The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. 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.
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The more profound question behind the scholarly intrigue is the one that really captivates parents: whether the prolongation of this unsettled time of life is a good thing or a bad thing. With life spans stretching into the ninth decade, is it better for young people to experiment in their 20s before making choices they’ll have to live with for more than half a century? Or is adulthood now so malleable, with marriage and employment options constantly being reassessed, that young people would be better off just getting started on something, or else they’ll never catch up, consigned to remain always a few steps behind the early bloomers? Is emerging adulthood a rich and varied period for self-discovery, as Arnett says it is? Or is it just another term for self-indulgence?
Yes. It is self-indulgence. It is so totally self-indulgent for one to move from job to job because this economy is and has been for the past 20 years not just in the toilet but halfway into the septic tank and NO ONE WILL HIRE YOU. It is self-indulgent not to marry the first person who can stand being near you, and stick with that marriage through years of misery and punishment. It is self-indulgent to not have ten kids right away. It is self-indulgent to actually figure out what you want instead of letting yourself get plowed under and then make sitcoms about how much it sucks to have a house in the suburbs.
Maybe I just spend too much of my time with kids who are busting their asses to find jobs, who don’t WANT to move back in with their parents and are really upset at having to do so, who would love nothing better than to have a great house and someone they love desperately. Maybe I spend too much of my time around twentysomethings who work harder on their laziest days than I work on my toughest, who love what they do and want to make money at it, who are doing their best in a world that, as usual, tells them they’re callow and stupid and don’t have anything of value to offer. I mean, I’m sure we all know lazy assholes, but I personally have far, far more stories about the people who would cut off their right arm for a chance at the job you say they’re too lazy to do.
This story is such bullshit, on so many levels. First of all, this subset of twentysomethings is being judged for moving back in with their parents after college, which means we’re looking at kids who have been to college. We’re looking at kids who have parents whose homes they can move back into. And I don’t know but somewhere along the line here we forgot that not everybody has those options, and shaming all the kids for the ennui of some of the writer’s friends’ privileged brats seems kind of reductive and silly.
Hell, even if the brats are privileged, shaming anybody for getting by however they’re getting by seems kind of silly these days. The amount of worry expended over whether kids are spending too much time at home or not getting married faster seems to be the real self-indulgence, in the face of, you know, entire countries drowning and the whole state of Michigan getting donated to the Salvation Army. It just seems ridiculous, this story, not on the part of the sociologists who are studying it but on the part of the journalists who take a few young people and make a crisis out of their lives.
Maybe I’m just getting old but so long as they’re not serial killers, they’re not MY kids, who the hell cares what they’re doing? I realize “nothing’s on fire and nobody’s in prison” is a pretty poor standard for a good day, but really. Taking it upon ourselves to decide when others’ adulthood begins? Everybody, take a deep breath, put down the Trend Story Topic Wheel or whatever the fuck you’re using to develop these ideas, and repeat after me: WE ARE ALL GOING TO BE OKAY.
We might be getting married later, or earlier, or never, but we are going to be okay. We might have six jobs instead of one, but we are going to be okay. We might ride our bikes to work and choose to live in cracker boxes next to crackheads, or on commune farms in the country, instead of in suburbs two blocks from our parents, but we are going to be okay. All this freaking out over various things kids today have or don’t have or can or can’t do is so much wasted energy. We’re fine. The next generation is fine. I mean, “fine” in the sense that they’re totally screwed, but that has nothing to do with how many kids are moving back in with their parents and everything to do with the world their parents built and brought them into. They’ll do the best they can with what they’re given, same as everybody always has.
That might not be comforting to people who can only feel successful as adults if they’re shaming other people for having shitty adolescent lives, but it’s true, nonetheless. We will figure this out and it will be all right. Or, alternately, we won’t, and we’ll just go on the way everybody goes on, muddling through as best we can.
A.