Fallen Into Knowledge

This is an interesting story, both in the traditional sense - the subject matter is interesting (its about people in my age group), and also in another sense - I hadn’t thought of myself as too unusual in this respect. That is, the article describes the life/growing up patterns of those between 21 and 31 as being novel in many ways, but since I am in the midst of those experiences that the article describes (not only I, but also most of the people I spend a significant amount of time with) I hadn’t considered my experiences to be unusual.
Why is it taking longer for us to become fully naturalized adults (married/family/financial independent/home owners)?
1. We are poorer (I, for one have never managed to break the poverty line)
2. School takes longer, is more expensive, and has less impact on our future financial well-being (and, oh, what a combination that makes)
3. Job security is harder to come by.
Those seem to be the tree main reasons that the article posits for this phenomena. Those three things are definitely true, and are certainly factors, but I think that there is something else that the article mentions in a (one) sentence that is more important than the above considerations: We have lost faith. Fulfillment, having a sense of purpose, a vocation (as opposed to a career): This is deemed more important than the finantial well being - or “entering adulthood.” That is to say, I think that my generation is a generation of idealists in a world without clear ideals. We do not believe in previous generation’s version(s) of success - but neither are we sure what our definition of success should be. We have lost faith, and we are determined to find it. And finding it takes time. And finding it looks to many people (including some of the people in the linked article) liike wandering. But we are not - we are dissatisfied with the world that we have grown up into, and so we are trying to shape a new world (or at least a place in the world) that we can be satisfied with/in.
the online version of this article is truncated - I advise you to find the print versionTIME Magazine: Grow Up? Not So Fast
BTW This rambling is officially a rough draft.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 20th, 2005 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Stream of Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.