In response to A.O. Scott’s essay on the death of adulthood in popular culture, Freddie sighs, “To believe that different types of cultural products should exist, and that some of these should create artistic pleasures based on work, ambiguity, or difficulty, is to be immediately and permanently labeled a snob”:
If you like any kind of artwork that does not leave its pleasures totally and utterly accessible at all times and to all people with no expectation that consuming art should involve effort, you will be lectured to by the aggrieved. You will get yelled at by the AV Club and Vulture and Slate, by Steve Hyden and Andy Greenwald and the rest of the crew at Bill Simmons’s Geographical Center of the American Middlebrow, in the New York Times and the New Yorker and every other sundry magazine, blog, site, app, Tumblr, Twittr, Tindr, Grindr, newsletter, listerv, forum, message board, image board, room & board, surfboard and broadsheet that humanity produces. …
The only part of adulthood that really matters is the part where when you finally grow up, if you ever really do, it’s because you recognize that there’s other people in the world and that they matter and their needs matter and you need to set aside your self-obsession for long enough to recognize that other people’s needs are often more pressing or important than yours and to act accordingly. Every frame of Guardians of the Galaxy exists to tell you that you are the only human being in the universe.
Alexandra Petri, who is much less perturbed by the shift, attributes it to the rise of the Internet, “where the primary mode of communication is the confessional”:
We know better, now, than to think anyone has anything under control. Too many people have admitted — in GIFs or paragraphs or videos — what a frantic scramble things really are (even and especially for those people, like celebrities, whose job is to appear to be have things effortlessly together). So much for the facade. The celebrities everyone clutches most fervently to their bosoms now are not the ones you aspire to be, but the ones you feel like you already are, the ones who wear their mess on the outside. We don’t want to look up to people. We want something different: to look out from their eyes. Online, currency is identification and sympathy. Competence is admirable, but it isn’t inherently relatable. If anything, the tendency is to play up the bumbling. If you can convincingly pretend to be a polished, collected socialite who is not, in essence, a frantic 12-year-old on stilts who doesn’t know whom to call about the plumbing — what can we possibly have in common with you?
Tom Hawking nods:
It’s not so much that culture is abandoning adulthood; it’s more that culture is deconstructing it. It’s fascinating to watch old American TV shows and think about how much they reinforced the idea of traditional patriarchy, where women deferred to men and children to adults. (I mean, Christ, we’re talking about a TV industry that literally produced a show called Father Knows Best.) …
Clearly, there’s a mental and emotional difference between childhood and adulthood, and clearly experience does lend some surety and confidence — I’m not A.O. Scott’s age, but at 36 I certainly feel I have something of a firmer grasp on my life than I did at 26, or 16. I suppose I’m technically a grown-up. But you never really lose that feeling of being alone and wondering what the hell you’re supposed to be doing — indeed, I’d argue that’s at the core of human experience. You just learn to mask it better. And I’m sure that hasn’t changed in millennia. If anything, the difference between adulthood as it’s presented in contemporary culture and how it’s been depicted in the past is that today’s writers depict this idea with gusto. The difference between, say, Don Draper and the patriarchs of the past is not that Don doesn’t know what to do, but that he is depicted as confused and increasingly impotent. It’s not that such characters haven’t existed before — but their bewilderment has usually manifested as the result of some sort of crisis, not as an inherent aspect of their character.
Meanwhile, Andrew O’Hehir points a finger at the economy:
[S]ometimes economic forces really do shape the cultural zone. Real wages have fallen since Don Draper’s heyday, especially for American men and double-especially for the middle-class and working-class white men who were once the bulwarks of the mid-century model of adulthood. We now live in a culture (using the word in its anthropological sense) of diminished expectations and permanent underemployment, where many or most young people will never be as affluent as their parents. Lifetime job security is an antediluvian delusion, and in many metropolitan areas home ownership is out of reach for all but the rich. It’s just as useless to object to those changes as it is to complain about grownups reading Harry Potter books, but certainly those things were the essential underpinnings of classic adulthood, and without them it’s no surprise to see the old order fading away.
Lastly, a reader writes:
Your post brought to mind what C.S. Lewis said about growing up and childishness in his 1952 essay “Three Ways of Writing for Children”:
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 10, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am 50 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.
The Dish 