Ever since my fifth birthday, I have been an old man. This is dispositional rather than chronological. It is an orientation, an outlook, a manner of perception. Although age is typically tracked by counting years, by calendar flips, a better measure probably comes from looking at temperament—and it doesn’t take much effort to notice that childishness is a particular sensibility that’s not limited by the calendar, nor is it all that uncommon to recognize that maturity, too, is a sensibility that can be felt regardless of your birthday. And, for me, that latter sensibility came rather early, as I seem to have made a jump, leaving the life of a young boy at around age five to very quickly become an old man.
Nearly all children do at least occasionally yearn to be older, especially when the justification is practical. Fairground age requirements are insufferable when you’re young, as are restrictions on movies and shows, and, even if you figure out how to maneuver past those rules, you still don’t decide your own bedtime. The desire to be older so that you can choose what you do and when you eat and where you go, without ever having to placate the totalitarians—your parents, your teachers—is perfectly natural and probably universal. But my sense is that most children don’t also believe that it is better to be older: the tall people have all the freedom, but the children have all the fun, as goes the timeless paradox. To a child’s mind, this paradox reads like a Greek Myth, where once you finally reach adulthood and can determine your fate, you lose the desire to play, to run, to shout, and you’ll only have boring conversations. So, yes, adults have the freedom to select what’s for dinner, and this seems like a good development, but that freedom somehow extinguishes your spirit for life.
In this longing for the freedom of adulthood you can spot the childhood delight in stories of children without parents, which is almost an archetypical and timeless tale—there’s a shipwreck, some disaster, the youngest are left alone, and the horizon contains adventure. All the benefits of age, with bedtimes and desserts chosen by the shortest among us, with none of the nonsense that usually comes along; it is liberty without any responsibly. Most children adore these stories, but they never quite worked for me. These tales seemed misleading or even inaccurate. The freedom sounded fantastic—break the chains, open the gates!—but, regardless of my age, I didn’t want to be free merely to be surrounded by other children.
This association with childhood as something to avoid and adulthood as where the fun occurred showed up a lot in television. For me the strangest part about television for kids was the behavior of the kids. I didn’t want stories about my world, about schools, or the usual teenage problems. To my eye, there was more adventure and curiosity in adult stories. Rather than appearing tedious, as it is usually portrayed for children, the adult world looked exciting, wondrous, especially when compared with the humdrum obligations that surround the young. Even when I liked the plots written for children, even if I did watch the shows, the child stars seemed immature, their clothes and language seemed too juvenile, the problems seemed prosaic—though I wouldn’t have known that word.
Adult dramas, however, gave me the opposite sensation. It wasn’t really the storylines that revealed the difference, it was the lifestyle, the way in which the adult world emerged from the screen as a place that I wanted to live, even though it was also clear that this world came with more responsibilities and perhaps a whole lot less fun. Perhaps the response is paradoxical—but the adult world looked freewheeling, vibrant, it had the associations, for me, that most people give to childhood.
I could watch a detective show and follow the plot, or I could watch a show about doctors in a hospital and feel the suspense, but I could also, as I did from an early age, notice that these adult characters wore tailored suits and lived in large apartments and went out whenever they felt the urge. A show could have a murder, or some medical intrigue, but those stories weren’t really dramatic or even what I cared about when compared to the thrill of the character who decides, on a whim, to go out at midnight and stroll into a bar, where there’s already a whole collection of thoughtful people, good music, good meals, all of it in the middle of the night, just waiting for the character’s arrival. I didn’t notice at the time that all of these television dramas about work don’t quite contain the necessary amount of work, but what I did notice is that the characters wore stylish clothes and that they acted serious and that they went out to trendy restaurants where they would have conversations that seemed a whole lot more adventurous than anything that happened in a childhood show about a playground.
I remember seeing a young actor on television when I was about thirteen. She was promoting a movie, and she seemed to wallow in her age, looking comfortable, content, not at all attempting to appear older—the interview focused on teenage subjects rather than movie promotion, such as getting a driver’s license and going out with friends. I can recognize now that this young actor was coached spectacularly well to inhabit this carefree, wholesome attitude, and that there were millions of very anxious dollars invested in her short performance of innocent childhood, but I was bewildered at the time. Why wouldn’t she talk like an adult? Why doesn’t she want to be seen as more mature? Don’t those questions about childhood feel condescending? I talked about the interview with a girl in my school the next day and I still remember her thirteen year old response: She’s fine with her age, she doesn’t need to try to be older.
The girl in my class seemed pretty content with her age too. It might have been the trait that allowed her to see what I lacked. Yet my sense is that this contentment with our status as children wasn’t universal, because I can remember times, too, when social status in school was determined from age, or experience, when children were belittled for the lateness of their birthday, and that just might imply a more commonplace desire to be older. Perhaps the unguarded moments of braggadocio on the playground reveal what children really believe about status, with age, knowledge, and even responsibility, as markers for the hierarchy. My orientation toward adulthood, my frustration with the world of children, might have been more extreme, but I think that I can detect a more widespread longing for adulthood in these memories. Now that I’m no longer a child, now that I’ve reached the age of the actors in those adult shows, however, something peculiar seems to have happened: adulthood, for most people, seems to have lost its shine, culturally, romantically, transforming it from a place to reach to a place to avoid.
