Have I grown up too fast?

Ahalya:  I seem to have taken the “traditional” route: “settled down,” achieved financial stability, married, and bought a house by the age of 30. In many ways, I am very happy with my decisions, and a life path that conforms to social norms and expectations of being an “adult.” At the same time, I wonder if I’ve grown up too quickly and haven’t caught up emotionally.

The cogs of my life keep on turning, but I don’t feel as if I have quite settled into that life yet. There are still many more things that the “kid” in me wants to do before officially settling down. I want to travel the world, live in another country, or take time off work to focus on some of my personal passions.

I feel that there is such a drive amongst 20-somethings today to keep “doing,” keep achieving, in order to reach the next milestone until you can display your achievements and stable family life like a status symbol.

Conflicting Expectations

Jia Jia: At the same time, we’re also supposed to be grasping at the less tangible ideals of happiness and fulfillment.

So we’re constantly torn between settling down and holding out until we’re as happy or fulfilled as we think we can be.

Especially well-educated people who feel the need to maximize their options.

MQ: But in many ways the future is unexpected. I think when I was little I assumed that romance and friendship would involve more fate/luck and less work.  Conversely, I thought that professional success would be more about work and less about fate/luck. Ah, innocence and naïveté!

I used to think having a husband was less of an achievement and more to do with fate.  But now, I see that society tends to treat having a successful relationship like having a successful career. They are all milestones that determine, to a certain extent, your worth as a person.

Persephone: What is annoying to me is the blanket generalization of adulthood. You can be mature and responsible and not want to marry or have children or buy a house! That’s not refusing to grow up. That’s just having carefully considered your circumstances and decided against it.

Ahalya: And if that works for you, I don’t see anything wrong with that.

Growing Up for Myself or for Society?

Persephone: I think the middle class is primarily responsible for all this when/should/how angst related to growing up. The upper and working classes are more fixed in their respective positions; it’s the middle that feels like they have to strive so damn hard.

Jia Jia: Yes! We can blame the middle class (in which I’m included) for most anything to do with social expectations.

Persephone: Really, reaching adulthood is more about intrinsic value than exterior validation.

The markers for exterior validation are always changing, and you will have an exhausting time trying to compare yourself with others. Nobody thinks on their deathbed: “I wish I had amassed more money/property/accolades.” It’s all about being true to yourself and in relations with those around you.

Ahalya: For me, adulthood ideally represents maturity, inner peace and fulfillment. This is different for different people. Some people will find true happiness married with two kids in a suburban house, and others will find self-fulfillment in ways that do not conform as closely to social expectations.

Is Adulthood the Death of Childhood?

Jia Jia: I also think that maintaining a child-like quality is important. There’s a wonder to life, and we tend to lose it as we “grow up.” I remember reading “Sophie’s World” and being struck by the metaphor of humans as fleas living in the fur of a giant cosmic rabbit.

We’re born at the edges of the fur where we marvel at the stars beyond it. As we grow up, we crawl further and further down into that deep comfortable fuzziness, conforming to expectations and forgetting to just be silly and amazed by life in general.

Persephone: I’m all for never losing your fresh childlike qualities.

Maturity is a mindset – not accumulated trophies or rites of passage.

I’ve met people who seemed ancient at 30, and 70 year olds who were youthful, exuberant, and optimistic.

MQ: And a lot of that gets lost in the anxiety over growing up or not growing up.

Becoming a Complete Human Being

Jia Jia: This whole conversation makes me think of a quote from Brideshead Revisited:

“He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory.

I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.”

For me, that’s the point of adulthood: to be a complete human being. Feel, be, experience and internalize so that, like Ahalya said, we can find maturity, inner peace and fulfillment.

—
By Ahalya, Jia Jia, MQ, and Persephone
Photograph by Sasha from “Perhaps When I’m Older I’ll Remember This”