The Art of Manliness - #158： The Prime of Life — What It Means to Be an Adult

00:00:00.000 right mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so i'd say in the

00:00:19.060 past 40 30 years there's been a there's been a transformation going on in the west and particularly

00:00:25.380 in the united states about what it means to be a grown-up i'm talking grown man grown woman

00:00:31.620 because there used to be these scripts that you'd follow right and you you'd met these certain

00:00:36.300 markers and that would mean you were an adult but nowadays those scripts have been thrown out the

00:00:41.240 window and it's sort of confusing for you young people to figure out well am i am i grown up now

00:00:45.600 or am i in this in-between phase am i adolescent i don't it's really confusing anyways my guest today

00:00:51.860 takes us on this whirlwind tour of the history of modern adulthood going all the way back

00:00:57.580 to the you know the 1500s so we can see how adulthood or the concept of adulthood as it

00:01:03.440 has changed throughout time and perhaps give us some insights on how young people can navigate

00:01:08.680 adulthood in the 21st century his name is steven mince he's a professor of history at university

00:01:15.700 of texas and he wrote a book called the prime of life a history of modern adulthood and today on the

00:01:21.020 podcast we're going to discuss what it means to be an adult whether work is involved owning a home

00:01:26.020 kids marriage uh the gamut we're going to talk about it really interesting discussion

00:01:31.560 so without further ado steven mince and the prime of life

00:01:34.900 steven mince welcome to the show thank you for inviting me so your book is the prime of life

00:01:49.080 a history of adulthood and you mentioned in the book and you're right about this that there hasn't

00:01:54.500 really been a history of modern adulthood in the west written there's been a lot of books about

00:02:00.240 childhood or adolescence but but not adulthood why why do you think that is even though this is like

00:02:06.640 a big part of our life uh adulthood and we don't really pay much attention to it

00:02:10.900 no one says life begins at 40 anymore at least not without irony whether you're young or you're

00:02:20.440 middle-aged or older there's tremendous amount of ambivalence about adulthood because adulthood is

00:02:27.880 associated with slowing down with being in a rut with stagnation and above all with stress

00:02:36.280 and so no one wants to talk about that no one wants to be yet at least as it was quote-unquote

00:02:46.580 traditionally defined and by traditionally defined i mean in the earlier 20th century yeah let's talk

00:02:53.100 about that because i feel like there's a lot of hand-wringing uh going on today in the media books are

00:03:00.200 written about it about boomerang kids how young people aren't transitioning to adulthood

00:03:04.920 um but it seems like this idea that we have of adulthood came from the post-world war ii era

00:03:13.160 which was you graduate high school you go to college and then you buy a house get married have kids

00:03:19.240 and you're an adult uh that's no longer the case uh it's become much adulthood becoming adults become

00:03:25.820 much more protracted but what i think is interesting in your book you show that this

00:03:29.840 sort of post-world war ii idea of adulthood is almost it's an exception to the rule of how people

00:03:36.680 became adults in modern times in the west can you explain what sort of the varying uh ideas of

00:03:43.880 adulthood have been throughout history before world war ii well it's of course utterly shocking to think

00:03:52.200 that the typical american woman in 1970 we're not talking about the distant past but

00:03:58.640 1970 was married by the age of 21 and her husband was typically married by the age of 23

00:04:08.360 so by the middle 20s these young people

00:04:14.360 had two or three kids they had a house they had a job that they were intending to stay in for the rest of

00:04:25.360 their lives and that image of adulthood has become uh the kind of norm that many today feel we're

00:04:36.560 deviating from but of course it's anything but a timeless norm the fact is that throughout

00:04:44.120 american history and really indeed throughout western history growing up has been a protracted and

00:04:52.080 difficult process there is nothing unique about how difficult it is to grow up today

00:04:58.400 but furthermore uh in that earlier world adulthood was not frowned upon adulthood was something aspired to

00:05:08.740 hard as it is to believe people wanted to look older not younger in the past and

