The Matter With Twenty-Somethings

This feels familiar. . .

There is such a thing as the blindly uncritical self. It is immune to irony and reflection. It refuses to change, even in order to adapt. The blindly uncritical self projects its own anxieties out on the rest of the world and then blames the world for their existence. The blindly uncritical self believes its values are the only real values; that its view is the only possible view; that its feelings are the only valid feelings. It takes many forms, like Lucifer. Needless to say, I hate the blindly uncritical self, and it is on full display in this New York Times Magazine article entitled, “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” Robin Henig tries to work out what is wrong with all of us. It's about time someone finally got around to it!

In the first part of the article, comedic media representations of people in their twenties are [mis]taken to be evidence of our actual society and five reasonably arbitrary events — “completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child” — are marked as the definition of “adulthood,” itself a malleable social construction. People in their twenties are compared to a recording device, nonsensically, and are excoriated for not achieving these arbitrary goals as quickly as (you may have guessed this) the Baby Boomers did.

Greatest Generation? No.

Clearly if we have re-aligned our priorities, something is wrong with us. If the Baby Boomers — when in this mode, surely the culture's most blindly uncritical self — scheduled their lives according to a certain plan, then this is the only right way to live one's life. Any deviation is deviant. Any new plan is an entirely new development. And foremost in that schedule, according to Henig: we must be married; we must produce grandchildren. If we don't couple and copulate quickly, society will collapse. I guess. She's actually not really clear on that point.

I can say with some assurance that we'd all like to be financially independent and whatnot, but that seems unlikely. Thanks, mom and dad!

Slate Magazine has some reasonable responses to the article. (Except the governmental policy question spurred by the author's daughter, who should really have been disqualified from the discussion.) Dan Check writes, “This felt like an article by boomers, for boomers.” But, of course, it's their world. We just live in it. Quite literally. The world that exists is emphatically not the product of people in their twenties — this world is the product of decades of decisions by the generation who now bemoans their consequences, and seems to blame everyone but themselves.

Thank goodness — thank goodness! — one true adult finally had the good sense to turn a careful eye toward . . . criticizing their children.

Wow. Not avoiding a painful truth at all. Not in the slightest.

Of course material and societal changes affect the rhythms of one's life, as well as definitions of adulthood. That does not make these changes negative. We are not “lost.” Young people today are not perfect, but they are neither more nor less noble than any other generation. Blindly mimicking the course our parents took will not serve us well for a future that absolutely will not resemble the lives of the Baby Boomer generation.

Wtf?

As a sidebar: I am fairly appalled that Teach for America is held up in the beginning of this essay as a wrong turn or some avoidance of commitment. Because teaching in poor communities is a waste of time? Because working to change America for the better isn't “adult” enough? There are all these overgrown children making hundreds of thousands of dollars by playing football with the stock market — and Henig picks on Teach for America. Not because of the organization's flaws, but because those people aren't home popping out babies. Whose priorities are out of whack here?