Redefining adulthood

Are you on Facebook? Are you or someone you love between the ages of 29-39? If so, it's likely that this week, in between National Coming Out Day stories (yay!) and reports out of Georgia about the possible disenfranchisement of roughly 53,000 mostly Black voters (are you fucking kidding me???), you saw the following Twitter thread:
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Several of my Facebook friends reposted this thread, with their own affirmations about how they related to the sentiments in these posts. Curious, I read the Tweets, and, unsurprisingly, I have some thoughts.

Full disclosure: although the phrase has kind of been wiped from contemporary terminology, I consider myself more of a "Xennial" than a "Millennial." I was born in 1985; I very clearly remember life before the Internet, cell phones, and 800 TV channels which are somehow all showing commercials at the same time. I think this coming-of-age in an analog world is a key line of demarcation between true Millennials and whatever the hell my generation is called, but I'm not here to debate that. I just wanted to be honest that I don't necessarily identify with the terminology that this poster used.

However, I did identify with several other things in these Tweets. Time is both stretched and collapsed. Hell yeah. Somehow it's October, even though yesterday it was March, and yet last week might have been a year or two ago. Is there an age when I can no longer where skinny jeans? I wonder that too, even though I'm wearing skinny jeans right now, and the button digging into my lower belly makes me question why I'm so keen to keep wearing them. It really doesn't help that we're approaching middle age in an (sic) deeply toxic economic system, with a global future very much in doubt, and our parents won't stop fucking us over. Have truer words ever been spoken? 

But even that's not what I really want to write about here. These posts posit that people my age, and the poster's age, feel unmoored and in a state of arrested development because so many of us are not hitting the socially constructed benchmarks that signify adulthood - marriage, parenting, home ownership, job stability. And that may be true. I've had many conversations with many friends about this very topic. If we haven't hit X, Y, and Z benchmarks, can we be considered adults? we ask. Until I buy a house, get married and have a kid, my parents won't really see me as an adult, we lament. But this Twitter thread made me consider a new question - what if we just need new benchmarks? 

After all, who decided on these benchmarks in the first place? Who gets to say what makes someone an adult? People older than we are? I'm not about to demonize an entire generation, but I think we can all agree that the Baby Boomers have screwed the pooch on a lot of issues, so I'm inclined to say "fuck 'em" when they try to define adulthood and decide whether or not that label applies to me. 

Psychology Today offers several definitions of the world "adult," including the one that seems to form the basis for the Tweets: "There is the post-World War II definition: someone who is married, has children, and, if male, supporting his family, and, if female, caring for her family." 

Well, a lot has changed since World War II (hell, a lot has changed since 2015, when that article was written). The American Dream has started to look more and more like the American Nightmare to my generation, largely through no fault of our own, and we have every right to be angry, frustrated, anxious and sad about the present and the future. Those feelings are palpable in these posts, and I can empathize with people whose life goals include being married, having kids, and owning a home, and feel like that is not possible or advisable in our current climate. Feeling like a goal remains constantly out of reach, or letting go of a goal altogether, is a difficult experience. But this post makes me wonder - there are many good reasons why someone would want to be married, have kids, and own a home, but is "feeling validated as an adult" one of them? 

What about those of us who don't have, or ever aspire to have, those things? I know many people (myself included) who are personally not interested in those things for many reasons, one of which is that they never really seemed to make our parents that happy. A job was something to be endured for a paycheck and a pension, the house always needed to be repaired, and kids - sure, the sun shines out of our asses, but we're also a huge sacrifice, emotionally, physically, and financially. Many of us saw these realities of our parents' lives, and said, "No thanks, not for me." So are we automatically excluded from ever claiming our status as adults? I know many people who don't have a steady 40-hour-a-week job, but who work as educators, teaching hundreds of children and adolescents in outreach and after-school programs, or as artists, creating all sorts of amazing original work. I know people who don't have children of their own, but are wonderful nurturers who are the nexus of safe, supportive communities for friends and colleagues. I know people who have dealt with intense trauma, overcome illnesses, lived all over the world, started their own business, earned advanced degrees - are they not adults? 

At what point do we stop waiting for the Adulthood Authority to show up and give us a trophy that says, "Congratulations, you're an adult," and own the fact that the Millennials (if you must call me that) are going to make adulthood look like whatever the hell we want it to look like? 

I'm not here to minimize anyone's feelings or experiences - as I said, these are questions and concerns I've felt myself. But reading this awakened in me the sense that, like any obstacle, we have to find a way through or around this. Isn't part of being adult having the autonomy to define who you are? If we can do it individually, we can do it collectively, and maybe in the process shed some of the existential dread of not living up to the standards of previous generations. If we want to the world to see us adults, we have to start owning our adulthood, in all its messy, contradictory complexity. Stop waiting for someone else to define us. Let's define ourselves.

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