How will we know when we’re grown ups?
You say you want a revolution? Ten years on from the financial crash we now know who paid for it. Everyone is £800 a year worse off. And those in their 30s could have expected £2k a year more. A house deposit, a start up grant, the university fund for the kids? What could that £20k have been? And there’s a more fundamental question. The conventional arc of adulthood has been smashed in half. What happens when you think everyone under 40 isn’t behaving the way you expect them to?
A few years ago, the Telegraph wrote a list, based on a press release from a Building Society, that proffered 50 markers that tell you you’re a grown up. A mortgage was number 1. Having children was number 6. Getting married was number 9. A savings account was number 12. Classing work as a career rather than a job was number 36.
Meaningless clickbait, you can easily argue. 2,000 people, stopped in the street or replying to an online survey pulling random ideas out of their brains about what being a grown up means. There’s no context about their mornings, their week, their day. On the days when you realise, for example, you have no clean knickers, then remembering to do the laundry before said disaster occurs seems more important in the grown up stakes than, say, knowing how to bleed a radiator (number 19). Similarly, listening to Radio 2 could easily be a generational thing (number 27) but many of the songs played on 6Music are equally as old but are often more alternative.
What the markers reference, however, is the societal expectation of an adult. Responsibility, commitment, steadfastness. These are all adjectives we associate with adulthood. Meanwhile, spontaneous, reckless, footloose are more associated with youth, a lack of maturity. A moral response is, invariably linked with both. Picture a steadfast man, an adult. You think of someone safe, reliable, secure. A reckless man? Well, I’m kind of picturing Pete Doherty. You make your own judgements.
This makes sense in society. We want to feel, as a pack, that we can trust people. Rely on them to make decisions that we know will help keep our society strong and secure. We use those markers as judgements, in the same way teenage magazines would give you a checklist for the perfect boyfriend; does this person meet all the criteria to be a reliable sort? Yes? Here are the keys to the kingdom. No? Steer well clear.
There’s a problem, though. Since the financial crash these markers have been eroded. If you’re in your 30s (and below) you can look at much of this list of markers for adulthood and laugh wryly. Job security, home security, these things have melted like a candy floss in a puddle. Austerity has not upset the applecart (many of the changes were already starting to take place, especially in the decline of “jobs for life”) but they have entrenched the societal shift. This is normal now.
18–40 year olds increasingly find themselves in what society perceives as an extended period of adolescence. Many move back to their parents after university, dulled by debt. The growing culture of work experience, of internships before a job is proffered delays security further. The perceived difficulty in securing a mortgage, the rampant growth of buy to let market means many millennials scoff at the prospect of owning their own home. Savings seem unlikely, pensions a dream for the wealthiest only, self employment a necessity. The change has been so rapid, so fast over a decade that many feel genuinely frightened. Anxiety levels among young people is rising, mental health issues are reported and diagnosed more frequently.
Yet the same generation that reels over the rapid societal shift is judged as they see the expectations and markers of adulthood whizz by unmet. Society changed drastically under dire economic circumstances, fundamentally changing what younger generations could expect from their future. The path through life would need to be rewritten, especially in terms of expectation. Those of us in our 30s are £2k a year worse off.
As well as having to acknowledge that in terms of what their parents had secured by the time they were the same age, they would find out of their grasp, younger people have been negatively judged for for that “failure”. While it’s recognised the economic crisis was out of their hands (even the top bracket, the 38 year old in 2018 was 28/29 in 2008 as the banks imploded) this is a generation judged for failing to live their lives along the same path as their parents who did so thirty years before.
What impact does this have? There’s a lack of security and uncertainty that has, in many ways, galvanized a generation. Many want to define for themselves what being a grown up looks like, what achievement looks like. There’s no automatic respect for elders. The people just a few years older who are still driven by that “keeping up with the Jones’” (buying the latest car, the biggest house) are not automatically given the respect they probably think they’re due. Well done, mate, you can afford stuff, but what have you done?
Conventional, a cultural hegemonic structure has had its foundations undermined. So should this generation wait for change or force it?