00:05:17.280 they associated adulthood not with settling down but rather with maturity responsibility

00:05:28.700 worldliness knowingness in other words uh what i'll call the cary grant version

00:05:38.020 uh or the katherine hepfern version of adulthood something to aspire to not something to recoil from

00:05:45.880 and what happened uh what what sort of cultural sociological i mean i'm sure economic changes i mean

00:05:53.720 it's very complex but why did our view of adulthood as something to aspire to transition to something like

00:05:59.960 man i'm going to go get plastic surgery so i get rid of the crow's feet and i'm going to get a tummy 0.51

00:06:04.620 tuck and i'm going to buy us the ferrari i mean what what happened well partly for very good reasons that

00:06:11.580 is the image of adulthood increasingly became a kind of straight jacket and what i mean by that is

00:06:20.460 individuals were finding it more and more difficult to live lives that they themselves found to be

00:06:29.220 fulfilling this was of course particularly true for women women who married at the age of 19 or 20

00:06:38.920 uh had three children by the time they were 25 this was the generation that divorced at extremely high rates

00:06:47.900 they found that life constraining but there's something else going on and that's really the triumph of

00:06:55.040 youth culture it's hard to remember but up until the late 1950s or early 1960s adult culture dominated

00:07:06.820 uh american tastes nat king cole or pat boone were still at the top of the charts at the end of the 1950s

00:07:17.420 but what happened of course because we all uh experienced this is that youth culture became much more

00:07:27.820 attractive and utterly displaced the more traditional adult culture which anyway adults were retreating from

00:07:37.900 uh in the face of television suburban living and the like

00:07:42.800 that's why today uh you'll have parents and children who have the same musical taste like they'll both love

00:07:49.880 rock bands for example which which is extraordinarily shocking to me uh you know i i was born in 1953

00:08:01.040 and my father who participated in world war ii that experience seemed immensely remote from me

00:08:08.760 well that was like the where my my children are way further from the vietnam war and yet i expect them

00:08:17.560 to be aware of it yeah and it's sort of that that theme that that breakdown between generations was like

00:08:23.880 the theme of a lot of movies in the 1950s right uh like rebel without a cause where you have the angsty gene

00:08:30.120 james dean you know it's not like oh it's breaking me up you don't understand me that was that's what it was

00:08:35.680 like but it's not so much like that anymore well i think you're exactly right but the psychological

00:08:44.500 consequences i think are interesting that is it's become more difficult for young people to cut the

00:08:54.000 umbilical cord and truly establish an independent identity and if your culture is quote-unquote derivative

00:09:03.060 of your parents culture if your parents are in constant touch with you which in many ways is a good

00:09:10.440 thing but it's complicated of course psychologically how do you develop an independent identity where you

00:09:18.100 do it often in transgressive ways that aren't positive and uh you know some of the transgressions are

00:09:29.460 pretty minor tattooing body piercing and the like and some of the transgressions are a little more

00:09:37.060 significant uh of which the challenges of growing up of of assuming financial responsibility for oneself

00:09:47.140 for example have become more difficult so i thought it was interesting uh in your first chapter you discuss

00:09:55.380 um the sort of life stages that we've we've tried to break down life into different stages and you you

00:10:01.920 talk about some uh famous people who uh didn't have the the traditional we call the traditional

00:10:09.760 uh transition in adulthood where they left mom and dad started life on their own and that was it

00:10:15.100 uh they there were a lot of famous boomerang kids even in the 19th century um i guess one of them was

00:10:22.980 uh henry david thoreau was one he left his house parents house then came back was it was it was that

00:10:32.520 the reason why we transitioned to this idea of you know you you graduate high school you graduate college

00:10:38.020 you're off on your own was it because of economics really that you could get a job that could support

00:10:43.740 you and a person and before the world war ii and now it's much more harder to land a job quickly

00:10:49.940 that can sustain you and another family let me offer a somewhat different perspective

