In a March 10th opinion piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, history professor Gary Cross laments the expansion of perennial adolescence, of “the sweet spot of youth,” wherein personal freedom mixes with peer-group support to create comfort too good to leave.
He refers to historical trends in marriage, working life and childrearing to explain the popularity of what I will call middle adulthood. Economic pressures and the need to differentiate from previous generations drive the video-game culture and drive up the age at which adults commit to relationships, bear children or establish a career.
While Gary Cross suggests that we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath water in condemning prolonged adolescence, he does warn that self-enclosed focus on youth causes us to ignore the connection to the generations of the past, losing “intergenerationality,” which “creates a more shallow culture for all of us.”
There is a superficiality to our culture. However, it isn’t clear that in the 50s, when people married “on time,” and settled early, young adults were any more in tune with the plight of their parents or with aging than they are today. They were just otherwise engaged than middle adults are today. They worked manufacturing or sales jobs, within the government or military or in business. They differentiated their own youth from the past times of their parents by buying appliances, pre-cooked food and plastic containers.
It is a human predisposition to be unable to connect with people otherwise situated than yourself. Especially in time. For a working 60 year old, imagining that he or she will one day be retired and 80 is slightly unsettling and difficult to connect to. So it is for all of us all across the age spectrum.
So, while I support the article’s observations as valid, I’m not sure that the deleterious effects of today’s youthification are unique to the subcultures present today.
I think the matter is more homogenous than that.
I think that what people seek is all the same. Children and adults want comfort, security, engagement and contact with others. For kids, school provides work, engagement and encouragement. Home provides security and care. For adults, jobs provide both: something to do and an income with which to secure one’s needs.
When it used to be that workers found employment and stuck with it for the majority of their working life, this position as their parent. The company and its rules were the adult’s new home the way his parents’ house had been his first.
As the years past the golden age of this kind of employment waned, and as people found out that companies had much less loyalty toward workers than parents had toward children, the abandon with which adults committed to a job in the manner they had committed to their parents’ home as children also broke apart.
The loss of the American employment fidelity was the permanent break up of the American adult home.
Once employees realized that the corporations they were subliminally treating as parents did not have the commitment to their health and wellbeing that they had also subliminally expected, a sort of random scattering began. Workers from every level of professionalism scattering like seeds in the wind, looking for the better current, the warmer climate, the richer soil. Looking, essentially, for the corporation they thought existed. Sometimes, they build their own secure environment. Freelancing works by putting a person within a community of professionals who support and employ each other. Agents, clients, writers, consultants, editors, contractors.
Coupling the infidelity of the long-term employer with the random success of scattered professionals, a general feeling arose of limitless possibilities. Of being able to find the comforts of security of success on one’s own terms. The self as a corporation. Education and training come in handy here, but even people with limited erudition can, through effort and ingenuity, generate their own supportive soil.
In this way, the rubric of the new professionalism is no different than the morays of the past: work hard and focus and you will be rewarded. But the risks inherent in the new model are greater, and the delayed adulthood so evident today is a way to mitigate this risk. No home? No child? No liability. A floating seed looking for the perfect soil cannot float if dragging lots of weight.
I understand that Gary Cross is calling into question the nature of this floating period, not its existence. He is asking why it has lengthened. He wants to know what people are doing en route. He thinks that, in the transition from parents’ soil to their own perfect clime’, adults are shutting their eyes to the rich heritage of their past, to the warm of their culture and the context of time.
Maybe they are, but, once it was clear that companies won’t care for employees the way parents care for children, the stakes of survival were heightened and the possibilities of perfectionism joined the state of uncertainty in a mix that leads to what may be characterized as a primordial soup of professional development: many different molecules swimming around in a salty sea. The possibility of a perfect chemical bond luring enticingly nearby while the likelihood of dismal obscurity rivals its glory.
With so much open chance around, the agents interested in grounding in the middle decrease. While still a majority in number, working adults who settle into home and marriage early are fewer today than in the past because the essential elements all people need have been de-certified. Life programs no longer standard in transition between first home and second give youth passing through adulthood more steps to go through than one or two graduations and a walk to the office to see your boss’s boss.
In the search for security, engagement and connection, children drift into a world today that is devoid of companies which promise them what their parents did. They are asked to look within themselves for the values that will build solidity, that will build a strong career and a secure social life. And in being asked to look within, we are asking that they build as they go. From scratch and with all the benefit of our engrossed media consumption. They have a microscope, it is true. And a telescope and data. They have what they need. But it still takes time. So let’s watch them and applaud as necessary.
