In the spirit of his generation — the one that brought us extreme sports, and made a mini celebrity out of a blogger who traded a paper clip for a house, and a mega celebrity out of a socialite who went on reality TV to move from job to job in “The Simple Life” — Mr. Aiken has begun a most unusual search. He will try a different job every week for a year. Depending on your point of view, his extreme job hunt either typifies or parodies his age group.

It all began at the dinner table last year, a few months after Mr. Aiken graduated from Capilano College in North Vancouver, British Columbia, with a degree in business administration. The son was telling the father (who took a job as an accountant 30 years ago in the Aiken family’s hometown of Port Moody, British Columbia) about wanting to find work about which he was passionate. “My father looked at me,” Mr. Aiken recalled, “and said, ‘I’ve been around 60 years and I’ve yet to find something I’m passionate about except your mother.’” Sobered by that thought, Mr. Aiken hatched his plan to work at 52 jobs in a year and to chronicle the search on a Web site, oneweekjob.com. He would take no salary for the work, but would encourage his “employers” to make a donation to charity. He spread the word through a mass e-mail message to friends and family and eventually through word of Web.

When offers came in that were far from home, he found a sponsor(nicejob.ca, a job search Web site) to pay for his travel, and he slept on the couches of “co-workers” and blog readers. As traffic to his Web site increased, he started taking along his best friend, a filmmaker, to create videos for the site.

The 20-somethings who turn to One Week Job find in Mr. Aiken “an ideal of the unstable life,” says Penelope Trunk, the author of “The Brazen Careerist” (Business Plus, 2007), who blogs and lectures on the transformation of the workplace. “He sends the message ‘job-hopping is O.K.,’ ‘moving around is O.K.’”

That is a comforting message, she says, because while Gen Y talks of seeking passion and embracing what is new, that is just brave cover for a less comfortable truth. “The reality is they might prefer one job that would last forever and end with retirement, but that kind of job doesn’t exist anymore,” Ms. Trunk says. “The alternative, the instability, terrifies them. Sean Aiken is an example of how uncertainty and constant change can be O.K.”