00:10:56.360 we in many ways have juvenileized the young and what i mean about that i mean that seems uh

00:11:06.100 contradictory right they have sex younger they're more likely to take drugs or to drink

00:11:12.680 uh how could it be that we've juvenileized them we expect children to stay home

00:11:19.440 to the age of 18 this was scarcely true in the past kids left home came back left home came back

00:11:28.280 let me give a couple of examples mark twain's father died when he was 12 he then went to work

00:11:35.740 he worked in st louis he worked in washington dc he worked in new york city he worked in keokuk iowa

00:11:42.960 all by the age of 18 i mean it would be hard to imagine a parent allowing anything like that or take herman melville

00:11:54.180 by the age of 21 his father went insane when he was 12 he left home he worked as a cabin boy on a whaling ship

00:12:03.860 he jumped ship he was captured by cannibals he somehow escaped uh he made it his way home 0.77

00:12:13.260 at the age of 21 i mean these are extraordinary experiences uh when melville writes

00:12:22.340 in moby dick that a whaling ship was my harvard and my yale college he's not kidding 0.98

00:12:30.340 that is at ages when we expect kids to be in a protected secure environment in close touch with their parents 0.83

00:12:41.200 kids showed remarkable independence now that independence was punctuated by return home

00:12:49.320 uh which had its own psychological consequences but

00:12:54.400 they assumed that young people had a certain kind of fortitude and independence that we do not assume today

00:13:04.980 you talk about this in your book as well about how college has changed in the past 30 20 years

00:13:11.240 where uh it's become much more um encompassing like we we basically you transition from one parent

00:13:18.860 set of parents to parents that are basically that are college bureaucrats uh essentially

00:13:23.700 we we think of college as a transitional space it's a coming of age experience for many young people

00:13:30.760 uh nowhere is this more evident than in drinking you know we at least legally bar drinking prior

00:13:40.360 to the age of 21 and so college becomes the place where many kids learn to drink and over drink

00:13:49.340 uh it's it's an interesting environment uh the notion uh you know i grew up in the generation

00:13:59.840 that overthrew what used to be called parietals a word that doesn't exist anymore these were rules like

00:14:08.600 three feet on the floor if a woman was in your dorm room or that the dorm room door had to be 1.00

00:14:17.340 open the size of a wastebasket at all times i mean it's it's almost impossible for uh students today to

00:14:26.820 imagine that there was a world like that where women had to check into their dorm at night 1.00

00:14:33.160 and that there were curfews for women students that were not for men i mean it's an extraordinary

00:14:40.920 uh story about how that got uh overthrown and what an irony that parents who themselves threw off

00:14:54.800 all kinds of constraints are placing new constraints on their own kids yeah why do you think that is it

00:15:02.720 is just that we've were maybe they the parents saw what the freedom was like and they said well

00:15:09.200 that's not that great i remember the dumb things that i did when i was a kid and i don't want my kid

00:15:12.900 to do that i i think that's part of it but the big thing is that parenting in general has become

00:15:22.040 much more anxiety ridden and the anxieties begin even before a child is born we have the capability

00:15:30.480 in pregnancy of testing for over 700 conditions we can treat a handful of those conditions and the

00:15:42.320 effect of this is to scare prospective parents to death then after the child is born we have fears that

00:15:52.640 date from the 1970s of all kinds of horrible things that can happen to your kid stranger

00:16:00.080 abduction abuse in daycare centers or even in churches all of this creates an atmosphere of anxiety and

00:16:10.620 that has then been reinforced by an increasingly entrepreneurial competitive economy an economy where

00:16:22.880 many parents feel that if they don't give their own child a leg up their kid will fail in the race to

00:16:33.420 success so there is a view i think among many parents today that their child is a project to be perfected

00:16:45.420 and other people's children are problems that need to be dealt with

00:16:51.960 and i'm i'm wondering maybe there hasn't been any research done on this um but i mean what effect are we

