The Case for Delayed Adulthood
5th October 2014
ONE of the most notable demographic trends of the last two decades has been the delayed entry of young people into adulthood. According to a large-scale national study conducted since the late 1970s, it has taken longer for each successive generation to finish school, establish financial independence, marry and have children. Today’s 25-year-olds, compared with their parents’ generation at the same age, are twice as likely to still be students, only half as likely to be married and 50 percent more likely to be receiving financial assistance from their parents.
A Voice of the Crust argues, as you would expect, that the prolonged immaturity that modern culture fosters (conveniently feeding as many people as possibly into dependency) is actually a good things. Any resemblance to the introductory sequences of The Hunger Games is purely coincidental, of course.
This is too pessimistic. Prolonged adolescence, in the right circumstances, is actually a good thing, for it fosters novelty-seeking and the acquisition of new skills.
For ‘novelty-seeking’, read ‘circuses’. For ‘new skills’, read ‘the constant search for something, anything, that will allow us to get a job’. The problem with the ‘new skills’ mirage is that success in life depends on some very old skills indeed, skills that today’s prolonged adolescents aren’t getting.
Studies reveal adolescence to be a period of heightened “plasticity” during which the brain is highly influenced by experience. As a result, adolescence is both a time of opportunity and vulnerability, a time when much is learned, especially about the social world, but when exposure to stressful events can be particularly devastating. As we leave adolescence, a series of neurochemical changes make the brain increasingly less plastic and less sensitive to environmental influences. Once we reach adulthood, existing brain circuits can be tweaked, but they can’t be overhauled.
So the Clerisy want to keep young people as plastic as possible for as long as possible, in the hopes of producing the New Soviet Man, or at least a sufficiently reasonable facsimile that will support, rather than challenge, the Crust.