#158: The Prime of Life — What It Means to Be an Adult
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode, my guest today takes us on a whirlwind tour of the history of modern adulthood going all the way back to the 1500s, so we can see how adulthood or the concept of adulthood as it has changed throughout time and perhaps give us some insights on how young people can navigate adulthood in the 21st century.
Transcript
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
00:04:14.360
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
00:38:48.760
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
00:40:08.040
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
00:44:29.400
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
00:48:24.920
store we just released a new wallet one of a kind can't get anywhere else called the
00:48:28.600
the detective's wallet we've got deals going on free shipping for orders over a hundred dollars
00:48:32.920
go check that out your purchases in the art of manliness store support the art of manliness
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