00:16:57.960 actually i mean i guess it is that what the result of that what you said earlier is that we're juvenile

00:17:01.880 izing uh adults or young adults in a way because of this young and this of course makes it much more

00:17:09.960 more difficult to develop the kind of independence that this society demands but also that's necessary

00:17:20.500 for the kind of maturation that people need to go through uh you know it is not easy to throw away

00:17:32.000 all the supports of life not easy to throw away the road map and rule book and to chart one's own destiny

00:17:40.040 but that's what somebody needs to do and if parents are always there to uh cushion the blows

00:17:50.600 how can you develop that kind of radical independence that this society really does require

00:17:59.620 and so it often comes in sort of traumatic ways uh where kids who have not been accustomed to

00:18:09.940 failure or stress experience it in devastating ways so yeah you're seeing you're i mean you're seeing

00:18:20.080 some of the consequences today of uh increased suicide uh depression anxiety amongst uh young people

00:18:26.380 um that's sure a lot of that has been contributed by their parents being overprotective of them and

00:18:33.760 micromanaging their life so they can get a leg up you know one of the great ironies in medical history

00:18:42.160 is the reason that polio became a terrible problem in the 1950s was that parents were cleaning their

00:18:50.440 houses more than ever in the past uh polio had always been prevalent but when you get it when

00:18:57.300 you're extremely young in infancy or very early childhood it doesn't leave any lasting effects in

00:19:05.580 general but when it's delayed it has horrible consequences i would just suggest that this is a kind of

00:19:16.300 analogy that uh increasing independence at an early age has good consequences at later ages let me give

00:19:26.280 one more example in many quote-unquote underdeveloped societies kids do chores at extraordinarily young

00:19:36.900 ages two or three the children are often terrible at those chores but parents have them do those chores

00:19:45.360 because they know kids at that age want to help out and if they do it at that age they will help out later

00:19:54.320 we wait and then we have to force kids to do chores which they do only in the most uh resistant

00:20:04.720 manner possible so we wind up in we're trying to help them we're trying to protect them we're trying to

00:20:15.340 free them but sometimes things work out exactly the opposite of what we hope you said something

00:20:24.380 earlier that i just want to elaborate on briefly by almost every measure kids are better off today their

00:20:34.240 crime rates are down smoking's down test scores are up graduation rates are up they're better off in

00:20:43.560 almost every way except the ways that matter we have depression beginning at much earlier ages we have

00:20:54.040 kids showing signs of stress debilitating stress at very early ages we have growing numbers of kids who seem

00:21:05.000 to have difficulties in interpersonal relationships so you could be better off in the ways we can easily count and still be

00:21:18.760 worse off in the ways that really matter i'm curious if if you came across this in your research but do you think

00:21:27.960 there is uh going to be a generational backlash and what i mean by that is these you know kids my age

00:21:34.680 i guess i'm not a kid i'm a i'm 32 years old be 33 uh i have my own kids um but you know millennials who

00:21:41.880 are raised by baby boomer parents who are helicopter parents and really micromanage their life do you think

00:21:47.480 these millennials who are starting to have kids are going to do the like swing the opposite direction and be a little 0.99

00:21:52.040 more um liberal i don't know free uh you know not as not as uh micromanaging with their kids life

00:22:00.920 well john edwards the uh failed presidential candidate uh disgraced presidential candidate

00:22:09.160 spoke of two americas and increasingly we're seeing two americas with very different life trajectories

00:22:19.480 and it's very much rooted in education and class it is not an accident that eighty percent of the kids

00:22:30.520 in the ivy league have two parents who've never been divorced which is wholly unlike the rest of society

00:22:40.360 uh we have a more affluent better educated uh population that leads a much more stable lifestyle

00:22:53.480 uh and that has lots of resources to shower on its children and has sufficient money to deal with the 1.00

00:23:01.640 work family tensions that beset everybody and then we have another very large segment of the population

