Twenty-five is not typically seen as a “difficult” year, and that’s part of what makes it so difficult. By the time you get there, you’re used to difficult years. It feels like being caught between phases of life, and it’s hard not to put yourself in drift and stay there. Both the resistance you’ve faced and the encouragement you’ve had as a young person back off at least a little, and without resistance or encouragement, it’s hard to find meaning.
From birth to age 18, or maybe age 22 if you go to college, life naturally has a sort of narrative character. Not everyone’s story is alike, but it seems like that span of time, for pretty much everyone, just feels like a story. While everyone’s story can be radically different—mine has been pretty unique—it’s largely the same structure for everyone. Each year means, developmentally, a particular set of challenges, and a particular vision for the near future.
Philosophers and theorists for the past several decades have focused a lot on how meaning is formed through narrative and many have concluded that stories—particularly our own stories and how we understand them—are where most of our sense of meaning comes from. In that sense, whether or not they realize it, young people have it pretty easy, at least for a while. Even if you don’t know where you’re heading, the fact that you have a trajectory—a built in direction, perhaps toward greater maturity—means you know reasonably well what to expect as the narrative progresses; and because it functions that way for most every young person, society has in part been structured around it. Your circumstances change; you change with them; and even with all the twists and turns and slip-ups and tragedies of growing up, you ultimately see, in your story, some form of progress. It is easy to believe you are heading somewhere definite, somewhere better than where you are now; it’s sort of programmed into you.
Another thing recent philosophers like to talk about is “the Enlightenment myth of progress”—the “Enlightenment” being the period after the Renaissance when modern science was developing, thinkers were turning toward reason as opposed to traditional religion, and democracy gained great prominence in Western society; and the “myth of progress” being this idea from that era that revolutionized our worldview in suggesting that society as a whole is improving and will continue to improve until we reach some sort of utopia in which all needs are met and dreams are realized and everyone gets along with everyone.
The reason philosophers like to talk about it is because they almost all agree that it’s not true. Further, they almost all agree that, however untrue the idea is, it’s still utterly pervasive among most people. I think technology has a lot to do with why many still find it plausible. To put it crudely, the man on the street thinks because the iPhone 5 is substantially better than the iPhone 4s, the whole world is moving in the right direction; whereas someone with some highlights of the twentieth century in mind—two world wars and a holocaust, for instance—is not so readily convinced things are improving. The Enlightenment’s “meta-narrative”—its grand, overarching story that says we’re getting better, is fiction.
But that fact has not made its way into the contexts that most significantly affect the worlds we grow up in. It’s still everywhere, and people still want to believe it, so it’s even harder to dislodge. The idea of progress makes particular sense to young people—even ones so young they can’t understand it—and it’s actually pretty reasonable for them to buy into it. Growing kids do see remarkable advances each year as they grow up and mature, physically, emotionally, psychologically, and so on. It’s easy to believe things are just supposed to get better.
My theory is, once you hit your mid-twenties, not only does progress become less obvious, but the whole idea of your life as a continuous story makes less and less sense, and you’re hard pressed to stay engaged and keep moving forward. As an adolescent you can be in drift and still move forward; the story itself carries you forward; but by the time you graduate, “in drift” no longer means “coasting”—something adults lament but ultimately condone in adolescents; it means something more like “stagnant.” From what I can tell, life does seem to pick up again once you’re in full-fledged adulthood, but that really doesn’t seem to begin until you’re about thirty—maybe until you have a spouse; maybe until you have kids. Mine certainly hasn’t started up again.
To be continued...
No comments:
Post a Comment