If you're feeling behind in life...

Happy birthday to me (4 days belated)

Turning 30 has to be one of the strangest human experiences, and now that I’ve done it five times over, I can say with authority that my thirties are not bringing the promised best years of my life. I’d heard that these are the years when you still look pretty good — not too far off from how you looked in your twenties — and you know what you’re doing in life, and you have money. Arguably, very arguably, I’m one for three.

These are the sorts of circumstances that lead people to say they “feel behind in life,” comparing expectations to reality and coming up short. What did I expect though? I did things roughly to schedule: first date at 16, graduated from high school and started college at 18, first kiss at 20 (okay, that one’s embarrassingly behind schedule), threw a drunken party for my 21st birthday, graduated from college at 22 and started a masters program, finished the masters at 23, started a PhD at 24, finished the PhD at 29, married at 32. I’m supposed to be self-satisfied, right? I’m supposed to feel fulfilled. I’m supposed to follow the academic/professional milestone track, racking up higher pay and more managerial responsibilities, mastering all the jargon and pretending to care about the less fortunate from the safe remove of an apartment in gentrified Brooklyn.

Instead, at the age of 34, I left a nonprofit job that promised serious professional development potential, vowing to never again work in the sector. I think you call this a “pivot.” I decided to be unemployed while my savings held out to see how much I could write. All the while, I could feel the disapproving stares from all the adults in my life. My only solace came in all the other people talking online about being twenty- (or thirty-) something teenagers. I instinctively understood; it was like I’d missed some rung on some ladder, and now I was slipping all the way down. Or maybe I was just tired of climbing. Not only was I seemingly assuming the professional responsibilities of my age, I was locked into an inescapable cycle of experimenting with my hair; my eye makeup getting heavier and darker. I bought a cheerleader skirt from a thrift store, and it became my most-worn item of 2024. I listened to a lot of pop music.

Whether you’re a twenty-something or a thirty-something teenager, your lack of maturity truly inspires moral panic among the cultural commentator class. What am I doing, trying to finally figure out what kind of eyeliner looks good on me, when I should be settling down and having a kid? How dare I leave behind a decent job in a sector I hate? What the hell is going on with my hair? Why, oh why, aren’t millennials adopting the gravitas of advanced age? Haven’t you heard, we’re aging terribly? We’re wasting our time clinging to some fading youth when we should be taking our jobs very seriously and not — I repeat: not — listening to Olivia Rodrigo.

Madison Huizinga wrote in Cafe Hysteria about “The Twenty-Something Teens” who are extending childhood and delaying adulthood — a fixture of times of economic insecurity. The idea is that we retreat into a state of internet-fuelled, childlike dependence, unwilling to take responsibility for their actions, refusing to get jobs and contribute to society. The result, it seems, is self-infantilization, with dire consequences:

“What I am saying is that — in the real world — there is a level of ownership that young adults should take in their own infantilization. Often, when we refuse accountability, we refuse autonomy — we place ourselves in a perpetual state of being incapable of hurting others and making the world a better place.”

But is youth really nothing more than lazy narcissism? What if youth is also about being curious, trying new things, taking chances, figuring out how to connect with the world? When you act like a teenager, what if you’re looking at society, asking why it’s structured how it is? What if this “maturity” we’re all supposed to attain is just another word to describe passivity, capitulation to an economic system that benefits someone, but most certainly not any of us? What if quitting my job and trying to “take my creative projects seriously” at the age of 34 was the best thing I could have done, not only for myself, but perhaps (in the most grandiose way possible) for the world at large?

This isn’t to say that a culture of women’s self-infantilization can’t be harmful, as Jade Hurley writes in “your fave is selling a pedophilic fantasy”:

“The impact of the “Year of the Girl” couldn’t end at media and aesthetics—we both know that. 2023, while a celebration of girlhood, also brought with it the return of heroine-chic, the normalization of cosmetic injectables, the buccal fat removal craze, and an obsession with luxury beauty rearing its head in Gen Alpha.”

Largely, I agree. I saw all those trends come and go too. But I also have to wonder at the extent of crossover between women calling themselves teenagers and those clinging to the appearance of youth for the male gaze.

I would say it comes down to a question of intent: whether these aesthetic choices are inwardly or outwardly directed. If you’re acting like a little girl for the benefit of men, sure, that could stoke some pedophilic fantasies. But is it so regressive if you’re wearing bows in your hair because you like them, or you’re singing along to music made by teenage girls because, even at your advanced age, you still, improbably, relate? What if the things we do to make ourselves happy are, in fact, the most radical acts? What if joy is just joy, and joy is important?

Not only does the apparent self-infantilization impulse stem from economic pressures — education costs putting people at a deficit before they even get started with work, costs of living making it impossible to recoup the losses incurred through education, homeownership out of reach — it also becomes a salve to lifestyles that could easily give way to unrelenting drudgery. The expected milestones are out of reach, so what do people do? They call themselves teenagers. They make fun of their situation and others relate. It doesn’t mean that no one is growing up; it means that no one has the means to grow up in ways anyone might have expected.

And while I think it’s a horrible act of institutional violence to lock people out of their “adult” milestones, I can’t say I feel longing for what I don’t have (namely the house and the baby). Maybe I would take a house, but when I say “house” I really mean a place where I can live at an affordable rate, without fear of eviction, and where I can make my mark on the space — painting the walls, etcetera. What I feel more than anything is a desire for fulfillment in whatever I do each day, a drive toward a life that still feels full of promise, even as I eventually move beyond my thirties and into the dreaded beyond.

It seems that the milestones we were sold (yes, sold) place too much emphasis on the big, celebratory moments — the graduations, the weddings, the career progressions. They come thick and fast in the late-teens-to-early-twenties, tapering off in the thirties, until it can feel like the last option is to have a child, passing the torch for another person (or, more cynically, another pawn in the capitalist system) to live out their own milestones. Days pass, years pass, doors close, possibilities disintegrate, the figs on our metaphorical trees die and fertilize (or poison) the soil for another generation. That’s the circle of life, we’re told. To ask for anything else is to self-infantilize. It’s childish. But for a society that wants us all so badly to have children, it sure does hate them and their curious, questioning ways.

After all that, would you believe me if I told you I’m still optimistic about what comes next? I’m shocked to say that I am. With all this thinking about milestones and the desire to go back to my teenage years, I realized that, ahead or behind or right on schedule, none of it matters. All these achievements I’ve been conditioned my whole life to want mean nothing; they were never intended to make me happy. They were intended to make me a good worker, a good consumer. Yet they made the days feel stale before they started, the years a race against the clock.

Now I’m 35, and I don’t care about advancing in a career. I don’t want to have kids. I don’t need any more big, expensive parties to commemorate my life milestones. I’d rather have small celebrations to make day-to-day life feel special. I’d rather take making friends and learning new things as my milestones for the future — not advancing through a system set on disposing of me once I outlive my usefulness. The beautiful thing about these simpler, quotidien milestones is that they’re available to everyone, and they’re available throughout life — no more milestone anxiety, no more drudgery of adhering to what you think you should do, no more falling short of where you think you should be. After all, it’s not about where you should be; it’s about where you are.