At a recent conference the dialogue got sidetracked on the question about when the “new middle age†begins (I’ll confess that it was my fault, I begged the question). The participants had fun guessing and throwing out ages from 45 to 65. I ended that rabbit-chasing and got us back on tract by saying that our problem isn’t so much that the midlife chronological point has move up, but rather the issue is that we’re dealing with a widespread case of societal protracted adolescence.
There are enough symptoms of this: young adults living in their parents’ home into their mid-20s, the appalling dress habits and lack of decorum (flip flops in church, stupid little boy baseball caps worn in the college, or graduate school, classroom), a lack of critical thinking, young adults into their 30s moving through a string of dead end jobs (rather than having careers), and the consumerism of “toys†for big kids (cell phones, iPods, x-boxes, video games, etc.). But worse are the thirty-something parents who seem to be no more emotionally mature than they were as teenagers. Pity the children.
So, it was with interest that I came across an interview with Diana West on the Orthodoxy Today website. Diana West’s new book is The Death of the Grown-up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.
In the interview West says,
I would say our adolescent culture suffers from a severe lack of cultural confidence. We think of adolescence as being a time to search for identity. Our adolescent culture is marked by a bona fide “identity crisis.” I went back to the definition of “identity crisis,” the term coined by Erik Erikson in 1970, and found that it describes an adolescent phase marked by “a loss of the sense of sameness and historical continuity of one’s self.” On a cultural level, we see that loss in spades.
You can read the entire interview here.
