The cult of youth cheats young and old alike. Let's reclaim adulthood
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Version 0 of 1. “Meet the Adults who Love to Color,” trilled a headline in New York magazine the other day, about the growing trend for coloring books among grown-ups – and it’s only with the greatest trepidation that I venture to suggest there’s anything even slightly eyebrow-raising about that. There are few surer ways to trigger the outrage of the internet, it seems, than to imply that there’s something questionable about adults engaging in activities originally intended for kids. When the critic Ruth Graham wrote an essay in Slate last year, Against Y.A., arguing that books written for minors shouldn’t dominate the reading lives of thirty-somethings, she received a fusillade of indignation so loud you’d think she’d called for the public execution of every adult purchaser of The Fault In Our Stars. The interesting thing here isn’t so much that we live in an era in which comic-book movies and bromances are Hollywood’s artistic and commercial heart, or where adults spend much time and money perfecting costumes resembling their favorite fictional characters. It’s that treating all this with anything other than earnest reverence is to cause such grave offence, to violate a vigorously defended social norm. When emotions run this high, it’s a sure sign something important is at stake. But what? It ought to go without saying that everybody should be free to read whatever they want, dress up however they want and engage in whatever artistic pursuits they want: there’s nothing to be gained from adding to the amount of shame in the world. Yet in her fascinating book Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age, just published in the US, the philosopher Susan Neiman makes the case that our youth-fixated society is a symptom of something worth worrying about: we’ve defined growing up as nothing but a question of decline. “Being grown-up,” she writes, “is widely considered to be a matter of renouncing your hopes and dreams, accepting the limits of the reality you are given, and resigning yourself to a life that will be less adventurous, worthwhile and significant than you had supposed when you began it.” We’ve created a world in which growing up – let alone growing elderly – is something nobody would reasonably choose. Who can really be blamed for choosing the exhilarating escapes of childhood fantasy instead? And when we’re not celebrating childhood, Neiman notes, we’re busy celebrating young adulthood, ceaselessly pressing upon 16-to-26-year-olds the message that these are the best years of their lives. Evolutionary biologists may argue there’s a reason why advertising, say, focuses on images of women of reproductive age and men at their physical peak. But “your goal is not to maximize reproduction, whatever may be said of your genes” and evolutionary arguments can’t explain our enormous societal emphasis on youthfulness, which has been far from a cultural universal, across cultures or history. It’s not even true that you’re happier in your twenties: there’s remarkably consistent evidence that most people, at that age, are on the downward slope of the “happiness U-bend”, with higher satisfaction to come. By describing what is usually the hardest time of one’s life as the best one, we make the time harder for those who are going through it. (If I’m torn and frightened now, what can I expect of the times in my life that, they tell me, will only get worse?) And that is the point. By describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect – and demand – very little from it. A culture always looking backward, toward the joys of a vanishing youth, cheats everyone: depending on your age, the “best years” are either an increasingly distant memory, or they will be, all too soon. In a culture that celebrates growing up, by contrast, everybody has them to look forward to – unless they’re already enjoying them. There’s an important case to be made for social and economic reforms to make aging a more appetizing prospect. But Neiman’s focus is on the inner life – on how each of us might get better at growing up – and she bases her prescription, improbably enough, on the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s famously impenetrable work The Critique of Pure Reason. Kant, she concedes, is a pretty unpromising model for facing up to the messy complexities of adulthood: he never married, never traveled more than 40 miles outside Königsberg in Prussia, and was so hidebound by routine that neighbors reportedly set their clocks by the regularity of his afternoon walk. Still, maturity, in this telling, is above all a matter of courage. As children, we harbor ideals for how the world and our lives could be; as adults, we gain bitter experience of how often reality falls short. Growing up means refusing to scurry back into childhood’s unsullied ideals – yet also declining to give in to cynical resignation. It’s about tolerating the tension between how things are and how they should be, while still getting out of bed in the morning. To be a good citizen, a good parent, a good political activist – a good grown-up – may require nothing less. There’s something subversive about all this, as Kant himself recognized, since an infantilized population mesmerized by “a wealth of small decisions” – what brand of washing-machine to buy? – is much easier for governments and corporations to control. “The picture of growing up as inevitable decline is supported by a web of interests that operate against our coming of age,” Neiman writes. “The tragedy is the way that we constantly collude in it.” Refusing to grow up may be a form of rebellion. But really growing up could be a revolution. |