I’m 52 and still haven’t grown up

When I was about to turn 52 years old, I suddenly realized: I feel that I have not coped with the task of becoming an adult. What is it like to be an adult? A certain set of actions and behaviors? Everyone can make their own list. And perhaps you also feel that you are not able to match it.

I am not alone in this. I know many people of all ages, my peers and younger, who see themselves as failures because they failed to grow up.

I feel like I haven’t matured, but does that mean I haven’t really accomplished the task of growing up? I’m a writer, I live in my own apartment, I have my own car, I’m married. If you make a list of everything that is supposed to have and what to do as an adult, I quite correspond to it. Well, what I do not do is not mandatory. And yet I feel like a failure… Why?

My ideas about adulthood were formed in childhood based on observations of parents who turned 18 in the late 1930s and early 1940s. And they followed the model of growing up of their parents, my grandparents — three of them I no longer found alive. Those, in turn, came of age on the eve of the First World War or during it.

As a child, I learned the model of adult behavior that is familiar to today’s youth only from old films. The men always wore a suit and a hat and went to work. Women dressed exclusively in dresses, stayed at home and raised children. Material prosperity meant having a car and maybe a black-and-white TV and a vacuum cleaner—although it was almost a luxury item in the 1950s. Air travel was still exotic then.

Adults attended church (in our family, the synagogue), the society was rather homogeneous and intolerant. And because I don’t wear a suit and tie, I don’t smoke a pipe, I don’t live with my family in my own house outside the city, I feel like an overgrown boy who never managed to become an adult, to achieve everything that an adult is supposed to.

Perhaps this is all nonsense: there were no such adults in reality, except for the rich, who served as role models for the rest. It’s just that the image of a successful middle-class person has become a cultural pattern. However, insecure, fearful people try to convince themselves that they are adults, and try to conform to everything that others supposedly expect from them.

The urban suburbanites of the 50s also inherited the notion of adult behavior from their parents. Maybe they, too, considered themselves failures who failed to grow up. And perhaps the previous generations felt the same way. Maybe the conformist parents of the 1920s also failed to become «real» fathers of families in the Victorian spirit? They probably took it as a defeat not being able to hire a cook, maid or butler.

Here rich people are all right: they can afford everything they want — both the servants and the education of their children. The popularity of Downton Abbey is understandable: it tells about the life of the rich, who can fulfill their every whim, live the way they want.

In contrast, ordinary people try to cling to the fragments of outdated cultural models that are long overdue. Therefore, if now you are hunched over working at a laptop, if you are not wearing a suit, but hoodies and joggers, if you collect models of spaceships, relax, you are not a loser. Generations change, culture changes, you’re doing everything right if you don’t hold on to the past.

As Terry Pratchett said, inside every 80-year-old man lives a confused eight-year-old boy who does not understand what the hell is happening to him now. Hug this eight-year-old child and tell him that he is doing everything right.

About the Author: Charles David George Strauss is a British science fiction writer and winner of the Hugo, Locus, Skylark and Sidewise awards.