Chapter 1 - Sample Chapter

This is a sample of the first chapter from Adult Themes. The full text of this chapter is available in the printed version of the book.

The Secret History of Adults

Jack’s apartment has exploded. Due to a possible accident with a gas fitting, all of Jack’s possessions are incinerated at once: no more Rislampa wire lamps, Klipsk shelving unit or Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern. It’s an Ikea apocalypse, with a perfect apartment for the young professional blown into so much particle dust. “I was so close to being complete,” Jack says, after discovering the gaping hole where his apartment once was. It’s a small moment in the first act of Fight Club, the David Fincher film based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. It is the point where Jack, the 30-year-old protagonist, begins to question his completeness. Does his sofa make him complete? Does a partner make him complete? If he has the right clothes, a great stereo, and a white collar job with prospects, will he be complete?

The contradictions of being an adult male are taken to extremes in Fight Club. Jack is culturally alienated, bored by his mindless desk job, and rapidly becoming a chronic insomniac. Nothing seems real and, as he stands by the photocopier, he realises what he has become, “Everything is just a copy of a copy of a copy.” That’s when Jack begins to experience a full psychotic break, and the alter ego of Tyler Durden emerges from within. Tyler is everything Jack isn’t; he’s unconventional, uncompromising and volatile. Tyler lives in a condemned house, with no family and no career to speak of – unless you count irregular stints as a waiter, projectionist and salesman of soap made from human fat. He picks fights with strangers.

Tyler Durden could be the poster boy of the disaffected adultescent – he’s not living a recognisably ‘adult’ life in any traditional way, and this makes him a threat, even before he starts playing with explosives. In one scene, Tyler confesses that after graduating from college he rang his father to ask what he should do next.

Tyler: He said, “Get a job.” When I turned twenty-five, I called him and asked, “Now what?” He said, “I don’t know. Get married.”

Jack: I can’t get married. I’m a 30-year-old boy.

In one brief exchange, Tyler makes it clear that he has rejected the life of the standard adult. This is not portrayed in the film as personal failure or a retreat from reality. Rather, Tyler Durden has delivered himself from the burden of a complete life. Jack, on the other hand, simply feels as though he has never grown up. Jack and Tyler are two extremes of a single identity – a well-behaved, office-working suit and a revolutionary anti-conformist all in one.

This struck a chord with cinema audiences. Fight Club made the top ten in Australia’s ‘My Favourite Film’ list in a 2005 ABC TV nationwide poll. It also managed to cross the gender barrier and appeal to a female audience, unusual for a highly violent film populated almost entirely by men. It spoke about the uncertainties of adult life, and many women were grappling with the same questions. As one female fan writes, “Fight Club’s message about becoming a real adult instead of the adult you were programmed to become speaks just as well to women as to men.” [1] So what is a real adult, and how does it differ from the kind of adult we are programmed to become? The original author of Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk, believes there is widespread uncertainty about these questions. According to Palahniuk, we lack any coming-of-age rituals, and this results in the kind of frustration and confusion represented in Fight Club:

I don’t perceive that we have a lot of rituals for establishing adult-hood in our society. It seems for me that it’s been about the impulse to rush out and buy a lot of stuff so I feel like a grownup, or commit to a relationship at age 17 so I feel like a grownup. It’s about trying to, in a way, arbitrarily complete myself with a rite of passage, because there is no rite of passage that says, “Okay, now you’re an adult.” [2]

Indeed, there is no widely accepted ceremony or event to mark the occasion of becoming adult. There is a faded convention of giving a house key as a symbolic gift of adulthood on the 21st birthday, representing the start of independent freedom. But as children more commonly receive house keys when they first start making their own way to school, at least a decade earlier, much of the symbolic weight is lost. Instead, we are left with Hallmark traces: silver keys emblazoned in 21st birthday cards or a quaint key-shaped cake. At the age of 18 we become legal adults, but does that mean that everyone 18 years old and above is automatically regarded as a full adult?

Not quite. There are large and powerful traditions associated with full adulthood that don’t come automatically, particularly in relation to work, property, marriage and raising children. There are social norms around what ‘responsible’ adults do: how they behave in the public sphere, how they engage with politics and how they enjoy culture. Many of these norms are unspoken and unquestioned, just quietly assumed; that’s the process of growing up. Following the expected steps in the process – be it taking your first full-time job, marrying your partner or getting your first mortgage – is seen as ticking off the boxes of adulthood. But what happens when those traditional practices of adulthood are delayed or disregarded?

Are there positive ways we can define adulthood in the absence of factors like reliable work, affordable home-ownership, life-long marriage or child-raising? Or are we left only with the ‘normal versus nonconformist’ opposition of Fight Club: you either choose to be Jack and try to follow the prefabricated path of adulthood or choose to be Tyler and reject it all in a frenzy of destruction?

