Why No One Grows Up Anymore—And What’s to Blame: Some reflections on how modern capitalism delays adulthood, and its cultural effects
https://mikecormack.substack.com/p/why-no-one-grows-up-anymoreand-whats?r=y3g8
Why No One Grows Up Anymore—And What’s to Blame: Some reflections on how modern capitalism delays adulthood, and its cultural effects
https://mikecormack.substack.com/p/why-no-one-grows-up-anymoreand-whats?r=y3g8
45 Comments
its two fold. Yes people are delaying their growth and clinging to childish interest more and more lately, however, past generations were more miserable and lacked any sort of interest outside of work until they retired when they went back to collecting toys from their childhood at 70 years old. But also there’s so little accessible hobbies for cost nowadays that clinging to low cost interest and childish hobbies is some people’s only escapism.
An article suggesting that with the increased concentration of wealth amongst the old, the young do not have the means to move to adulthood as easily any more. Mortgages, steady jobs etc remain out of reach. They therefore are stuck in a sort of pre-adult limbo. And the culture responds with extended over-parenting and a refusal to let the young experience risk or pain, so they don’t learn resilience. It ends with a call to give greater freedom and independence to young people so they can regain the status of adulthood and enjoy it.
Sure, modern capitalism is one part.
But the older generations have shown how many of them never really matured past high school, stopped learning a long time ago, and many in politics have failed to foster their replacements.
Capitalism, corporations in particular, have shown how to refuse responsibility and accountability and that has infected the rest of society.
I hope this pays homage to he who spoke of this centuries ago, describing alienation and commodification. It’s a shame everything sacred has been appropriated for greed and we’ve been conditioned to think it’s normal.
We need to redefine what “being an adult” is. It’s kind of bullshit that someone is only considered an adult if they have children or own a home or only have certain hobbies that are expensive.
hhmf. I went into the article with the curious mind but this guy got into this right quick.
“(they) explain their emotional pain using the same vocabulary they use to diagnose fascism. “Heartbreak is “narcissistic abuse”. Confusion is “gaslighting”. Disappointment is “a trauma response”. In place of experience, they’ve been handed terminology, not tools for living.”. “
People are actually growing up more nowadays. It’s just these bizarre ideas of “growing up” are not as common. Like having children or a house isn’t growing up. Developing emotional intelligence is. Older generations were actually less mature adults if you go by the true meaning of growing up. They have owned houses but they had atrocious (and I mean absolutely horrendous) emotional regulation skills and their marriages were god awful.
This is a wild claim.
There are too many variables to confidently say something like this. For one, it could also be we are no longer becoming “adults” because infant mortality is down. Witnessing multiple of your children die stacks some traumas resulting in pretty harsh joyless people I bet.
Boomers will try any rationale to avoid raising the minimum or median wage in this fucked up country.
Boomer article, as always. Would we be happier if we had children? Maybe in boomer economy the answer is a perhaps. We dont want to be exploited and what the article defines as “growing up” is to basically “give yourself responsabilities, live to pay debts for your children, that is a gift!”. Sure.
Whats the point in growing up when it’s shit wall to wall…
Interest rates, everything is about interest rates…
Delays? if something pressures you into adulthood faster … what is this bullshit?
Being on the titty at 30 off is the new norm. Plus the whining and whinging about boomers.
Ah yes, another article blasting the youth and glazing the boomers. The boomers that have left the next generations a ruined planet and a ruined economy, well done, you. At least current Gen Alpha or whatever wont have to preach the same to their children, since our ecosphere will have collapsed by then and reduzed us to hunter-gatherers again.
It is so, so, tiring. I and the wife work full time, pay a mortgage, do our taxes, all the adult stuff. And yet, to Joe Boomer we are still “children” because we dare to enjoy our lives, i guess? Perish the thought that not everyday has to be ceaseless drudgery and misery.
Guess i should start hating my wife, complaining about the ball and chain and drink our savings away, like the “greatest generation” did?
It is doubly enraging to me because the Boomers arent the ones who fought in WW2, pulled up Europe from the ruins and crafted the modern world. That was the generation before them, the Boomers are the generation who experienced the longest peace period ever (bound to end now as things stand) and the greatest economic boom that ever happened in human history. And now that it all comes crashing down they have the gall to spit again on the younger generations, as if everything good that happened to them was by merit alone.
Painful read.
I wanted to say the author needs to define what he means by “growing up” but that doesn’t matter.
Outside of getting married and having kids later, which is historically unprecedented, any other definition he implies would necessarily be limited to a narrow culture and time.