00:23:12.200 that lives amid a kind of swirl of relationships that has a lot of instability in their lives

00:23:22.040 that live paycheck to paycheck but sometimes that paycheck's not there

00:23:26.360 not there and we're increasingly seeing these two routes through adulthood and it's scary because as a

00:23:37.720 society we know how much this society has depended on a stable family network to help us when we're old

00:23:46.680 and if you don't have that who's going to take care of you

00:23:54.120 yeah yeah that's that's that's a great that's a great point um so basically there we we have

00:23:59.240 two today we have two trajectories of adulthood and it all depends on social class right or economic class

00:24:07.000 well let me give you an example that i know well which is involves higher education

00:24:14.120 in higher education all the benefits flow to having a bachelor's degree and increasingly having

00:24:21.880 a master's degree or some other professional degree but the benefits only come if you have a degree

00:24:31.240 but of all the kids who enter college only a little less than 60 percent will ever get a college degree

00:24:43.560 and it's much much worse at community colleges where the overwhelming majority of students who

00:24:51.240 enter a community college will never get an associate's degree all these kids are getting

00:24:59.720 is debt now there's been a lot of talk about debt but debt can be a good investment all of us go into

00:25:08.200 debt to buy a house often to buy a car because we view it as a investment in our future

00:25:17.160 college debt is a real problem not for people who graduate from name brand institutions

00:25:23.720 they'll be able to pay off their debts uh the obamas didn't do so poorly uh but it's the people who

00:25:33.160 never got a degree so they never got the benefits so even if their college debt is relatively low they are

00:25:42.040 going to be hard-pressed to repay it and that's going to have consequences not only for them but uh also

00:25:48.680 for our country as a whole absolutely i mean i uh am a historian and i'm a college professor but i'm

00:25:59.320 also an academic administrator and the job i've been given the task i've been assigned in what's really the

00:26:07.560 second largest uh public university system in the country is affordability access and student success

00:26:17.240 we need to get more students for it'll be good for them and it will be good for society

00:26:26.120 let's um shift um topics here a bit um and let's talk about friendship because it's something that

00:26:32.600 we don't think too much about when we think about adulthood because if you do the survey said that

00:26:37.880 most adults don't have very many friends i think one uh is what it is but at a previous time adulthood

00:26:44.520 was a time of when you had your most stable relationships and you meant people even men

00:26:48.840 included had lots of friends maybe three or four how we watch friends on tv and in real life we have

00:26:59.960 lots and lots of casual acquaintances and we have lots and lots of work colleagues

00:27:09.640 now increasingly we've seen a gender divide in friendship that is women are much more likely than men

00:27:21.800 to engage in intimate conversation with a small number of close intimates

00:27:29.960 and men whose lives are tend to be much more work centric uh tend to have a lot of work connections

00:27:42.200 that don't provide the kind of friendship that we used to associate with friendship my father

00:27:50.760 recently died at the age of 95 when he was 94 he had four high school buddies

00:28:00.200 that he had grown up with in detroit and were still alive and still in communication at the age of 94 today

00:28:08.200 they're all dead unfortunately but these people had shared a whole lifetime of experiences they lived in

00:28:20.920 proximity they were able to communicate whenever they wanted to

00:28:27.480 and that is much harder to do these days our friendship networks are spread nationally or internationally

00:28:38.600 people are busy it's hard to figure out how to communicate email is okay but it doesn't convey tone very well

00:28:48.600 and anyway people don't tend to write those lengthy letters that victorians loved to write

00:28:55.160 so people find it difficult to sustain the kinds of

00:29:02.840 friendships with deep disclosure and sharing of feeling and uh providing day-to-day help and guidance that

00:29:13.480 friendship used to mean uh now friendship can take many forms and there is a form of male friendship that

00:29:22.440 involves bantering and joking that's a fantastic form of friendship but if it's but friendship ultimately i

00:29:33.720 i think and i think and i say this with great hesitance but i think requires face-to-face

