20-somethings

Found this article interesting. Thought you guys might offer some perspective on the subject of your 20s as a stage in life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?_r=2&hpw=&pagewanted=all

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Arnett would like to see us choose a middle course. “To be a young American today is to experience both excitement and uncertainty, wide-open possibility and confusion, new freedoms and new fears,” he writes in “Emerging Adulthood.” During the timeout they are granted from nonstop, often tedious and dispiriting responsibilities, “emerging adults develop skills for daily living, gain a better understanding of who they are and what they want from life and begin to build a foundation for their adult lives.”

longer, healthier lifespan + many divorced and often miserable parents and broken homes + bad economy = wait longer to buy homes, have kids, get "real" job. i would like to think maybe people are just less naive than they used to be in regards to what sort of lifestyle is supposed to make them feel ~fulfilled in life~. also i think people might be spending more time self-consciously examining their own role in shaping their adult identity and fretting over what they may become, though this might have been happening all along and people just gave into social pressures to go ahead and settle down more readily in the past. the article itself could be seen as a symptom of this sort of modern/post-modern self-consciousness.

i just skimmed it, so maybe they sort of address a lot of these things.

this article has gotten a lot of flak for putting forth an interpretation of adulthood that the author admits is old-fashioned and parochial, and then going ahead and using it anyway as the premise for the whole concept of the piece.

going a little further, i think our generation's culture right now points to less concrete notions of identity and less concrete ideas of what a relationship with another person should be like. those are both big blows to the old-fashioned concept of adulthood.

my sister did it the old school way, now she has a kid and way more responsibility, a house with a huge mortgage and no time to enjoy her life with her husband, their baby in no ways takes away from them enjoying life and actually enhances it, it just makes it much more financially difficult and puts a strain on everything else. so just another example of the old fashion way of growing up is not actually growing up at all , just forcing yourself to fit a mold or place in life when you very well may not be ready for it.

One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.

wow!

Karl wrote:i would like to think maybe people are just less naive than they used to be in regards to what sort of lifestyle is supposed to make them feel ~fulfilled in life~. also i think people might be spending more time self-consciously examining their own role in shaping their adult identity and fretting over what they may become, though this might have been happening all along and people just gave into social pressures to go ahead and settle down more readily in the past.

something attributable to this, maybe, is the (very welcome, imo) emergence of happiness studies (this example being the first I'd heard of), in which psychologists posit that a ton of what we're traditionally told will make us happier is actually "refrigerator-light happiness": when someone asks and you look, its "sure, I enjoy my marriage," "I enjoy having kids," but that's only you think about it - whenever you're not actively examining it, its almost definitely one's biggest source of stress.

which is only to argue that when humans helplessly find themselves valuing very different things than their ancestors, they're going to have to re-calibrate relationships and child-rearing and the rest of that stuff, lest they be miserable.