Adultescents and other catastrophes

The ‘crisis of adulthood’ is not confined to Australia. The phenomenon of adultescence fills column inches in England, the USA, Canada, Germany, South Korea, India and China. There are some shared characteristics across the international dateline: adultescents are easily bored, scared of commitment, superficial, and interested only in the instant gratification provided by pop culture, fame, travel, Harry Potter books, mobile phones and iPods. It’s rare to see the mainstream media attempt a deeper engagement with social, cultural or economic circumstances. We’re much more likely to hear about the immaturity of this new group – a group that is underdeveloped and simplistic, yet also mysterious and threatening.

It’s hardly surprising that the word ‘adultescent’ was the creation of market researchers, making its debut in a magazine called Precision Marketing in 1996. [3] Since then, it’s been eagerly adopted by journalists and marketers alike. Recently, it began to creep into the major dictionaries. The Concise Oxford Dictionary added adultescent in 2001 and defined it as “a middle-aged person whose clothes, interests, and activities are typically associated with youth culture.” The definition had changed a little by the time adultescent became the Webster’s New World College Dictionary word of the year in 2004. It dropped its middle-aged connotations and became more broadly applicable to “an adult who has not achieved expected intellectual maturity or who indulges in the tastes and attitudes of youth.”

These are fairly loose definitions. Exactly what is the expected maturity of an adult, and what preferences and values are confined to youth culture? This question has proved difficult for a wide range of people. “What do we do with a generation who refuse to be motivated by money or power?” asked Sandra Yates, a director in the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi Australia, in an interview with the Australian Financial Review. [4] In her view, it’s a problem that cuts to the core of what adults are supposed to be like, and Yates expressed her concern this way: “How terrifying, how ironic, that the levers that have served us so well in business all these years appear to have no sway at all with the 20-something set.” [5] A real adult, in this definition, is someone who has a driving desire for wealth and a love of the corporate ladder. Subtract that and what’s left?

That’s not the only problem. “Growing up is widely considered an unpleasant and troublesome activity,” writes Michael Duffy in the Courier-Mail, “so too are marriage and parenthood, the two main activities associated with adulthood.” [6] It’s likely due to “some broader changes in the young’s attitudes to maturity,” Duffy argues. The end result of all this frivolity, according to some, is an old age of isolation and poverty: “Many young adults would rather see the world than pay rates,” writes Vanessa Walker in the Australian, “but the outcome may be a lonely old age in a council flat.” [7]

If this weren’t bad enough, some reports indicate that this unfortunate situation is now shared by the majority of the population who have reached the age of 30 in Australia, the UK and the US. Citing research by the British Economic and Social Research Council and the American Sociological Association, the Herald-Sun announced that two-thirds of 30-year-olds in the USA, UK and Australia fail “the three tests of adulthood–having finished their education, left home and become financially independent”.

These criteria may seem to be setting the bar pretty low. But what about someone who returns to live with their parents during a time of relationship crisis or financial hardship? What about those who go to university for the first time after raising a family, or return in their 50s to study a Masters degree? Is there really such a thing as complete financial independence when debt is so common, and when many relationships involve some kind of financial interdependence? Perhaps it’s not so surprising that the American Sociological Association’s study found less than a third of 30-year-olds passed the test. So how can you tell if you, or someone you know, are not a real adult? This question is treated seriously enough to merit a wide range of tests and checklists in major newspapers. Handy ‘cut out and keep’ charts to test your adulthood vary from the banal to the ridiculous. While the Sydney Morning Herald’s “New youth” article listed iPods and mobile phones as signs of adultescence, according to Britain’s Observer newspaper you classify if you’ve seen Lord of the Rings, sent a text message, worn trainers, read a Harry Potter novel, tasted Diet Coke or, perversely, if you moisturise. [8]

What is really going on here? Does your status as an adult depend on what films you see, or what you drink or wear on your feet–in essence, what you consume? Does it depend on whether you have a ring on your finger, a child in your arms and a mortgage on your house? Why do we need a test for adulthood at all? If adulthood is such a natural state, one that happens to all of us when we reach the age of 18, then why do we need a screening process to see who is a real adult and who has failed?

Of course, these tests for adulthood don’t touch on the question of values. They only look at the material signs of adulthood, be it financial security, fashion preferences, owning a home or being married. The values are assumed to go along with the whole package. But as we’ll see, values can be manifested in a range of ways that aren’t necessarily part of the conventional understanding of adulthood.

Getting a clear picture of how we collectively define adulthood in Australian culture is actually a far more complex task than checking an ‘Are you or aren’t you?’ chart while reading the Saturday paper over breakfast. But while those charts do provide us with a few clues about how this debate is playing out, we are never given a close analysis of how ‘normal’ adults live or what their values might look like. Instead, we are given endless analysis of the problematic non-adult categories.

Hidden underneath all this is the fact that little is actually known about contemporary adulthood. What makes a ‘normal’ adult is rarely investigated. But the barbarians are at the gates: the concern around adultescents suggests an insecurity about the borders of adulthood, uncertainty about who is deemed to be within the normal category and who is outside it. How can we get a more detailed portrait of adulthood if only those who don’t fit the image are the subjects of debate? One approach is to piece together information from the other life stages, ones that are described in contrast to real adulthood: the figures of the child, the adolescent, and now the adultescent. By looking at the stages that aren’t considered to be adult we can begin to get a more forensic picture of adulthood itself.

References