00:29:40.440 time and that it really can't be totally replaced by facebook and other forms of social media those are

00:29:50.120 wonderful for keeping fossil friendships alive but at some point you better activate those friendships or

00:30:00.280 they're not real yeah yeah i thought it was interesting too that another reason why friendship has gotten

00:30:05.960 harder in the modern world is um we've become more family focused so men in particular are encouraged uh

00:30:15.160 to spend more time with their families and say their grandfathers or great friend grandfathers who

00:30:19.720 might have gone off you know a couple nights a week to go play poker with the boys or go to a lodge night

00:30:25.160 uh now men are encouraged to stay home and spend time with their family

00:30:30.760 it's interesting uh that this remains the case women are much more likely to be for example in book clubs 0.99

00:30:38.680 or other kinds of activities like yoga than men even though the male breadwinner

00:30:49.880 conception of gender roles is broken down uh many men continue to hold to that vision

00:30:59.640 it's it's evident in a variety of ways and there's reasons why people do it uh men earn

00:31:06.520 much higher incomes than women partly because they work longer hours in uh more in very stressful fields

00:31:17.640 and uh they still view their job as the key to the family's financial success but that comes at a cost

00:31:28.680 cost is no friends and and uh ironically if you put too many burdens on a lonely life raft that life

00:31:43.480 raft will sink for most men they say that their closest intimate is their spouse their partner

00:31:53.080 and if you place all the weight on that relationship it's more than that relationship can bear

00:32:00.280 so i think uh so reviving friendship reclaiming friendship is not just a good thing in the

00:32:12.360 abstract it'll actually produce better intimate relationships in the long run yeah it seems like

00:32:17.960 it's great for everything it's great for you your emotional needs uh it's great for your relationship

00:32:21.720 uh and i feel like you know there was a time when friendships yeah you said provided a

00:32:26.760 support a social support whenever you were sick or you needed help you didn't you didn't have to go

00:32:32.840 to a therapist you didn't have to go uh rely on paid services to you know for someone to mow your lawn

00:32:38.680 like your friends would come over and do that for you but we we don't have that anymore so we have

00:32:42.600 to go out and to the marketplace to get these services that we once would get from family and friends

00:32:47.960 uh precisely more people of course will die from loneliness than will die of cancer uh we may call

00:32:57.880 it something else but there is no question that the social isolation that our society has uh contributes

00:33:07.640 to a lot of problems with our psychological and even our physical well-being you know one thing that's

00:33:15.800 weird about our society is we don't recognize friendship that is no obituary mentions who your friends are

00:33:26.680 but we also legally castigate friendship in the 18th century nobody saw nepotism as a bad thing

00:33:38.520 networks were how people got jobs in general we've eliminated nepotism for

00:33:45.480 good reasons but one message that we're sending is that friendship should never be instrumental

00:33:55.080 they shouldn't actually do things for you they should provide psychological support and comfort

00:34:03.560 they should provide laughter in your life and sociability but they shouldn't actually do

00:34:10.520 anything for you but friendships historically did lots of things for people and in the real world

00:34:19.800 that we exist in uh we all know that having a great linkedin network is a great way to get your kid a job

00:34:30.040 or to find a new job if you're looking so it's on one level we deny that this exists and on a different

00:34:39.240 level we do everything in our power to take advantage and leverage that network um so another part of

00:34:47.240 adulthood that is uh that looms large we spend most of our adult life doing this is our work

00:34:53.720 and i thought this your chapter on the history of work in regards to adulthood has is fascinating how has

00:35:00.680 it changed in the past 100 years i mean how do how do we view our work now that's different than how say

00:35:08.280 our grandfathers or maybe great grandfathers may have viewed their work

00:35:14.680 if you ask someone who they are they are their job people do not answer in terms of their religion

00:35:22.840 they do not answer in terms of their ethnicity in general they do not answer in terms of their family

