Twenty-Something Angst Now and Then

Imagine yourself as a 23-year-old who has recently graduated from college. You are educated; you are motivated; you are ready to secure your dream job. You relocate to New York City only to find law school graduates pawing for paralegal positions and career opportunities in fashion becoming obsolete as magazines fold before your eyes. Rather than breaking into the fashion business and putting your French major to good use, you are forced to wade in the murky trenches of the magazine world—otherwise known as working for a tabloid. This is the career my sister stumbled into upon graduating from college and embarking on the job hunt. While my sister’s situation serves as an extreme case, many college graduates and twenty-somethings find themselves facing similar occupational and identity issues today. The problems that college graduates and adults in their twenties encounter—ranging from finding a job to coping with relationships to shaping a separate identity apart from college and parents—compose the “quarter-life crisis.

Transitioning to adulthood through an extended period of time because of increased freedom and options remains unique to our generation. However, we are not the first generation to experience difficulties as we head into adulthood. The young adults of previous generations experienced quarter-life crises as a response to societal expectations or transformations—the rigid social structure of the ‘20s, the advent of suburbia in the ‘50s, and the prevalence of women in the workforce in the ‘80s.

           

The issues of the ‘20s, ‘50s, ‘80s, and current decade thus vary in substance, but a common thread connects them. Through the study of four key primary sources, it appears that what assimilates these decades is individuals’ shared urge to rebel. In the 1920s, Judge Lindsay examined the rebellions of flapperdom and sexual freedom, in his subjective expose aptly entitled Revolt of Modern Youth. The revolt then shifts in the ‘50s to a counterculture of beatniks, presented in Growing Up Absurd, and rumblings of feminism, which finally came to materialization in the form of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique. We then turn to witness a more existential crisis in James Reston’s article “A Subdued Class of ‘80”, with adolescents rebelling to increased expectations, rather than to societal constraints. After twenty years of existential crises, matters do not seem to have transformed much as documented in the 2005 anthology Generation What? Instead, college graduates continue to defer adulthood and bemoan the consequences of increased freedom.

These primary sources offer direct snapshots into the lives of youth in their respective generations and give us a better sense of their issues, as opposed to current scholars who remain further removed from these generations. The sources, when compared to one another, suggest that quarter-life crises throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century share a common theme. In each instance society presented youth, namely twenty-year-olds, with a set of expectations and rigorous rules on how to approach adulthood. Youth responded by rebelling—sometimes subtly and oftentimes vocally. However, the study of these documents also reveal that the crises have evolved from a valid rebellion against societal expectations to today’s crisis for crisis’s sake.