Have We Outgrown Growing Up?

A.O. Scott sounds the death knell for adulthood in American culture, arguing that shows like Girls, Broad City, and “a flood of goofy, sweet, self-indulgent and obnoxious improv-based web videos” signal that “nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore”:

It is now possible to conceive of adulthood as the state of being forever young. Childhood, once a condition of limited autonomy and deferred pleasure (“wait until you’re older”), is now a zone of perpetual freedom and delight. Grown people feel no compulsion to put away childish things: We can live with our parents, go to summer camp, play dodge ball, collect dolls and action figures and watch cartoons to our hearts’ content. These symptoms of arrested development will also be signs that we are freer, more honest and happier than the uptight fools who let go of such pastimes.

I do feel the loss of something here, but bemoaning the general immaturity of contemporary culture would be as obtuse as declaring it the coolest thing ever. A crisis of authority is not for the faint of heart. It can be scary and weird and ambiguous. But it can be a lot of fun, too. The best and most authentic cultural products of our time manage to be all of those things. They imagine a world where no one is in charge and no one necessarily knows what’s going on, where identities are in perpetual flux. Mothers and fathers act like teenagers; little children are wise beyond their years. Girls light out for the territory and boys cloister themselves in secret gardens. We have more stories, pictures and arguments than we know what to do with, and each one of them presses on our attention with a claim of uniqueness, a demand to be recognized as special. The world is our playground, without a dad or a mom in sight.

Adam Sternbergh appreciates the prompt to reconsider what maturity means today:

The best part of any essay about changing cultural notions of adulthood is that it encourages us, again, to revisit what adulthood means, exactly. To some, it’s men in suits and smoking and not being able to do what you want anymore, because propriety. For others, it’s a continuing suspicion of cultural pleasure that would make the Puritans proud. To my eye, watching Seth Rogen grapple with responsibility in Knocked Up is a much more honest engagement with the meaning of maturity than watching Woody Allen grapple with a 17 year-old Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, a presumably more “grown-up” film.

Alissa Wilkinson also sees Scott’s point:

Growing into a full humanity requires cultivating virtues that temper one another. Some are associated with adulthood—courage, tenacity, autonomy. Others are more closely associated with childhood—curiosity, humility, generosity. So, yes: only engaging in “juvenile” culture could shape us in bad ways. … But only engaging in “grown up” culture can, too, as can reflexively defending sophisticated products and rejecting simpler ones.

As Scott points out, the kind of culture creative output that results from our cultural shift doesn’t merely mean we end up with “juvenile” culture and fart jokes and boy-men and girl-women. It also means we end up with a lot of “childish” culture. Or maybe “childlike” is a better term. We get things that test the edges of the accepted in playful ways. We have stories that find wonder everywhere. We experience pleasing blows to our self-importance. And sometimes, if we are paying attention, we are even returned to a time when things like faith, and hope, and love came easily.