August is here again. For
many, August means school is back in session.
For me, August means I’ve lived another year. As I’ve prepared to enter into the later half
of my 20’s (26), I have thought and read a lot about my fellow twenty-something’s
and how we have struggled to become “real adults”.
Over the last decade or two, the number of young adults that
have returned home after college, or never left, seems to have
skyrocketed. What is happening to
us? Why can’t we find real jobs and be financially
responsible/independent?
Brian Simmons defines this awkward stage of life as Emerging Adulthood. It’s the idea of living in that place in between…knowing
that they are no longer teenagers but not feeling fully grown up yet either. Simmons goes on to say that “...they
experience life for several years suspended in mid-air between the trapeze of
adolescence and the trapeze of adulthood”.
I’ll admit that there
is definitely a tension present, but there’s got to be more of an explanation
than just not being able to lock in your dream job. Part of the issue is something I like to call
Peter Pan Syndrome. Us twenty-something’s grew up at a time that
aging and growing up was considered the enemy.
We’ve progressed through the years with a “Never grow up!”
mentality.
The Trap of Upward Mobility
Throughout
the course of the 90’s and into the new millennium, attending a 4-year college
became the norm. We were taught and
encouraged from an early age that the thing to do after high-school is go to
college-because if you don’t go to college then you’ll never be able to get a
good job or find anything outside of the realm of flipping burgers for the rest
of your life.
College
truly is a great thing-pursuing higher education and being the best you can be
is wonderful. BUT, accumulating thousands
of dollars of debt before the age of 22 is not so great.
Dozens of my
college friends thrived and even excelled from semester to semester all just to
return home after 4 years of higher education.
You’ve got the degree, but no one
will hire you without any work experience.
I’ve literally had this conversation with friend after friend. So now, you can’t find a job within the realm
of your degree, you have no money-scratch that, you OWE lots of money, and the only place to go is home.
There is
nothing wrong with going to college, but maybe it isn’t for everyone. Perhaps those that do go to college need to
be more intentional in seeking out real life experience rather than just
reveling in your first “on your own” experience.
My college
experience shaped and molded me more than I ever imagined it would, but what
shaped me the most was my work experiences
while in college. Sure, I missed out on tons
of the fun activities on campus, but I had a pretty impressive and established
resume for a 20 year old. Sometimes, we
have to skip what’s the most fun in order to pursue what’s the most
advantageous for the future.
Can we just blame our parents?
The answer
is a big fat no. Let’s be honest here, to a certain extent, our parents were (and
in many instances, still are) enablers.
Mom and Pop want to give us the things that their parents couldn’t offer
to them. For many of us, this included way too many clothes, buying our first
car for us, not making us work in high school, and holding our hands all the
way through college.
Now mom and
dad, we love you for it, but maybe your helping is actually hurting. Yes, mom and dad, we will always be your
babies, but as J.M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan) explained, “All children, except one, grow up.”. Adulthood is inevitable, but
we’ve got to do a better job of preparing
children and teens for the realities of growing up.
Jeffery Arnett noted that since 1950 there has been a trend
in America toward delaying or postponing the things which complete transformation
into full adulthood. As Americans ages
twenty to twenty-nine delay their transition to full adulthood, they create
another phase of the life cycle: emerging adulthood. AKA: Peter Pan Syndrome.
So now we have 27 year olds working 12
hour night shifts and playing video games while their parents are at work. We’ve gotten to a point in which seeing
people in their mid-twenties still living at home is the norm.
The age at which young adults get married has gone from 18-22
up to 27-35. Is this because our
20-something’s don’t really understand how to adult yet? My concern is that the issue seems much
deeper than just the age in which we marry. Are we avoiding responsibility
until certain things fall into place for us?
We spend this decade wandering around waiting for the next big thing
rather than being a successful contributor to society in the here and now.
It’s time to move out of mom and dad’s
basement and blaze our own trials. It’s
time to actively pursue rather than sit around waiting for everything to be handed
to you on a silver platter. It’s time to stop blaming society or your degree
choice. It’s time to grow up.
“To live will be an awfully big adventure.”
–J.M. Barrie
*Information
gathered from Brian Simmon’s Wandering in
the Wilderness, and Jeffery Arnett’s Emerging
Adults in America: Coming of Age in the 21st Century.
