In Search of Lost Adulthood

How do we define an adult? This question has surged in the last week, as Megyn Kelly defined fifteen-year-old girls as “barely legal” adults, mere days after online rumor-mongers redefined twenty-eight-year-old Rama Duwaji as a child. We saw this happen five years ago, when columnist Joseph Epstein called First Lady Dr. Jill Biden “kiddo,” just days after Donald Trump called his son Don Jr. “a good kid.” They were seventy and thirty-nine years old, respectively.

This problem recurs in America. Last month, J.D. Vance dismissed vile, racist comments from leading “Young Republicans,” ranging from their middle twenties to early forties, as “kids do stupid things.” But a decade ago, Connecticut schoolteacher David Olio lost his job for letting students read a sexually explicit poem in A.P. English, nominally a college-level course, because his students were “kids” and needed protection from adult sexual expression. Childhood excuses vast repressions in its defense.

Our society keeps moving the boundaries of adulthood further out. America has the world’s oldest legal drinking age, preventing youth from learning how to handle alcohol responsibly until they’re most of the way through college. An increasing number of upwardly mobile jobs require graduate degrees, keeping young adults from commencing their careers until they’re around thirty. The average first home purchase now happens around forty, keeping adults from building equity or developing rudimentary financial independence.

Every few years, Congress suggests adjusting the national retirement age. This probably makes sense to legislators, who are mostly lawyers and financiers, and can work as long as their brains remain active. But manual trades, like construction or manufacturing, erode your joints and tendons, so laborers get old faster than office workers. But for our purposes, keeping laborers working will prevent managers from retiring, keeping rank-and-file workers trapped in entry level positions for literal decades.

Perhaps worst of all, Western society overall no longer has clear adulthood rites. The rituals we Americans witness in travelogues like Roots are inspiring, and of course the mitzvah rituals of Judaism, and similar minority religions, still exist. But in the mainstream, ceremonies like baptism or marriage, or benchmarks like high school graduation, carry little weight anymore. With neither ritual nor financial independence, we no longer have any standards to objectively call someone an adult.

Because of these convergent forces, we see people performing the rituals of childhood well into physical maturity. Sometimes this influence is mainly turned inward. Incels and “masculinity influencers” like Andrew Tate perform peacocking displays of manhood that look like middle-grade boys flexing on the schoolyard. But we’re seeing more outward-facing, harmful displays, too: men like Bill Clinton and President Taco collecting sexual conquests like overgrown fraternity boys, leaving trails of scarred women in their wake.

Philosopher Alain Badiou writes that, in market-driven societies, men achieve adulthood by collecting the most toys. But as it now takes longer for youth to achieve financial independence, hoarding toys becomes prohibitively expensive. Therefore men adjust adulthood rituals to strength, dominion, and conquest. Who do they dominate and conquer? Women. Thus, as Badiou writes, men remain boys well into physical adulthood, while girls, to survive, become women at absurdly early ages. Just ask Megyn Kelly.

America’s shared definition of adulthood has become mushy and subjective because, in a society organized to protect capital, we turn humans into capital. Adulthood becomes contingent on economic productivity, freedom from parental support, and resources enough to have and raise children. Standards that many citizens don’t achieve until they’re approaching forty. To be enforceable, we need a standard age of majority: sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty-one. But for all practical purposes, these numbers mean nothing.

We’re witnessing a rare moment of bipartisan moral outrage over the continued lack of accountability for Jeffrey Epstein’s clients. And we should; very little encourages universal outrage as surely as child exploitation. But economic instability and job loss cause trauma as real as SA, if less visibly offensive. We’ve created a society where nearly everybody, in one way or another, is nursing the psychological scars of long-term trauma, and the people responsible suffer no consequences.

Within my lifetime, America has become a society comprised of traumatized children, trapped in cycles of learned helplessness, desperate for adult guidance. We only disagree about who, exactly, we consider a responsible adult. Does our society need a macho disciplinarian, a nurturing teacher, or some third option? Until we find a useful shared definition of adulthood, we’re all, in different ways, trapped at the level of dependent children, desperate for our lives to finally start.