to maladaptive cognitive impairment, chilling investment and deterring long-horizon commitments even when current affordances seem adequate.

These observations motivate three refinements that assign environmental volatility its proper analytic role. They operate at distinct but interacting levels: the individual, the social context, and the environment itself. First, at the level of the individual, it is necessary to distinguish available, perceived, and anticipated affordances. People plan not only from what is offered now, but from structured expectations of near-future loss. Representing these anticipatory adjustments explains shifts in prioritization that might otherwise be misread as idiosyncratic deviations. Second, at the level of the social context, stratified capacity to rebuild niches must be integrated. Managing affordances depends on resources and institutional reliability. After a shock, some communities can restore developmental affordances while others cannot. The result is systematic, unequal patterns in life-stage transitions. Priorities still shift, but the means to pursue them become heterogeneously distributed. Third, at the level of the environment, environmental volatility should be treated as a higher-order constraint that acts as a primary causal input. This system-level instability calibrates the very life-history strategies and goal architectures that Ko and Neuberg’s framework takes as its starting point. Volatility conditions whether other affordances can be trusted or realized, thereby increasing monitoring demands and impairing future-oriented planning. This proposal complements Ko and Neuberg’s framework by treating volatility as a baseline feature to represent rather than a boundary condition to bracket. Without that move, there is a risk of universalizing developmental patterns contingent on a historically stable, affluent niche.

The extensions are testable. If perceived ecological volatility shapes goal architecture independently of current resources, it should systematically alter the timing and prioritization of life goals. Where capacity to rebuild niches is strong, recovery of stage-typical trajectories after shocks should be steeper. And if anticipated loss and uncertainty are operative, they should mediate links between volatility and disengagement from long-horizon goals. Multi-country longitudinal designs can decisively test these claims.

Updating models that foreground ecological affordances to explicitly represent volatility, rebuilding capacity, and anticipatory cognition preserves the spirit of Ko and Neuberg’s contribution while aligning it with unequal, uncertain, and rapidly changing worlds. This is a pressing scientific priority with nontrivial ethical implications. Affordance management theories that ignore contemporary conditions of high volatility risk conflating historically contingent niches with universal baselines.