People, let’s talk about age and youth. Are we not constantly goaded by age expectations and limitations? What is considered appropriate and expected at a given age directs our days, the media being the biggest age bully bombarding us constantly with ageist propaganda.
Zeroing in a bit, I’d like to talk about my age, 24, which I consider the mid-twenties. The mid-twenties is the new purgatory, void or wasteland for this generation’s post-adolescent, post-baccalaureate not quite self-actualized adults. The pressures exerted by our woe-be-gone economy, domestically and abroad, have kept many promising grads far from gainful employment and pinned under the pressure of ever- inflating student loans. What we do? Go abroad to teach a bit, try subsidized programs like Teach for America and apply for Grad school. Does grad school secure a career? I sure hope so; otherwise I have no clue how I’m going to pay for it. It’s no secret, America runs on credit and interest. There’s no flying the coop, financial freedom for today’s twenty-somethings seems more and more impossible to obtain so we linger in our one bedroom apartments trying to enjoy what’s left of our supposed best years.
It’s prolonging the settling down and multiplying process. We don’t want to live at home with la mamma but we certainly can’t have the responsibility of multiple mouths to feed hanging over our heads. Many concede the cliché: this is a strictly male phenomenon, men want to be single, and men don’t want to commit or settle down and if women don’t it’s because they can’t nail one down. That’s a gross oversimplification. It has less to do with avoiding the family life or finding a partner than looking for a safe bet, stability and security before plunking down on a good plot of new suburbia and attempting the nuclear family.Many have abandoned the rat race to get hitched and stay in one place party by choice and largely by circumstance.
We have been split up from family and friends, shipped off to different cities to find work or relevant study and have been bit with the travel bug. Personal projects and individualist goals are loftier than ever and although the world is getting smaller the distances we share with those in our social web are not. Take myself for example, I currently live and work in Paris, France. My immediate family and a few high school friends live in North Florida. My best friend lives in Washington DC. My boyfriend lives in Paris. My closest friends live in places as varied as Brussels, south-eastern and south-western France and Miami. The rest of my family is scattered throughout the continental U.S. and Puerto Rico. I’m planning to go to Graduate School next year either at my Alma Mater, University of Florida or in Washington, DC, a big shift in the center of my social web.
I find myself far from many of the ones I hold dear, except for the liens the phone and the web has afforded us, without a decent job or financial backing and trying to figure out what my next move is. I know I’m not the only one. I wonder if the benefits of cosmopolitanism outweigh the pitfalls, if I should be worried about getting ‘older’ or losing my youth, if I look or act my age, if I’m too old for the shenanigans of college years and too young for these couply dinner parties, if I’m too irresponsible and spontaneous or fun and disorganized and mostly I worry about being financial instability. Am I wasting my time or just plodding on slowly with great anticipation? A family isn’t yet waiting in the wings for me but hopefully with a useful master’s degree and a decent job I can make a debut and take the first ticket out of twenty something purgatory. (the glitch is I’m bored of study and who wants to be shoved in a cubicle, no no no I’m not an idealist; I’m just lazy and like wide open spaces)