This is just a person bothered that the next generation is culturally very different. Well, we created a world based on technology and economy and then changed the world to a greater degree than any other lifetime in history. Of course the people born of this new world will be culturally different to their parents in a greater degree than any other time in history. How could it be any other way?
The older generation did something novel in human history. They made the new world radically different than theirs. Different to an extent never before seen within a generation. Now that they’ve done that, it’s no longer their world or their culture.
Whatever their thoughts and recommendations may be are unfortunately irrelevant. It’s for a world that they made sure longer exists.
Their definition of adult is shit, that’s the actual problem. They are just jealous that the younger generations manage to keep their youth longer and don’t succumb to the toxic definition of adulthood. If they are independent and act responsible, I see no problem. I’ve been called childish a lot, because of my interests in games and my goofy behavior, but I have a wife, son, a house and a well paying job that I’m good at with quite a bit of responsibility and i still get called childish. Toxic people being toxic.
Being an adult is taking responsibility. Which means you OWN the problem and have to fix it. In our current world the only problem left is money. Every problem comes down to money. and we don’t have any real agency to generate the amount of money to fix problems. We removed agency from people to take responsibility. So we never really grow up. Having children these days also has become a problem of having money. You aren’t even allowed to find your own solutions. You have a problem? Pay up to fix it. No your own solutions aren’t accepted.
It’s always up to the past generations who know what it is to be an adult to impart these lessons on the younger during times of relative calm. I wonder if those generations were taken in by delusions that they wouldn’t have to do that work, that the new modern technological global age led by America would prevent the painful ugliness from needing to be taught. Or maybe they just couldn’t keep up with all the new media channels.
And past generations aren’t childish in their refusal to learn and act on the most basic, tribal, and thought terminating behaviours? Don’t get me wrong there are clear maturity issues in different ways with newer generations that has rapidly become worse from Millennial, to Zoomer, to alpha. But articles like these ignore past generational developmental issues and make excuses to ignore the core issues behind ours.
Money, its just money, the jobs to access money, the money to be free, the money to be secure. Normally when you take away resources it creates a hardier people, but we are stuck in a disgustingly unnatural cultivated wage slave ecosystem where we have just enough to survive and plenty of entertainment to make us docile.
Parents today either don’t give a shit or are too overbearing. One grew up with no no rules and thus no maturity and the other doesn’t know how to be independent
A potentially interesting article marred by the writer seemingly to be quite upset about a person they created in their head.
I really suspect that the issue is really the incel epidemic and it’s periphery- in addition to the actual incels there are a lot of men that can get casual sex but desire a stable relationship and can’t get one. The amount of growing that you do in a relationship cannot be understated and with the clear statistical decline in committed relationships over the last decade, this isn’t happening. This is a very real concern and unprecedented in human history.
Video games and social media also seem to have hijacked most hobbies. These things are dopamine factories and in the short term are more enjoyable than most ‘classic’ hobbies. They really do tie in directly to the brains reward system and everybody has a smartphone with them at all times.
What the hobbies are is less important but I do find anime and other Japanese media to be slightly more concerning since it tends to lean so heavily on escapism.
“Kids are growing up faster than every before.”
“Why no one is growing up anymore.”
Its like man, make up y’alls mind… I guess when people have less of a real exploratory autonomous childhood, they tend to make up for it when adults. But plenty of older gens never have childhoods… they went to war and crap… So I dunno that merely growing up fast would mean much so my initial “damn shite all over the map” stands.
It’s not modern capitalism. It’s civilization in general. Our infantilization started with the first cities.
This article seems to entirely ignore the working classes. Blimey, but it drips of privilege and is entirely nonsense.
Couldn’t get through this. It was obviously written by someone unqualified to be exploring these topics.
That’s good. “Growing up” is an anti-materialist nonsense similar to the “absolute idea” idealists like to propagate.
Nope; there is not “grown up”-you. There’s just the incremental climbing the ladder from lower stages of understanding to higher; that’s materialism; that’s science.
Telling somebody who reached, idk, 30 years that he is “grown-up” (usually because they had unprotected sex and learned to press some buttons at their workplace) is an insult; that’s not even 1/3 of their fully aware life that they’ve lived since; let’s face it: everyone but these few asian superchildren is pretty damn stupid at age 1 to 10.
I will “grow up” the day dementia hits me because that’ll be the day I’ll be able to confidently say that I won’t be able to grow any further.