00:35:32.840 they answer in terms of what they do our jobs are incredibly important to us they are the source of our very identity

00:35:44.840 and this becomes evident when you see uh americans today take fewer vacation days than ever uh at least

00:35:58.920 in the uh modern period that is the last hundred years uh americans only take 16 days of vacation a year

00:36:07.800 this is extraordinary uh it's as if we live to work which europeans have long accused us of doing

00:36:18.120 what's interesting to me is that american history has a long tradition of alienation towards work

00:36:29.960 long before karl marx americans were talking about wage slavery

00:36:37.160 they were talking about the dehumanization of work if you read herman melville

00:36:46.360 you'll see tales that talk about the mindlessness of work and this is a long time ago but what's striking to me

00:36:58.600 is that the language of alienation from work seems to have disappeared from american society

00:37:06.280 uh the kind of notion that work shouldn't be all your life is about has dissipated uh this is scary

00:37:18.440 uh it's not a product of some corporate plot to brainwash people to work harder clearly this was

00:37:28.120 self chosen by americans to embrace work and it's not just of course men who've embraced work but women

00:37:38.120 as well and many many americans find retirement the most difficult transition of all because everything

00:37:49.960 that was meaningful in their life was tied up with work including their sociability

00:37:58.040 so it's scary that we've lost the uh the old view take this job and shove it uh

00:38:08.840 the kind of view you know popularized not so long ago in movies like nine to five

00:38:15.000 life and we act as if you can find the meaning of life exclusively in your work

00:38:25.080 yeah that's interesting because um i see that a lot particularly in the online world where you can

00:38:30.200 find coaches life coaches um programs you can take where the whole goal is to help you find your life's

00:38:38.840 calling which is basically it's your life's work and how you can make money

00:38:42.280 right simply doing the thing you love

00:38:48.760 um but the problem with freud once said that the meaning of life lies in two things love and work

00:38:59.080 but he's wrong of course because the well-rounded life actually has way more than that in it

00:39:05.800 uh it's hard i think these days to see that to see that there are other worlds that are worth

00:39:16.040 spending time and energy on we've become narrow we've become focused we're incredibly productive

00:39:26.840 and then one has to ask for what yeah i ask myself that a lot um so you mentioned earlier

00:39:37.160 about the angst of parenthood um but adulthood itself is filled with lots of of angst and i think

00:39:43.960 we're all familiar with the the midlife crisis but now you're you're even hearing uh reports of that

00:39:49.880 there's a quarter-life crisis of people in their 20s who are experiencing this anxiety about there's

00:39:55.720 yeah it's an existential crisis um what what causes that angst in adulthood and why is it starting

00:40:03.800 earlier and earlier

00:40:08.040 when there was a clearly defined road map through adulthood when there were clearly defined gender

00:40:16.760 norms and clearly defined expectations what me worry as alfred e newman who would say but when there aren't

00:40:29.560 when there's no well-defined uh navigational tool no gps that tells us that we're on track

00:40:38.200 when we live in a world where we're constantly bombarded with consumer delights how can you ever feel happy

00:40:48.440 where you are the grass always will appear greener someplace else and you will feel that

00:40:58.440 that things could be better than they are and maybe they could be uh the fact is that many people are now

00:41:09.160 able to reinvent themselves multiple times and move onward and become truly the author of their own life

00:41:17.400 course and who am i to say that there's anything wrong with that each of us has to determine that for

00:41:24.760 ourselves but the price we pay for that freedom is anxiety

00:41:34.840 this is what kicker guard like the existentialist would would say absolutely yeah and i think i think

00:41:42.760 you also mentioned in your book as well is that modernity has given us with the technology and science

00:41:47.400 that we have has given us sometimes a false sense of control over life and when things don't turn out

00:41:54.440 the way we do the way we think they should turn out uh it's upsetting because like you think i should

00:42:00.280 have control over this but you don't yeah there are two cultures i would argue there's a culture of

