Stumbling upon a lengthy article via a friend entitled "What is it About 20-Somethings?" by Robin Marantz Henig from the New York Time Magazine gave me a little bit of fresh perspective. I didn't need to scroll through the entire ten pages to get the gist of it. Take from it what you will, but I found these couple of paragraphs sum it up quite nicely:
"We’re in the thick of what one sociologist calls “the changing timetable for adulthood.” Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones. Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so. A Canadian study reported that a typical 30-year-old in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones as a 25-year-old in the early ’70s.
The whole idea of milestones, of course, is something of an anachronism; it implies a lockstep march toward adulthood that is rare these days. Kids don’t shuffle along in unison on the road to maturity. They slouch toward adulthood at an uneven, highly individual pace. Some never achieve all five milestones, including those who are single or childless by choice, or unable to marry even if they wanted to because they’re gay. Others reach the milestones completely out of order, advancing professionally before committing to a monogamous relationship, having children young and marrying later, leaving school to go to work and returning to school long after becoming financially secure.
Even if some traditional milestones are never reached, one thing is clear: Getting to what we would generally call adulthood is happening later than ever. But why? That’s the subject of lively debate among policy makers and academics. To some, what we’re seeing is a transient epiphenomenon, the byproduct of cultural and economic forces. To others, the longer road to adulthood signifies something deep, durable and maybe better-suited to our neurological hard-wiring. What we’re seeing, they insist, is the dawning of a new life stage — a stage that all of us need to adjust to."
The tone of the article is undoubtedly coming from an author in an age range greater than the "20-somethings" that she is referring to so discouragingly. It is not overt disapproval that she is projecting, but it is apparent that she possesses some sort of disdain, or maybe it is something as simple as coming from a place of parental anxiety for her kids. Granted, I know absolutely nothing about the author, aside from this article, but I'm trying to prove a point. It could be that generations ahead of my own have an inherent sense of tradition flowing through their veins, and are uncomfortable with the drastically different lifestyle of the average "20-something," but I personally find this to be untrue, at least with the 30- , 40-, and 50-somethings that I have encountered throughout my 20 years of chillin' on this planet. The natural tendency of generations is to evolve, to possess alternative perspectives from previous generations, to make their own mark; the decades of the 1900s in the US have make this trend undeniably clear. I like to think that the natural tendency of human nature is simply the cause of generational disdain, also known as the "mere-exposure effect"(Zajonc 1968): "people most like what is familiar. Although people may value creativity because it will bring progress, they are often uncomfortable with it, and hence may initially react negatively to creative work"(Sternberg and Lubart 1995). In this sense, we, as 20-somethings, are bringing new and progressive "creative work" to the table, and it would only be normal to fear any sort of deviation from the norm. Doing the same things over and over again gives us, as rational human beings, a sense of comfort, and any sort of change from that pattern can seem scary. This is how history is written my friends, and we are all a part of it right now, at this very moment.
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