> And because much of the scaffolding of traditional adulthood (work, marriage, responsibility, even plain old boredom) has been stripped away or postponed, there are fewer arenas in which to build the psychological muscle that used to be called resilience, and is now referred to, somewhat desperately, as “coping strategies.”
But also, when you don’t have the marriage and mortgage, then why cope?
The author is right that a fisherman wouldn’t refuse to go to the sea because of anxiety, but if its stormy and you have nothing to lose by calling out for the day, then call out and stay home.
There is no discomfort with forward motion, there is discomfort with sacrifice and “resilience” when you know there is no forward motion at the end of that either.
I have been laid off three times by no fault of my own, and survived as many where my job ended up shifting so much, it became a new job that I didn’t apply for or want. Double the work for a 10% salary increase when a house costs 10-15X of what I make.
I’m late 30s and still speak like a 20 year old. I think it’s because of isolation. The last time I was truly social was in my 20s. I still also picture myself as someone who should be nurtured and cared for, like a child. But I pay a mortgage, manage a team, and make phone calls. It’s weird.
I like this article. It’s a perspective I find interesting, the author is likely a suburban, not entirely shitty boomer. I don’t expect to agree with everything in this article. I’m reading the critiques and I see lots of identiterianism and people criticizing the author for not creating a theory of everything. WHY ISNT THIS ARTICLE A REARTICULATION OF MARXISMS.
I really like the author’s point about a lack of a compelling narrative. I think that’s true. There is no widely accepted mold. And the old mold looks awkward and sad to many of us. This lack of a formula leaves lots of us creating new narratives. New ways to build a happy life. I think that’s really interesting and I relate a lot. That’s what I see in my social circles.
What is “adulthood” except one type of mask we wear to hide from the trauma of a lifetime?
Sure – for some people maybe. But I think that it has given people a choice. You don’t have to start a familiar these days you can take the responsibility you want.
Aa a 43 year old who never wanted kids i appreciate this a lot. I don’t need my parents to for me to provide for my self. I see what he means about not growing up – but I see it as a privileg not and punishment
> no idea how to change a plug
Uh… does he mean repair an electrical cord? Or a socket? Or a spark plug?
In any case, none of these things are required to be an “adult”, most “adult” boomers wouldn’t know how to change an electrical socket, and most probably also don’t know how to replace a spark plug these days either because why the hell would you when you can just take it to a mechanic who has the right tools to do it if it even needs to be done, which requires enough knowledge of cars to be sure about?
Anyway, I bet this “adult” doesn’t know how to set up a web server, and only a boomer would think knowing how to change a spark plug is the definition of adulthood.
> There’s a reason people used to marry young. It wasn’t naivety. It was the simple fact that they could: there were jobs, houses, and social frameworks to support early independence.
That’s idiocy. This guy is an idiot. You don’t need to own a house to get married.
People did get married when they were young due to naivety. They thought that’s just how things were, what you were supposed to do. And they often got married because they stupidly had kids at too young an age.
> and explain their emotional pain using the same vocabulary they use to diagnose fascism. Heartbreak is “narcissistic abuse”. Confusion is “gaslighting”. Disappointment is “a trauma response”.
The fuck is he veen talking about. “glaslighting” isn’t confusion. “gaslighting” is when someone tries to convince you that a lie is true. Like this asshole is doing.
> This is not an attack on the young.
Bullshit. You’re literally saying thir growth is stunted, and they are immature. You’re GASLIGHTING them!
> Because without the scaffolding of work, housing, or long-term relationships, the only available identity is perpetual youth: a limbo of delayed consequence, endless potential, and simmering anxiety. And when that becomes unbearable, the fallback mode is victimhood. If you can’t win the game, declare it unfair.
Holy shit. This fuckin’ guy.
How is it not unfair, if you can’t find a job because no jobs are available? You literally admitted that there is an issue with jobs not being available, but then you act like the kids themselves are not victims of this reality, and that they should be magically pulling themselves up the bootstraps instead.
> Adulthood is not a feeling. It’s a state of being. It’s the ability to face reality without crumbling.
Acknowledging that men have feelings, instead of concealing them because of some stupid ass belief that men aren’t allowed to cry, is not crumbling or weakness. It’s a strength. It’s not being a sheep who is afraid to challenge what generations of fools who came before them decided defines what a man is.
> That means homes you don’t have to inherit.
Great idea but the boomers won’t allow it because it lowers their own net worth and their views of empty grassland if we build more homes.
> Jobs with dignity, not just Slack channels.
Oh jesus christ, he’s talking about going back to work in cubicles.
