The Lexwerks

Lifestage: Arrested Development

The New York Times is reporting on a piece in the New York Times, talking about 20-somethings. The Last Psychiatrist has already discussed the second article rather successfully, and followed up on, so I won’t be spending much time on it here except as a preface to the NYT’s ongoing obession with the subject (which could be re-cast as “Is your news in the news? Read all about it on page A3!”).

In case you’ve not seen it, the core article (which is part of a trend, but iconic enough to stand in for the trend in its entirety) is a hand-wringingly awful piece of schtick about a 24-year-old who has graduated from college (subsidized by grandparents) and moved back in with his parents and can’t seem to find a job, not counting the $40k/yr job he turned down, no matter how hard he looks on the internet in the mornings. Although apparently written from a “woe is America that our most-advantaged young people aren’t forging new upper-middle class lives of their own,” the piece does tip its hand a couple of times. Like when the kid in question give up on his intention to join the marines after a setback because “the sheen was gone.” And when the kid’s mom says that she knows he has a “great work ethic.” And when the readers aren’t people like me who were several re-orgs into a career, paying a mortgage and subsidizing my ex-wife’s college education at that same tender age of 24.

So it is with a bit of a chip on my shoulder that I read the follow-up article — that first link up above — today. The vast majority of the article is spent fawning over Professor Arnett’s claim to have discovered “emerging adulthood” as a distinct life-stage for 20-somethings. Please temporarily disregard that Professor Arnett and the previously mentioned 24-year-old are somewhat co-located in Massachusetts because this really is as big as the discovery of adolescence a century ago. And because it’s so similar to adolescence, “the longer road to adulthood signifies something deep, durable and maybe better-suited to our neurological hard-wiring. What we’re seeing… is the dawning of a new life stage — a stage that all of us need to adjust to.” Excepting that people conflate common with normal and adjust accordingly without stopping to consider their ability to change it.

Likewise, claims that adolescence doesn’t have to be the way it has commonly been accepted are tending to fall on the deaf ears of a myopic society. As Paul Graham puts it in “Why Nerds are Unpopular,”

I’m suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it’s physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I’ve read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren’t crazy…. As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they’re made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.

(There’s also an entire book directly on this subject.) The point is that rather than try to figure out how to proactively adjust the development of society as a whole, specific targeted fixes for what was recieved as a problem had the overall effect of validating and entrenching that problem into the fabric of our society. We went from reacting to it as common to reacting to it as normal. And now Henig is saying that “they” are telling us that we’re all just going to have to “adjust to” this emerging adulthood, because if it’s common enough then it becomes normal, right?

But what exactly does the author, Ms. Henig, stake on “emerging adulthood” being the new normal? Try this passage on for size:

The 20s are like the stem cell of human development, the pluripotent moment when any of several outcomes is possible. Decisions and actions during this time have lasting ramifications. The 20s are when most people accumulate almost all of their formal education; when most people meet their future spouses and the friends they will keep; when most people start on the careers that they will stay with for many years. This is when adventures, experiments, travels, relationships are embarked on with an abandon that probably will not happen again.

Yeah, let’s just slow this down a bit. The claim is that your third decade of life has more impact on your life than the previous two, or even the decades that follow. There is a claim that almost all formal education occurs in that third decade, apparently discounting 12-ish — often more — years of schooling, to say nothing of any formal education recieved in those late teenage years. By way of disclaimer, I graduated from college in three years, shortly before my 21st birthday thanks to an aggressive class schedule. As far as the possibility that people might meet future spouses and friends they will keep, I might point out that Arnett started dating his spouse at age 32 and wouldn’t have met her if he hadn’t actually entered into socioeconomic independence with a teaching gig. It also seems to be worth mentioning that those future spouses have rather high odds of also being future exes, taking the “friends they will keep” in the process. But what did we really expect from binding the adjective “abandon” to “relationships”, except that maybe those rather high odds will make the common become normal?

The one last element of that block of particular relevance would be that 20-somethings often start on their life’s work and/or career. This seems to me to be a bit of light cracking through this article because that bit about career tends to signal the traditional financial independence milestone toward adulthood (which allegedly culimnates in “married with children” where the transition to adulthood is completed by sacrificing your life effort to what is expected to be your genetic offspring). But if it’s a traditional milestone anyway, then it would seem to me that the novelty of this phase is overblown. Other hand-tipping in the article includes Arnett claiming that somebody who’s been doing their best to be responsible for themselves and others since age 8 due to socioeconomic disadvantage and worse is going through “emerging adulthood” and that for them “emerging adulthood represents an opportunity — maybe a last opportunity — to turn one’s life around.” There are two obvious responses to this: First, if somebody is crawling out of a fetid pit that they started their life in, then they aren’t “turning their life around” just because they’re moving slower than people who were lucky enough to not start in fetid pits. Second, and more importantly, normal life development doesn’t involve turning one’s life around and reversing things that were done earlier. It may be common process (around which many 12-step programs and some 12-disciple religions are built) because we’re messy mistake-prone mortality-ridden monkeys, but if you’re talking about linear development which cares about these stages then un-developing previous work is not and cannot, by its non-linear nature, be a stage. This is apparently repeated by Arnett:

Even Arnett admits that not every young person goes through a period of “emerging adulthood.” It’s rare in the developing world, he says, where people have to grow up fast, and it’s often skipped in the industrialized world by the people who marry early, by teenage mothers forced to grow up, by young men or women who go straight from high school to whatever job is available without a chance to dabble until they find the perfect fit.

