Delayed Adolescence: Where do we go from here?

If working at the local coffee shop, living with multiple roommates, flip-flops and board shorts, long vacations and short work hours, non committal relationships and a fluidity of partners consist of your anticipated lifestyle for the next 5-10 years; you are a pragmatic ‘twixter’ believe it or not.

‘Millennial's’, ‘emerging adults’ “twixters” among others are terms being used analogous to delayed adolescents. These individuals, typically within the ages of 18 to 25 and in college, are characterized by short term goals, near sighted living, being in vogue with every wind of fashion, technologically savvy and up to speed on celebrity news and when the new race car or other will be released, to mention a few. It’s clear, even from the shy list of ‘twixter’ qualities, that these, who are the ‘adults’ of tomorrow are in no way, shape or form ready for the weight of responsibility that awaits them. For some the extent of their concern is their next videogame purchase, the newest fashion line, spending money on one eBay® purchase after another and the list goes one.

The tendency to a delayed maturity and procrastinated responsibility has been manifest in our generation more than any before us. In an article by the communications department at The University of Pennsylvania, young men during the first half of the 20th century, attained the ability to support a family by age of 20, and women were married with children before age 30 but this has declined significantly with more single men and women and parents as well. Other studies show an appreciable delay in marriages and child bearing among these individuals. This is coupled with an equal increase in job turn over numbers, premarital sex, and returning home after graduating college. How did our society get here?

Perhaps it’s the degeneration of the family unit along with its virtues. It is estimated that the majority of families even here in LA are increasingly being led by single parents, not to mention the high divorce rates even among the religious. The family was once what people worked toward and once realised, became what they worked to maintain. This condition then naturally leaves the society with poor role models to learn from and follow.

How about the expectations of the culture? As my economics professor correctly pointed, a society’s integrity can always be told by its dependence on accountability. The media inundates the so exposed mind with tickling news, commercials on self improvement and even when serious issues are aired they are often cartoonized and presented as unserious. The countless sitcoms and shows about young slap-stick, promiscuous and even irresponsible but seemingly happy professionals, only escalate the plague.

With the nippy access to the internet and inevitably the world this generation enjoys, it’s only ironic that they happen to be the most naive and unconscious of both local and global events. A lacking exposure to real needs and the hard work associated with meeting them, has made this generation comfortable with ignorance. A 60minutes presentation on delayed adulthood revealed that the problem came with a big emphasis in homes during the ‘twixter’s’ growing years, on individual worth in relation to self and not society. This consequently yielded self absorbed and as one man put it, ‘Narcissistic praise hounds.’

To develop this further, individualism is by far one of the biggest players in this game. From some of the mundane events of life such as birthdays, holidays, vacations, clothing style, to the more important issues of health, schooling, choice of spouse even choice of career, we see an even kilted emphasis on me, myself and I. We are taught from early on that we have an opinion and that it matters even more than what is known to be true. It is attitudes like this that breed societies like the Millennials with no concern for anyone or thing but themselves.

To spare the dead horse, I conclude by asking whether we led ourselves blindly over this cliff or if it is just a shift in a society’s paradigms. Either way it’s conceivable that we poorly projected the consequences of our actions and now are turning in on us. Regardless of how we arrived here, the more imperative question is where do we go from here?