A Diagnostic of The Male Brain in the Early 20's…It Sucks

A few years back, I was attending a dinner party where I struck up a conversation with a young producer. The man was perfectly normal. He was in his mid 30s with a typical knowledge of pop culture, sports, and finance. You couldn’t come up with a more stereotypical male if you pulled one out of a CW drama. This guy was moderately successful with a long-time girlfriend and had recently taken out a loan for a down payment on an apartment.

You can imagine my surprise when I heard the man mention that his early 20s had easily been the roughest years of his life thus far.

“Oh, they’re the worst,” chimed in the polite 64-year-old man next to us, “a genuine old-fashioned cluster fuck.”

They didn’t realize that I was only 20 years old myself. I shrugged my naive shoulders and kept my age a secret. Two men coincidentally decrying their early 20’s seemed weird but, come on, I was a middle-class white Jew from the San Fernando Valley with budding film ambitions. As far as mental sanity goes, that’s a pretty safe formula.

Three years later, I’m in the middle of Laurel Canyon next to my totaled car. My head is bleeding, I’m concussed, and I’m soaking wet from the busted fire hydrant flooding my flipped-over Honda Civic. I sat by myself on the curb, watching cars pull over on the other side of the road to call the police. Then I notice that the iced coffee I was drinking had somehow landed perfectly upright on my steering wheel during the crash.

“Incredible,” I thought, “how did that happen?”

Soon I heard sirens approaching and traffic slowing to a halt. My parents arrived, the paramedics showed, and I was rushed to the emergency room. The entire ride to the hospital, all I could think about was that iced coffee. “How is it possible that not a drop was spilled when my car flipped off the road?” (I brought this up so much that at one point my parents told me to shut up so they could hear the EMTs)

There’s a numbness I associate with the accident — Not because I was apathetic and not because I didn’t understand the magnitude of the situation. But because the 18 months prior to that moment were filled with so much angst and anxiety that the accident felt like any other event. The past few years were such a roller coaster that they had beaten any emotion out of me. I remembered that dinner party. “Holy crap, they were right.”

The past few years were a complete mess. I would lay awake at night, terrified about my future. My nightmares weren’t about monsters, they were about being late for work. I was never so confused about how to talk to a woman. Not even in my teenage years. I hated my job, but the thought of doing anything else filled me with dread. Throw in a few depressions and a death in the family and the middle-class Jewish kid from the valley became a ticking time-bomb.

A car wreck? Sure. Why not?

Now, a bit older and a tiny bit wiser, I can reflect on what makes one’s early 20s so goddamn difficult for us young males (Note: I don’t doubt that those years aren’t hard for women, however, I can only truly speak for my sex). The following is my hypothesis on the male brain as it transitions into adulthood and it’s really rather simple:

We’re not invincible anymore… And it sucks.

Much of our adolescence is spent testing the world around us. From childhood, we express our curiosity physically. We push other kids. We kill bugs. We build forts out of pillows. Then we get into fights. We disrupt classrooms. We build better pillow forts, but our parents are a lot less amused. During puberty, no one tells us how to masturbate. We just kind of figure it out. The world is a racquetball court and we are constantly seeing what will bounce back and how fast.

Welcome to your early 20’s, where, if you hit the world, the world hits back in a match more lopsided than Pacquiao versus Mayweather. Our hangovers are more crippling than ever and a hit of marijuana can induce an existential crisis.

The world expects us to hang up our curiosity and take our lives in a concrete direction. For a group of people that have always learned via exploration, that’s a scary prospect.

Because missteps now result in consequences. Because crashing your car will triple your insurance rate. Because pushing other kids is now assault.

The good news is, to my surprise, everything actually does work itself out.

Our confusion and angst forces us to anchor ourselves in what we know. We establish routines. We find hobbies. We refine our personalities and lifestyles. In exchange for a delusion of invincibility, we get a sense of self. If you ask me, that’s far more valuable in the long run.

But before you get to that moment, you have to dive head-first into your anxiety like a swimming pool that you’ve entered in search of pennies.

I go back to the day of my accident, where, with a bandaged head, I sat in a junkyard pulling apart the mangled piece of machinery that I got my first hand job in. As I tried to salvage old iPods and notebooks out my trunk, I accepted the fact that, like my male recklessness and misdirection, there are relics I would to leave behind. And for the first time, I was okay with that. But damn… what a genuine old-fashioned cluster fuck.