Are we really trapped in eternal adolescence? What is maturity supposed to look like, anyway?
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Version 0 of 1. When my siblings and I were very young and our parents were heading out of an evening, they would soften the blow of temporary abandonment by explaining that they had to go to a boring meeting. Being gullible, we absorbed the curious idea that grown-ups were regularly obliged to attend dull night-time meetings. Oh well, we reasoned: adulthood sucks. We were not alone in this conclusion: every couple of years there’s another gloomy announcement that adulthood is so grim it’s being abandoned in favour of an eternal adolescence. Recently, film critic AO Scott proclaimed the death of adulthood in American culture, suggesting that “nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore”. Scott wrote: To be an American adult has always been to be a symbolic figure in someone else’s coming-of-age story … We can now avoid this fate. The elevation of every individual’s inarguable likes and dislikes over formal critical discourse, the unassailable ascendancy of the fan, has made children of us all. Scott observed that to oppose “the juvenile pleasures of empowered cultural consumers is to assume … the role of scold, snob or curmudgeon”, but didn’t really explore the underlying point: capitalism makes consumers of us all, in the cultural realm as in other areas of life. If adults are people who are not being assiduously marketed to, having their desires expertly mapped, manipulated and catered for, good luck finding any. Adolescence is more than fandom and frivolity; as Alison Croggon wrote recently in response to a salvo in the ongoing Young Adult fiction wars, it’s “complex, dangerous, passionate, contradictory, fierce, full of a desire for justice”. Youth is also a state in which many are currently feeling trapped in the wake of the global financial crisis. Writer Sady Doyle argues: “My generation didn’t choose childhood. Childhood chose us, or rather, it refused to let us go”. In particular, Doyle posits that for women, “the loss of adulthood can feel catastrophic”, for “the autonomy we need is harder than ever to attain”. Closer to home, the Abbott government’s much-loathed budget is set to be so harsh on students and those under 30 that an ABC explainer simply listed “young people” among its “losers”. The question of what maturity ought to look like is a difficult one, with answers varying between cultures. In the west, adulthood is associated with the same promises as capitalism itself: choice and freedom. The ability to stay up all night and determine your own chocolate intake without parental oversight is not to be sneezed at, but our autonomy can be illusory. Writing of inequality in modern Britain, Owen Jones observes “only a sociopath would design such a society from scratch”. Equally, you’d have to be something of a masochist to deliberately sketch out an adulthood that involves working like the clappers for around half a century, then collapsing into obsolescence. The options adulthood confers are also heavily influenced by class, power, and privilege. Notions of maturity carry political weight, for youth is often associated with the left and adulthood with the right: consider the old cliché that if you’re not a socialist at 20 you lack a heart, while if you’re still one at 40 you have no brain. Apparently leftwing ideals are something that, like dystopian fiction, you’re meant to grow out of. Two can play at this game, of course, and it’s tempting to point out the adolescent tendencies in libertarianism’s focus on a narrowly conceived vision of freedom. (Why should I pay taxes or clean my room, dammit?) No political persuasion can really claim to be “adult”, and to deride our opponents as childish is unlikely to get us very far. If we can apply the concept of adulthood to politics, it’s worth remembering that care - something which truly makes us human, let alone adult - is devalued in our society. The lack of status accorded to care work is particularly odd given its necessity: we all experience vulnerability during our lifetimes (in our treasurer’s parlance, there is no one who will always lift and never lean). The capitalist ideal of an eternally unencumbered, endlessly consuming individual does not exist in reality; growing up simply can’t give us that sort of freedom. My six year old self was only partly right. Adulthood does suck, occasionally, but there’s more to it. In our circular debates about age and wisdom, one thing is certain: there’s a great deal more going on than grown-ups watching cartoons. |