conundrum

I do want to respond to Ben's last post (and I must say that though it can look dangerously like neglect, I really like the leisurely pace of conversation on this blog), but in the meantime, here is a poser:

At eighteen I can drive and smoke and vote, but I am almost certainly not an adult. At nineteen, I am much the same. Ditto for twenty. At twenty-one, perhaps I have an off-campus place; I pay rent, I pay bills, I cook, albeit haltingly; perhaps I have even developed a talent for sex. I am Into Wine and foreign films; I read The Economist. Now am I an adult? Or have I just become better at pretending? Now I am twenty-three, I have graduated, have a job, am living with friends and am really paying taxes and earning my keep and am starting to less secretly fight the fact that I want to go home, that I am waiting for summer vacation. Am I an adult now? What about at twenty-five? Thirty? When I'm married? When I'm divorced?

Not saying I subscribe to this mindset, and I'm as sick as anyone of cultural commentators griping about "extended adolescence," but I do see this as a salient concern among (white, financially stable, well-educated)* folks in our generation. And it's a bit different from "extended adolescence," the self-indulgent nostalgia of the baby boomers, because it isn't that we (and I use the collective first person solely for rhetoric's sake) don't want to grow up, it's that we don't know how. It may be that because our parents willfully avoided maturity, we lack its vocabulary, its motions, and so we're kind of circling an idea, trying to work with signifiers (enter alcohol**). It's a sort of feeling of adrift-ness.

Now, this is nothing new. Sartre and Wordsworth, among others, spoke of a similar feeling, though theirs is, if I read them right, a bit more founded in some spiritual/metaphysical Angst. And, while I am sympathetic, I don't totally condone these feelings in young people. (Listen to me: "young people." Who am I kidding!) After all, they're responsible for Garden State. Then again, they're also why we have the National, so it's not all bad.

I don't know, I'm just kicking all this around in my head. Am I right? I hope that there are those who graduate or grow up and actually take a kind of joy in maturing; I've seen it in some of my friends, come to think of it.

*though it may be more prevalent than that

**or, at Wheaton, marriage

(sorry for the lame DFW imitation, but I do like how footnotes allow for side conversations and something like comic timing)