Coming of Age in the 1920s: "The Damned and the Beautiful"

While we may think that undergoing adolescence today is one of the more painful points in life, rewind 90 years or so to the Jazz Age and the issues those college-age kids had to deal with will shock you.

When I first began my research on the quarter-life crisis in the 1920s (i.e. the issues teens faced in transitioning to adulthood), I expected to find evidence of teens turning to booze and partying as a means of escaping their societal roles a la "The Great Gatsby."

However, I discovered that teens then had a whole lot more on their mind than escape in the '20s. Paula Fass explains in "The Damned and the Beautiful" that teens rebelled in the '20s because the "imminence of death turned youth to pleasure-seeking." The recent end of the war and the knowledge that another one might be approaching thus turned youth to experience crises of the psychological variety.

Reading this, I couldn't help but wonder why people haven't made a bigger deal of coming of age in the '20s or during other war time eras. The quarter-life crisis didn't start gaining attention until the early 21st century, and yet quarter-lifers today aren't traumatized by war or determined to defy society's expectations because of a fear of death. Instead, we defer finding jobs because we have too many options and often because we believe we have too much talent to waste on a career we don't love. Our reasons for postponing adulthood thus seem less legitimate than those of 20-year-olds in the 1920s.