wicked twixter

Grow Up? Not So Fast

It appears to take young people longer to graduate from college, settle into careers and buy their first homes. What are they waiting for? Who are these permanent adolescents, these twentysomething Peter Pans? And why can't they grow up?

Well, I'd say the instability of the job market has something to do with it. Every time you get a new job, you're lowest on the food chain, and first in line when the company starts laying off people. The days of settling in at one company for 30 years no longer exist because the companies themselves simply won't have it that way. Look in the help wanted ads and see how many employers are hiring managers and directors rather than promoting underlings who are already familiar with the work. If the underlings never leave, it makes it that much harder for a graduate to find entry-level work.

The years from 18 until 25 and even beyond have become a distinct and separate life stage, a strange, transitional never-never land between adolescence and adulthood in which people stall for a few extra years, putting off the iron cage of adult responsibility that constantly threatens to crash down on them. They're betwixt and between. You could call them twixters.
[...]
It's too easy to write them off as overgrown children, [Jeffrey Arnett] argues. Rather, he suggests, they're doing important work to get themselves ready for adulthood. "This is the one time of their lives when they're not responsible for anyone else or to anyone else," Arnett says. "So they have this wonderful freedom to really focus on their own lives and work on becoming the kind of person they want to be." [...] It's not that they don't take adulthood seriously; they take it so seriously, they're spending years carefully choosing the right path into it.

That's a good way of putting it. We're less inclined to just jump out into the world and live on Ramen noodles for the first five years of our adult lives (even if it means we'll miss out on bragging rights later in life as we share our more-suffered-than-thou "when I was young" stories).

I think another part of it may be that the cost of living "comfortably" keeps going up. Now comfort is found in high-speed internet, air conditioning, and daily Starbucks coffee. Generation Y expects to be promoted to supervisor status at work within two years and have gobs of paid time off. I'm not saying these are necessarily bad things, just that it makes it harder (or scarier) to get a start when we expect so much so soon.

Here's another good one:

Recent college graduates owe 85% more in student loans than their counterparts of a decade ago, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. In TIME's poll, 66% of those surveyed owed more than $10,000 when they graduated, and 5% owed more than $100,000. (And this says nothing about the credit-card companies that bombard freshmen with offers for cards that students then cheerfully abuse. Demos, a public-policy group, says credit-card debt for Americans 18 to 24 more than doubled from 1992 to 2001.) The longer it takes to pay off those loans, the longer it takes twixters to achieve the financial independence that's crucial to attaining an adult identity, not to mention the means to get out of their parents' house.

Also, I think this is probably the largest issue:

Annual earnings among men 25 to 34 with full-time jobs dropped 17% from 1971 to 2002, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Timothy Smeeding, a professor of economics at Syracuse University, found that only half of Americans in their mid-20s earn enough to support a family, and in TIME'S poll only half of those ages 18 to 29 consider themselves financially independent.

I really think that's at the heart of the matter. Unlike the baby boomers before us, who were happy to delve into marriage, child-rearing, and home ownership right out of college or high school, the twixters want to be more careful. They realize up front how expensive those things can be, and decide to wait until they have stable jobs before diving in. In that regard, it may be that the baby boomers raised us too well to learn from their mistakes, so we're ever more cautious. Hence, marriage is done out of love and compatibility more than as a means for financial security, raising kids, and having someone to drive you to the doctor when you're sick.

And speaking of learning from baby boomers, we're all too aware of how splitting up into sequestered little '50s sitcom white-picket-fence families can allow close friendships to fade as spouses, children, and home repairs take precedence. I guess more of us want to hold onto those friendships longer, before we move on. Some manage to find a balance between the two lives, while others simply resign to the fact that their children are their new social outlet. So as to avoid mid-life crises, the twixters figure they might as well get the crisis out of the way while they're still young and flexible.

But if twixters are getting married later, they are missing out on some of the social-support networks that come with having families of their own. To make up for it, they have a special gift for friendship. [...] They throw cocktail parties and dinner parties. They hold poker nights. They form book groups. They stay in touch constantly and in real time, through social-networking technologies like cell phones, instant messaging, text messaging and online communities like Friendster.

Amen to that.