And this runs into problems with classical stage theory because

“The core idea of classical stage theory is that all people — underscore ‘all’ — pass through a series of qualitatively different periods in an invariant and universal sequence in stages that can’t be skipped or reordered,” Richard Lerner, Bergstrom chairman in applied developmental science at Tufts University, told me… According to classical stage theory, he told me, “you must develop what you’re supposed to develop when you’re supposed to develop it or you’ll never adequately develop it.”

But what could prompt Arnett to make such an academic blunder? Perhaps “It is a big deal in developmental psychology to declare the existence of a new stage of life, and Arnett has devoted the past 10 years to making his case.” might be involved.

The thing which stuns me, though, is how the author of this article apparently ignores her complicity in the continued umderdevelopment of culture. Despite a concern about “turning the ‘changing timetable of adulthood’ into a self-fulfilling prophecy” and begging the question of “is it just another term for self-indulgence?”, she ultimately waxes poetic on the bohemian joys of being aimlessly parasitic for a third decade of life. Instead of, you know, having to get an advance on a book deal to subsidize such behavior.

The flip side of this is some career guidance from Michael Lopp: “While you’re sitting there in your mediocrity, your industry is aggressively attempting to make you irrelevant.” Only it’s one step worse for these allegedly emerging adults because they’re not even in an industry that’s aggressively attempting to make them irrelevant. And while I may think that it’s woefully short-sighted of industries to try to make people irrelevant, the fact of the matter is that these people are making themselves irrelevant and thus the imploding work of our economic enging all the easier, with the “emerging adulthood” adherents claiming that this is all normal rather than an aberrant side effect of massively increased industrial productivity and cultural dissemination.

While being almost hatefully unsympathetic to people who find themselves unable to get to where they were told they should expect to be in Japan’s economy, Charles Smith over at Daily Finance at least starts by looking at the way a cultural narrative detatched from economy has impacted the coming-of-age process. He views the emerging adulthood — which doesn’t necessarily result in any emerging at all — as a result of pushing kids hard through school and college, only to let them find that there are few permanent jobs, with impermanent jobs being a socioeconomic step down from how they were raised, such that they may have to continue living with their parents for another 10-20 years. He states that

The world’s second-largest economy [now third-largest, actually] has stagnated in just this fashion for almost 20 years, and the consequences for the “lost generations” that have come of age in the “lost decades” have been dire. In many ways, Japan’s social conventions are fraying under the relentless pressure of an economy in seemingly permanent decline.

The implication is that prolonged stagnation significantly alters the culture in which people develop, which in turn impacts how they develop — and that this can presumably happen just about anywhere.

So this is scary stuff. And a lot of it has to do with how we treat our money: everybody’s either obviously better than other people, or vigorously but fairly competing with them. Look at a parasite and a provider — they’re generally going to live with cognitive dissonance rather than admit that the parasite is a parasite and the provider has effectively chosen to squander their life’s work sustaining such a person. The privileged 24-year-old who could ignore a $40k job offer isn’t going to acknowledge how much money (our modern proxy for productive labor) has been sunk into him; such a colossal net expense was a choice and/or gift from his elders and not something he needs to worry about paying back or paying forward any time soon. Yet his ambivalence towards productive contribution while reaping the rewards of his elders’ efforts turns him into a consumer and destroyer of wealth. And he seems to be okay with that, probably because he hasn’t thought about it very hard.

Or maybe his thinking about it is just wrong. I continue to believe that modern education is focused on ensuring kids don’t fail rather than helping them to actually succeed. And while I would love to at some point argue that having the possibility of a score of 100% on an assignment conditions kids into believing in an artifical success cap, I’m going to instead take this towards the modern bastion of self-esteem, wherein anybody who is doing well enough gets applauded and ignored so our educators can try to rescue the people who aren’t doing well enough. And this helps the people who aren’t failing to develop what Eric S. Raymond referred to as “The Curse of the Gifted“:

When you were in college, did you ever meet bright kids who graduated top of their class in high-school and then floundered freshman year in college because they had never learned how to study? It’s a common trap. A friend of mine calls it “the curse of the gifted” — a tendency to lean on your native ability too much, because you’ve always been rewarded for doing that and self-discipline would take actual work.

And this is very much what Daniel Pink cites when talking about education in Drive:

As Dweck’s research has shown, children who are praised for “being smart” often believe that every encounter is a test of whether they really are. So to avoid looking dumb, they resist new challenges and choose the easiest path. By contrast, kids who understand that effort and hard work lead to mastery and growth are more willing to take on new, difficult tasks.

Or, to put it another way, if kids aren’t actively challenged to grow and mature through their cognitive development, then their emergence into adulthood is likely to be delayed by something as laughable as “the sheen” of joining the marines wearing off at the first spot of difficulty.  This may be common, but we shouldn’t be accepting it as normal.