> Apprenticeships that pay, not unpaid “experiences” that drift into your thirties.
I don’t think anyone is working for free as an apprentice for 15 years.
> A welfare state that treats independence as a right, not a reward.
What the fuck is that even supposed to mean?
> We also need to let the young fail earlier and recover privately
And we’re back to contradicting earlier statements. We need to set the young up to NOT fail, not ALLOW them to fail. ALLOWING them to fail is why we are in this situation in the first place.
This paints people who aren’t boomers as being childish, but I’ve never met a more child-like generation than my parents (boomer) generation. If everyone I know, including me, managed their finances as haphazardly as my parents and their friends did, me and every millennial I know would be homeless. Granted, I’m a blue collar man from a blue collar family, but boomer men can’t even function and take care of themselves without their wives. They live as if they fell off their mothers tit the day they married their wife.
Not over leveraging my finances to own an asset (house) that’s outside of my financial means that holds liability? That’s called financial responsibility and not being a child.
Not starting a family due to the impossible task to raise a family in a duel income family in a world with an uncertain future? That’s called logic.
Being raised in a hyper-consumeristic culture and associating material things with more positive feelings and nostalgia? That’s more a product of how adulthood feels like you lose your sense of autonomy to serve an economy that is indifferent towards you at best, resents you for being a human who wants a living wage at worst. But it doesn’t negate my necessity to manage my finances, my health, cook my meals, and clean my living spaces.
We grew up, we just don’t have the convenience of stumbling into milestones by happenstance like boomers.
# “Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
#
― C.S. Lewis
>there was a clear vision of adulthood. It may have been rigid, repressive, and often suffocating, but it had structure. You left school, you found work, you got married, you raised children, you participated in the world. The milestones were economic, social, and moral. They weren’t always fair, and they weren’t always kind, but they gave you a story to step into. The future felt clearly plotted.
Well, maybe people are rethinking those ideals just as culture and society shifts with every generation. I don’t see anything truly special about the “old” ways, and even here they admit a lot of it was a sham.
We don’t need to go back to a time when people reproduced mindlessly and just married whoever came along first. There ain’t no way in hell everyone was finding their soul mate in high school. That’s hollywood baloney.
The article also comes across as heavily U.S. centric with the idea that adulthood always means living alone either by yourself or with a partner but never with family as is common in other countries.
And when people receive assistance from parents, it’s always viewed negatively, like you’re not a “real” adult, but then where else are people supposed to get support?
The average housing price is around 5 or 6 times greater than the median income. There’s also a housing shortage which increases the costs. Tuition is even worse. The job market is trash despite the low unemployment numbers. It’s full of ghost jobs and businesses don’t respond to your application until 5 months later after you already forget you even applied.
So of course people will depend on family because there ain’t nowhere else to go.
This article is based on the premise that marriage, kids, and a white picket fence should be the goal. Even though he says he isn’t blaming the younger generation, he certainly takes the “snowflake” approach rather than acknowledge the expanded ideas of well being/personhood we’ve adapted. We aren’t having kids because we’re infantilised, but by the poor socioeconomic conditions, the mental break of living by societal standards of happiness, and engagement in broader climate change/overpopulation issues. Some may view it as selfish to indulge in our own interests rather than pursue the American dream, but we grew up with a generation of people unhappy having lived their whole lives pursuing it. Why not try something new?
this is an american trait and is not current. americans have this weird obsession of being “forever young”. I mean I see it in other countries too but not as widespread as in the US.
Wait, did we cure ageing and no one told me???
Or is this just some assholes blog post about their subjective definition of “grown up”?
This article is absolute drivel. The world has changed so young people have changed. Was it better in the old days – in some ways yes but I would argue in many ways no. This is just an old man trying to hide his old man talk. I’m saying this as somebody who is on the older side. Parents used to kick their kids out at 19. Today’s parents are more compassionate – they actually like their kids.
Bold of the generation that got half an education and started playing house together to assume that the subsequent generations aren’t growing up.
Can’t afford to grow up. Need 2 min wage incomes to survive , 2 X average incomes to buy a property and need to be in the top 10% of income earners to afford a child seeing how expensive childcare is . Until government subsidizes childcare fully people cannot afford to have kids.
Seems like a lot of people are quite defensive in the comments. I think this is largely correct, each generation is a little less capable than the last, different skills that don’t lead to good adulting.
Look, all I know is that if there are problems then they are the boomers fault, or maybe in some cases the zoomers. Us millennials on the other hand are perfect, blameless and have never done anything wrong, ever.