Phases of Life

Does my depiction of young adulthood at the end of the last crumb seem unkind—even bitter? Does my depiction of people with children seem too rosy? They do to me.

 

We always judge most harshly the phase of life that we most recently left behind. We see its illusions and contradictions clearly, for we have lately escaped from them, and we have not had time to forgive ourselves for those follies. Whereas the phase we are now in is always partly a mystery to us. (And maybe this is why we are still in it: could we see it all clearly, its illusions and contradictions, maybe we would transcend them and enter a new phase.)

 

So let me try to take a fairer look at the comparison I made at the end of the last crumb.

 

I accused young adults of an “unconscious self-involvement,” whereas parents, I said, “have bound themselves to and taken responsibility for others; …they have some experience … in putting other people’s immediate desires ahead of their own.” Now parents clearly have done all that—but only for a very select group of people very near to them. And this selfless caring for immediate family, and especially for children, usually entails a diminished regard for the needs of the rest of the world. Often, in fact, parents’ denial of their own desires, the fact they are working not for themselves but for another, becomes justification for a ruthlessly competitive promotion of their children’s interests. So parenthood (and often marriage) can mean both an expansion of one’s interests within the narrow realm of the nuclear family, and also a contraction of those interests away from the wider world. The young adult, by comparison, is more automatically self-interested and at the same time is more concerned for, has more of a feeling of kinship to, the whole world.

 

I do not yet have children, but four years ago when I got married I felt myself shifting into a new phase of life, in which my concerns, my thoughts and my dreams were all differently configured. The Sanskrit term for this phase is grhastha, which is usually translated as householder. The question for us householders will be whether the contraction or the expansion of interests will be the dominant force in us: whether the family becomes really just an extension of the self, so that we are more selfish and greedy than ever, only with a three- or four- or five-headed self, all the hungrier because it is trying to stave off the loneliness of its egoistic seclusion; or whether the care of the family teaches us to care for others, and we learn from the process of these new relationships, so much more inescapable and deep than the relationships of our youth, to see others a little better and to look at ourselves a little less. Either outcome is possible for each of us.

 

For the young adult (or, say, the youth), the question is again which will become the dominant force in her: the capacity (which arises from her free-floating unattachment) for a sense of obligation to the whole world, even and especially towards people and creatures very unlike herself, or the unconscious self-involvement, which is equally an effect of unattachment and freedom. This question is closely connected to another. The young adult (if he has the leisure to enjoy—or shall we say wallow in—his young adulthood and not immediately have strict material needs pressed upon him, and especially if he has that dubious privilege that gives a young person too many options and not enough needs) is plagued by a feeling that his life has no solidity, that he is a kind of wraith floating lonely and rootless in the anonymous crowd of the modern city; he longs for reality, for genuine experience, for recognition, companionship, solidity, for something that does not feel artificial and false. The question is to what will this painful ache and longing lead him: to empty pleasure- and thrill-seeking; or to an ardent but confused rebellion that is half posturing and play-acting and half impossible hopes; or to participation in a communal life that can channel his abundant energy towards meaningful ends?

 

 

The way in which all these questions arise, and the conditions of their answers, have to do with the isolation of these age-groups within themselves—i.e. age segregation. It is a peculiarity of our culture that people socialize largely with people around their own age. And the relations they have with people in other phases of life (parents, teachers, bosses, etc.) are structured so as to discourage them from taking these older people into their confidence or trusting them to offer a useful perspective on their own condition. Younger people feel sure that older ones have nothing to teach them, and older people often confirm this by speaking in a manner that wards off confidences and shows a lack of sympathy with the conditions of the younger person’s life. (In fact, wasn’t this just how I was speaking at the end of the last crumb?) 

 

Given that phases of life have characteristic challenges (exploring sexuality, finding a job, navigating romantic relationships, raising children, etc.), it seems on the surface silly that people should be unable to make any use of the experiences of those who have already been through the challenges they’re now in. This odd situation depends on the idea (part myth, part reality) that the world is changing so rapidly that sexuality and work and courtship and child-rearing are all completely different now from what they were half a generation ago. It depends on other ideas as well, and these ideas are in turn generated and encouraged by the structure of our social relations, especially by the segregation of age groups. The ideas enforce the structure and the structure encourages the ideas.

 

I do not profess to understand the whole system of causes and effects, but I will mention one other that seems to me important. What I called the “characteristic challenges” of each phase of life are things about which we are very vulnerable and guarded. This is not only because many of them are on explicitly intimate topics (sexuality, romance) but also because the very fact that they are central challenges of the age we’re in means that our pride and sense of self are wrapped up in them. So an encounter where the younger person is able to speak openly about such topics and listen to advice about them will necessarily be an intimate one—and intimacy across age groups is something that our culture is deeply suspicious of. (In a strange way, this is even the case between parents and children. Think of the conflicts that arise when parents try to give their adult children advice about childrearing. Or picture parents trying to give their kid some perspective on middle-school social relations; note how irrelevant the parent’s advice seems to the kid; and yet, think how much the parent actually does know about what the kid’s going through. In this second case, we may feel that the distance is necessary, that parents just are not the right people to give guidance on this issue; but this only highlights the need for other kinds of relationships across age groups.)

 

There are many bad effects of this segregation of age groups. It leaves young people turning to peers for information about things none of them understands (picture middle-school boys giving each other advice about hooking up with girls). It dissolves tradition and custom. It creates a strange feeling of disconnection from the past, of existing in a frightening immediate present, like a precipice overlooking the abyss of the future. And, of course, it deprives people of perspective on the challenges they’re in and practical wisdom on how to navigate them. 

 

What “perspective on the challenges they’re in” means is not only the active statements of older people who have gone through those challenges and can see them from without but also (what would probably be the much more effective medicine) direct observation and participation in the work and difficulties of later phases of life, in which the challenges that loom so large in this our current phase have been left behind and shown themselves as partly illusory. Thus, for example, the parent of school-aged children, coming into close contact with the lives of older people whose children are already in their mid or late 20s, might observe that who did the best in school and who went to the best college are not of such immense and final importance. But lacking this close observation, they imagine these questions as immense; they are consumed by them. 

 

So a group or network of groups experimenting with forms of life must expand beyond whatever age group it begins with. If it begins with a group of parents in their 30s and early 40s, it must find ways to make itself useful to people both older and younger, to undertake experiments they can participate in or foment them to undertake experiments of their own. I have already suggested some ways in which this might happen.