With etymological origins in late Latin, the notion of moratorium refers to an extension of the period that had originally been determined for the performance of some action . Typically, the concept refers to the extension that provides more time to pay a debt .
Generally, the moratorium materializes as a plan that targets those who did not comply with a certain obligation. Thus, those who contracted a debt by not paying on time can take advantage of the moratorium and regularize their situation.
It is important to keep in mind that the debtor has to pay interest : the larger the debt and the longer it takes to pay it off, the higher the interest will be. The moratorium is intended to help those who did not pay in a timely manner and are now struggling to catch up.
That is why the moratorium usually includes a reduction in interest or implementing payment facilities . Suppose that a person who did not pay an annual tax of 1,000 pesos owes, five years later, 4,800 pesos for the accumulated interest. Faced with this situation, the State offers him a moratorium: it forgives 30% of the debt and allows him to pay the remaining 3,360 pesos in four monthly installments of 840 pesos .
The moratorium, in short, is a mechanism to favor the payment and collection of a debt . The debtor, in this framework, finds comfort for compliance, while the creditor increases his chances of obtaining the money, even when he resigns a percentage of the amount that would correspond to him without the moratorium in question.
On the other hand is the psychosocial moratorium , a concept that comes from the 1950s, when it was coined by Erik Erikson , an American psychologist. This is an idea equivalent to "dead time" in the context of searching for one's own identity , leaving the potential consequences for later in pursuit of an intense interaction with what surrounds us, both feelings, objects and objects. living beings.
Erikson postulated this concept as one of the fundamental points of his theories about the development of adolescent identity. Let's say that the psychosocial moratorium is a kind of experimentation that the people around the subject allow and understand, because it facilitates the development of their self and their perception of the very meaning of life.
Adolescence is in itself an example of a psychosocial moratorium, since it is a stage in which we try various things, some of them very dangerous, others that we simply will not do again in adulthood, and we justify the lack of attention to the consequences. with our youth . But if it weren't for those years of euphoria and lack of control, we probably wouldn't define our identity with the same precision.
Another example of a psychosocial moratorium is carnival, a holiday that gives us the possibility of behaving in a different way than usual, of acquiring another identity temporarily, precisely without thinking about the consequences of our actions as we would have done in another time. of the year. The use of a costume is not far from the exploration we carry out in adolescence, when we "play" at being one person or another until we find the one that suits us best.
We can also mention the university stay , which prepares us for the world of work but exposing us to less serious consequences than those existing outside that context. This is a time in which we can learn through an experience very similar to that of the "real world", although with a much greater margin of error allowed. People who go from study to work directly suffer much greater consequences for their mistakes.