Have you ever felt completely ordinary about something, only to discover that it’s actually an alarming abnormality worthy of a 7,500-word news article lamenting the current state of society?
Maybe not. But maybe it just happened to you the way it happened to me, upon the mid-August publication of Robin Marantz Henig’s piece in the New York Times Magazine passive-aggressively titled “What Is It About 20-Somethings?”
“What’s Wrong With All These Unemployed, Unmarried, Undecided 20-Somethings?” would have been a more apt title.
In addition to pointing out everything Generation Y has fallen statistically short of achieving (settling down geographically, vocationally, romantically), Henig postulates that these trends might reflect the development of a new stage of life, one that she and psychologists call “emerging adulthood.”
Here’s the gist of the idea: emerging adulthood is like adolescence, but worse. Like the anguished teenager, the emerging adult has no clue what he’s doing. He’s on a perpetual soul search with no real spiritual compass to guide him to self-realization.
Unlike his adolescent younger brother, though, he’s already completed his college education and spent years chasing unpaid internships, dating casually and generally living with a crippling case of commitmentphobia (coined in the 1988 self-help book “Men Who Can’t Love”). Meanwhile, his parents are still helplessly funding his decade-long identity crisis, and he has no problem being coddled.
Hey, guys. She’s talking about us.
Henig’s 10-page guilt trip unnerves me to no end, mostly because it captures my peer group with such alarming accuracy. When I read psychology professor Jeffrey Jensen Arnett’s list of the symptoms of emerging adulthood (“identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between” and—my favorite—“a sense of possibilities”), it was like reading a detached, clinical summary of my own puerile, insipid soul. At the article’s description of today’s 20-somethings “slouch[ing] toward adulthood,” I winced and promised myself I would drop my dreams of taking a gap year after graduation and crack open my LSAT book the next chance I got.
One thing’s clear: As 20-somethings, it’s no longer enough to doubt the future and question our career choices. We must now feel bad about feeling bad, worry about our worrying and submit ourselves to meta-angst about our anxieties.
If we were better people, we would stop waffling and get on with it already.
Sure, the article doesn’t outright say any of this. In fact, Henig tries to remain inconclusive about the positive and negative effects of the “changing timetable of adulthood.” But she nevertheless writes from the already-grown-up side of the maturation divide—and it shows. Ingrained in her analysis of Generation Y is the assumption that life ought to follow a linear journey, a narrative that proceeds neatly from childhood through senility, with maybe a midlife crisis pit stop along the way.
The sociologists Henig references also see life as a series of stages that ultimately culminate in adulthood. To them, a certain set of milestones constitutes a normal life, and deviations from the prescribed path count as attempts to avoid the inevitability of maturity.
Call me immature, but I just don’t buy it—especially because the people who do research on this stuff are invariably adults who have already personally succumbed to the grand narrative that they then try to sell everyone else. Do I smell a bias?
I admit that Henig’s defeatist account of life is convincing. It caters to the pre-professional in all of us. It feeds our fear of failure and our penchant, as lifelong students, for deadlines. It would no doubt be easier to give into the teleology of adulthood, to settle into a linear journey with the roadmap clearly marked.
That’s the funny part, though. As a 20-something, I do indeed feel a “sense of possibilities” incompatible with the pragmatism of maturity. Arnett ays emerging adults have not yet confronted the realities of the future: “[t]he dreary, dead-end jobs, the bitter divorces, the disappointing and disrespectful children.” If this is the party Henig is inviting us to, I think I’ll pass. I’m still attached to an idealistic optimism about the future—which I see not as a single path, but as multiple options branching out in all directions in front of me.
So, what’s the matter with 20-somethings? Not much, really, unless you already suppose that there must be something wrong with remaining open to future possibilities. Or unless you’re already an adult, in which case your perspective would necessarily disapprove of indecision of any sort.
If I’m not making sense, here’s a line taken out of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince” that’ll explain why: “Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.”
Shining Li is a Trinity junior. Her column runs every Wednesday.
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