00:42:09.240 chance and a culture of control if you are poor you're much more likely to embrace the culture of chance

00:42:19.880 uh you will be much more likely to play the lottery or to gamble because maybe luck will come your way

00:42:32.680 but for many well-educated adults they inhabit the culture of control after all they made their own way in

00:42:43.160 life and they're going to do everything in their power to make sure that their kids

00:42:48.600 are successful and don't suffer downward mobility

00:42:54.200 but a culture of control is in many ways an illusion illness or accident can strike any time

00:43:04.120 it can strike randomly and unexpectedly one of the shocks that i've had growing up

00:43:12.200 is discovering the number of people who've died who i was close to uh we sort of think for good reason

00:43:21.720 that people live a long time right now uh that most people will live into their 70s or 80s and yet

00:43:32.440 about one in six men and one in nine women will die between the age of 20 and 65 which is way higher

00:43:45.400 i think than most of us assume and they did not die because they were bad people they did not die because

00:43:54.680 they had bad lifestyles they died by chance and misfortune for the most part and that's a scary world

00:44:07.640 to live in it should remind us a bit of the world of our ancestors where they had much less control than we do today

00:44:16.920 but it also means that we need all kinds of support systems

00:44:22.680 because sometimes the bell will ring for thee

00:44:29.400 steven this has been a fascinating discussion before we end up one last question um because i get this

00:44:33.960 question a lot from our podcast listeners and the guys who read the website and the question is like

00:44:40.600 how do i know i'm a man right there's you have guys in their 30s who will say like i still feel like i'm

00:44:45.960 18 years old um with this breakdown of traditional markers of adulthood how do we know when we've become

00:44:53.960 an adult what is there some is it a psychological thing i mean or there what is it that we can know

00:44:59.000 that we're an adult first i think when we're financially independent you have to be able to support yourself and

00:45:08.840 if you can't do that then i think you're not really an adult you're a dependent and then the second thing

00:45:18.600 is the assumption of responsibilities for other people uh almost all adults bear a lot of responsibility

00:45:30.440 for children for a partner a significant other often for siblings increasingly for older parents

00:45:42.520 and this can be a tremendous burden it's a burden that uh few of us were really prepared for and so it

00:45:52.760 comes a bit as a shock but it's one of those things that defines adulthood and then

00:45:59.640 i'll add something else to the mix true adulthood ultimately comes with failure all of us

00:46:12.120 have when we're young infinite expectations for our future success the world truly does seem to be our

00:46:21.320 oyster and after all at our college graduation we're told that we're the most promising generation

00:46:28.680 on earth and that anything is possible and as you grow older you discover it's not true options narrow

00:46:41.960 and the chances to do anything at all in your life disappear and it's how we cope with that

00:46:53.080 that determines what kind of adult we are are we someone who eschews these responsibilities

00:47:04.040 is are we someone who does not want to take up the burden of maturity or are we someone who will embrace

00:47:13.720 that and yet at the same time will maintain a kind of playfulness and humor and youthfulness no matter

00:47:24.040 what their age so there's two paths we can go down we can become morose and depressed and whine and complain

00:47:34.520 or we can thrive on the freedom that we have and take advantage of the dependencies the

00:47:46.040 interdependencies that we've woven and make them meaningful if you want to have a happy adulthood

00:47:53.480 there's no choice which path you need to take very good well steven mince this has been a fascinating

00:47:58.920 discussion thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure you're welcome it's been a joy to

00:48:04.280 talk to you my guest today was steven mince he's the author of the book the prime of life and you can

00:48:08.840 find that on amazon.com well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast

00:48:16.840 for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at

00:48:20.120 artofmanliness.com and it's the holiday season if you haven't already check out our art of manliness

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00:48:36.520 podcast as well as the content we produce on artofmanliness.com as always thanks so much for

00:48:41.160 your support and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly

The Art of Manliness - November 24, 2015

#158： The Prime of Life — What It Means to Be an Adult

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