Kate Andrews has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Adulthood was once determined by age, but now we’ve extended childhood far beyond the teenage years. If the government gets its way, the next generation will never grow up: there are reportedly plans to ban cigarette sales to anyone born after 2009. This would mean that, come 2060, 50-year-olds could be begging their elders to pop into the local corner shop to buy them a pack of 20.
We need a new metric of adulthood, and I have a proposal. The real mark is not an age or any particular milestone, it’s really when you receive your first piece of unsolicited feedback. It’s a grim but unavoidable rite of passage: having personal and outlandish comments directed your way, often in such a breezy or casual manner you’d think they were talking about the weather.
It turns out the playground bully has nothing on a grown-up who sees their peers doing things slightly differently
The penny dropped for me recently when I was at dinner with some girlfriends, all of us in our early thirties, all in different stages of life. Yet we could sense a common thread between us, some kind of angst that we couldn’t immediately describe. What was it about adulthood that we were finding so tough?
What if, I finally asked, the problem isn’t the paths we’re on, but rather the exhaustion that comes from fielding comments from friends and strangers about those chosen paths? At the very least, this would help explain the defensiveness, queasiness and slight paranoia that seems to set in as we leave our twenties behind.
Perhaps I should have been better prepared for it. Pop culture was full of warnings when I was a kid. My teenage years were dominated by Sex and the City and Friends reruns, designed to show just how unkind adults can be.
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