Adulthood (3)

In 2005, the year I graduated college, Time Magazine published an article by Lev Grossman about people my age and a few years older. The headline and subhead ran:

Grow Up? Not So Fast
Meet the Twixters. They're not kids anymore, but they're not adults either. Why a new breed of young people won't — or can't — settle down

This was the first of a wave of such articles discussing the strange Peter-Panish quality of my generation. (Do not ask me for other examples, I don’t remember any. Maybe I imagined them, maybe there were dozens.)

These articles irritated and unsettled me, but this was clearly not because the question they were asking was a bad one. There was something weird going on with my generation. We all knew it. We wandered the streets of large coastal cities like hungry wraiths looking for something solid to cling to. We wallowed in nostalgia for the pop-culture of our childhoods, which was of course a proxy for something else—a sense of security, maybe, but not material security—that we remembered having in our childhoods. Clearly, a good deal of what these articles were saying about us was, in some straightforward sense, accurate. This was why they were unsettling. But why then were they so irritating?

The clearest answer I can give to this question, and it is not a very clear one, is that these articles were like think-pieces written by a murderer, asking what is wrong with her hand that it keeps picking up blunt objects and banging them against round, hard things until those things crack open and their wet insides spill out. They are like think-pieces written by a drunk asking what is the matter with his belly that it keeps being full of alcohol. My point is not that the solution is obvious: an alcoholic may well ask himself why he keeps drinking, and the answer may be deep and complex; same with the murderer. My point is that (a) the problem is not isolated to the place where it is immediately manifest; and (b) it is perfectly clear why the writer is so intent on misunderstanding the situation. It is, after all, much more appealing to prod a sickly organ than to explore the dire state of the whole organism.

More on this theme >>