Half-formed thought

Every time there's a slow news day, some media outlet or another publishes an article about how Kids Today (i.e. young adults) aren't "becoming grown-ups" despite the fact that they're legally adults.

Have you ever noticed that the definition of "grown-up" in these articles is increasingly nebulous?

It started out during the 1990s recession, as commentary on the economy more than anything - people aren't able to find jobs that can support them and therefore aren't able to move out of their parents' house. Defining adulthood as self-sufficiency for the purpose of an article on the state of the economy - that does make some sense.

Then they moved on to more social things, like marriage and children - traditionally associated with adulthood, but not strictly necessary, and also not entirely matters over which one has complete control - all the good planning and responsible behaviour in the world, and a stroke or two of bad luck could still leave you unmarried and/or without children by the time you've reached age 35 or whatever the arbitrary cut-off is.

Then the criteria started getting more materialistic, like house and car ownership. Again, even less necessary for self-sufficiency and independence, and even more easily eliminated by circumstances - to say nothing of personal preference.

Then the criteria started getting ridiculous. I've seen articles declaring that today's young adults are not grownups because they wear sneakers to work or listen to certain music or wear headphones on the subway or enjoy unwinding with a video game. So basically the older generation of adults is now arbitrarily defining the younger generation of adults because their clothing, music, and recreation choices are not identical to those of the older generation - because a noticeable number of younger adults are not behaving in a way that is interchangeable with that of a noticeable number people who are 20-30 years older than them. Because the trappings of one generation are different from the trappings of the next.

What started as an illustration of economic realities had degraded to dissing the generation gap based on the superficial - declaring an entire generation immature based on their footwear, without even looking at the kind of life they were making for themselves.

I wonder if this happened in the past, with other generations? I'm too young to remember myself. But imagine it in the 1950s: "Kids today, with their suburbs and their televisions and their circle skirts - when are they going to grow up?" You know how the parents of the baby boomers are historically known as the greatest generation? I wonder if their parents felt that way?