A question was posed in the New York Times recently

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?pagewanted=10&hpw

asking whether the collective failure of “twenty somethings” to 1) finish school 2) move out 3) become financially stable 4) marry and 5) have a child by age 30 and hence achieve adulthood is so rampant that perhaps we are witnessing some kind of collective devolution such that a new category in addition to adolescence is needed between childhood and adulthood called “emerging adulthood.”  This article is more than just another slap in the face to young people who have never had the opportunity to start a career mixed with some struggling, debt-ridden academic’s sad attempt to make a name for himself.  This article is the very antithesis of what this blog is all about and as such merits a response.  As I peel back the layers of lies and hypocrisy I ask that you the reader not lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day life is not about 1-5. 1-5 simply has to do with a society perpetuating its own existence.  Your LIFE is measured by how you advance an organized movement designed to benefit others well beyond your few years on the planet.
 
First, let me say this: ouch.  I don’t say ouch lightly.  This was not a bee sting or a splinter.  This was a sledgehammer to the ankles.  This is like getting a test back from a teacher that you failed so badly the teacher actually begins to wonder if whether you have some unknown mental deficiency.  I mean, the article is saying someone in my situation is so hopelessly pathetic that SOCIETY NEEDS TO MAKE SPECIAL LAWS TO ACCOMMODATE MY EXISTENCE.  I have a friend who completed 1-5 by age 23.  I was 0-5 then.  Now I’m 28, 1-5, with nothing on the horizon.  This article suggests that when we rent cars, purchase alcohol or engage in other activities that the law treat us differently…kind of like insurance companies do when evaluating what kind of risk you are or mortgage companies do when deciding whether or not to give you a loan.  According to this article pursuing a graduate degree and not being able to get a job right away could eventually make you a protected class under the Constitution!

 
Now, let’s take a big step back, and point out the lunacy in this assertion.  At the root of this article is an assertion that the inter-generational transfer of wealth needs to have a strict cut-off and it is unnerving that it seemingly is being pushed out further and further.  To sum it up, parents are paying for things too long, get a job and a haircut you lazy bums!  Actually, since time began the inter-generational transfer of wealth has ALWAYS OCCURRED until the parents either died or ran out of money.  That’s why so much of the law focuses on property and inheritance.  The only difference is that the visible spectrum used to be wider.   If your parents were poor or absent you were on your own from the gitgo, no education and manual labor was your lot in life should you be lucky to live long enough to feed and clothe yourself.  Slightly better off parents could send their kids to gradeschool (if they were not needed on the farms) richer parents saw their kids graduate gradeschool and maybe become apprenticed, richer still got to go to college, richer still got to study in Europe and eventually take care over the family business/plantation/government post etc.  There was none of this lifestage crap, you just were somebody’s son or daughter and that was how your life was defined unless you married up or down.  Today, in America, the visible spectrum is simply marginalized with the poor ignored and the wealthy clamoring to make us think that there position is mostly merit based.
 
Let’s also take a step back and talk about the shame.  Here at Debtor’s Prison we talk mostly about the dehumanizing shame we experience being looked at as children in adult bodies, never given the chance to work or feel productive.  I do now acknowledge and accept the shame parents (particularly parents who see their children primarily as extensions of themselves and carriers of their DNA and hence a direct reflection upon them) feel when after a lifetime of sacrifice and resource child is in the same place with the same level of dependence as if he had never learned to read.  We acknowledge and admit that but for you we would be homeless or dead.  We were given every tool to stand and we stumbled and despite how comfortable we look on the couch or content we seem playing videogames that fact will eat at us until we die – even if our circumstances change, even drastically, for the better.
 
But let’s also look at this a little more closely.  Don’t pat yourselves too heartily on the back those of you who sneer at twenty-somethings.  Many of the behaviors of my generation can be directly related to things we observed in yours.  You hate your jobs.  You divorce early and often with little regard to how it will affect your kids so long as they are taken care of financially.  Your consumerism is an embarassment to us when we leave this country’s borders and your callous disregard for the environment is disgusting.  So please, if we switch jobs, live with a significant other, aren’t willing to work 20 hours a week of overtime to afford a new BMW or spend a few years working in a “non-career orientated” internship for Green Peace keep your commentary to yourselves.
 
Our generation did not invent screw-ups.  I’ll be the first to admit we have had more than our fair share, but the normal pitfalls of young adulthood, particularly accruing too much debt too fast is not an altogether new phenomenon.  But the most salient point is this: if you’re measuring life based on completing 1-5, then you’ve missed life entirely.  Look at Civil Rights.  You have students who dropped out of school, worked out of their parent’s basements, were unpaid and didn’t have the time or the means to start a family because they were staging sit-ins, registering people to vote, etc.  Many of them didn’t even LIVE until 30.  But looked what they accomplished.  Others chose to let their neighbor fight on their behalf so they could finish school, get a nice job, and start a family.  But my question is this: who did their kids look up to?  Who REALLY did the most for the up and coming generation?
 
In a strange way, maybe student debt is a blessing.  When the conventional and easy road is off the table, when faced with a materially poor life that means something versus a materially poor life that means nothing, perhaps more people will choose the former.  Like anyone I would like to have a comfortable life with nice things.  But at the end of the day I think choosing the former is the only real way out of Debtor’s Prison.