Although there’s nothing new about disliking the reality of aging, I would argue that the current mentality is different. The cultural connotations of adulthood have shifted, so that the adults don’t want to be adults, and they, rather peculiarly, want to live in a childlike paradise, where responsibilities vanish and where youthful trends are what’s valued. Gaining autonomy was the entire point of those archetypical children stories, but that proposition is apparently a little too scary for the adults who actually have the autonomy. The adult fantasy right now seems to be a yearning for childhood, a yearning to not make decisions, a yearning for an imposed order and structure and even rules, where all the responsibilities have vanished and where someone else decides what’s for dinner—in a mentality that seems a bit like a craving for the supposed comfort of the totalitarian. What’s valued by many adults, today, doesn’t resemble what was once valued, in a way that I can’t help but find peculiar and backwards and even a little sad.
I don’t recall, years ago, the universal pining for youth culture, for the life of someone past childhood to be spent exhibiting the behaviors and language and accouterments of those from later generations. Even if people didn’t particularly want to become older, they didn’t look to later generations to define what’s hip—they didn’t feel the need to share in the music, films, or styles, nor did they consider it an axiom that what’s new must be better. They might enjoy the art, or they might not, but there wasn’t any yearning to be included, and not being included didn’t come with disappointment. But there’s an undertone of neediness today. A sense that a film for children must also be a film for adults. A belief that a musician that teenagers adore must also be a musician that adults adore. I seem to stumble across style guides and music guides and even social guides about teenagers pretty regularly, which are written for thirty or forty or fifty year olds, with the staggeringly-immature notion that the purpose of style at fifty is to seamlessly merge with youth culture.
Alongside these tendencies is the romantic belief in the purity of youth. It is rarely explicit, but there’s an undertone of righteousness, or even authority, in the opinions and cultures of the nascent generation. Now this is obviously ludicrous—the date of your birthday doesn’t make you more likely to be right, or wrong, about anything in particular, but perhaps this is a reasonable belief if you happen to be young. A tad tribal, worth jettisoning, yet understandable. It is, however, a very strange belief for adults to maintain and perpetuate. Besides, if you’re at university or even younger, it is probably worthwhile to be a little frustrated when the adults won’t take you seriously, to see that what you consider important and exciting and hip isn’t accepted by society, and not to perceive your inchoate whims as the principled center of the culture. Working toward rebellion only to have that rebellion mimicked by the larger society must feel, I would imagine, rather tedious. How can you possibly rebel when everyone wants to be you?
There’s nothing wrong with curiosity—I am endlessly curious about the norms of subcultures and about how different people live—but it doesn’t have to trigger longing, to have adults masquerade as children, forever immature and callow, in much the same way that I can take an interest in cultures without necessarily adopting those cultures. If you’re old enough to be laughed at for your style, your speech, and your music, then you should be old enough to not care.
And this almost certainly leads to some unfortunate outcomes. Despite my own childhood yearning for adulthood, I think it is fair to say that life comes with stages, even with thresholds, and none of them are worth skipping past. Some are more enjoyable, or come with more benefits, but in this peculiar ride that’s called life it is probably best to take advantage of each stage. And there’s certainly something sad about people who long for a stage of life that they’ve passed while, not incidentally, managing to completely skip the stage of life that they currently occupy.
I would argue that you can be mature for your age when you’re young, just as you can have a pleasantly youthful sensibility when you’re older. Both states are really about your character rather than the calendar, and neither state implies a yearning. I know people with many decades behind them that manage to uphold a youthful, spry persona, and it appears genuine, to result from a place of contentment rather than desperation. And if there’s a trait that I don’t want to lose, it is that sensibility, that excitement and adventurousness and curiosity about the world. It is, in fact, the spirit that I most associated with adulthood when I was young—however unusual that conclusion might be for most people. But I don’t think age determines this sensibility, nor does it feel like a contradiction to preserve this state as the years pass. It feels like a rather mature sensibility, as it comes with contentment, patience, even focus. To be comfortable in your skin, inhabiting each year without desiring what’s passed, while still cultivating an enthusiastic, insouciant attitude, seems about right.
Great essay! This wasn't a phenomenon that I'd noticed until reading your essay, and I wonder how social media influences this. . .where a section of society is more easily mingling or seeing what the younger generation is doing. And I assume part of this trend toward youthfulness is adults being told over and over again that after a certain age, they're no longer desirable to be catered to or advertised to - yet it's so funny (and this was something I didn't realize til reading your essay) that the older ones would even WANT to be catered to like that - the neediness you wrote about. I like to at least "understand" other generations - have enough cultural info to maybe understand the jokes - but I don't need to be any other age than I am. As a Gen Xer tho, it's pretty interesting to see how many 12 to 22 year olds are dressing like our generation but with a more refined air, so that when we dress the way we always have, suddenly we appear to be trying to be youthful haha! Thanks for always making me think more.