where have all the grown-ups gone?

Maybe protracted adolescence is the anxious state of millennial life.

“I hate it when people call me on the phone,” I say between bites of a cheeseburger I had pulled the top off, sitting on a wooden bench outside a British pub opposite a good friend. It was a warm early summer’s eve and we had slipped out to have ‘girl time’ while baby and baby-daddy stayed at home. She nodded in agreement, laughing, the bubbles in her champagne uplifting spirits.

“Sometimes the calls are from people I actually want to hear from and I still avoid them. And then have to call them back.”

She giggles. “It reminds me of this meme I watched about how different generations open the door. The millennials are the only ones who want to crawl away and hide.”

“That actually makes me think of this tongue-in-cheek article I read about how the ’90s was the best time to be alive and someone in the comment section added that they felt like there are no grownups left anymore.”

“Right?! Who is coming to handle things and sort this world out?!!” We laugh.

But it’s something I can’t stop thinking about and talking to anyone who is willing to. Where have all the grown-ups gone?

On one side we have shrugged off many of the markers that have traditionally defined adulthood. Owning a home, a car, having children, staying in the same company and progressing through it over a long period of time… This may be due to constrained monetary realities but, more broadly, there’s an attitudinal sea change evident here.

Even those of us who do eventually have any and all of the above continue to focus on things unseemly in previous generations like prioritising lifestyle and living in the present and determinedly throwing ourselves into our passions and turning them into “dream jobs” at the cost of said markers.

We are stressed and confused but we are also very interested in the social justice system, a stronger healthcare system, the environment… all those things have pulled us to the traditional political left.

Politically millennials aren’t moving to the ‘right’ and to a more conservative mindset as is common with age. That’s just not happening for us. Partly because we are not acquiring those markers but also because we are just not thinking with that conservative mindset which could be seen as not thinking in a very ‘adult’ way.

This disinclination to grow up is reinforced by popular culture and technology. Our millennial lives aren’t stacked with a lot of adulthood or the perception of being adults. We didn’t change our behaviour at all when we moved into a much more adult stage of life marked by something like having a child or buying a house. We keep living the way we did in our 20s but will bring our kids along. We are able to devote our attention and income to self-improvement and self-indulgence almost exclusively.

In that conversation in the setting summer sun outside over burgers, I brought up the idea of how the loss of ‘the village’ meant that we were never initiated into adulthood because we were not tied into those kinship and tribal systems that previous generations were.

Our parents became unstuck from the village but they still had remnants of that experience remaining and remembered models of that. Then we failed to grow up because the ones who were supposed to show us how did not. They did not know how to or that they had to or were not there.

As adolescents, we entered a globalised world and often moved away and travelled for various reasons which meant that the village is now gone and we don’t have any memory of it.

Perhaps we could argue that if you destroy or abandon the village adulthood becomes untethered as well.

We imagine a world where no one is in charge and no one necessarily knows what’s going on, where identities are in perpetual flux.

The world is our playground, without an adult in sight. And we're largely okay with that.