Irresponsible and confused the American psychologist Meg Jay thinks that people in their twenties should get a grip before it’s too late. But, Lundagård’s Annika Skogar defends the right to make out without further reflection.
– It is now you make the investment in who you want to be. Eighty percent of life’s most characteristic events have taken place by the age of 35. Therefore you have to decide who you want to become. Now! It is Sunday afternoon and at the same time as the events of the weekend are being analysed in horizontal position through SMS, the psychologist Meg Jay’s TED-talk pour through my speakers. It’s my SMS friend and I she wants to get at.
Almost 25 years old and with a number of backpacker trips, second hand contracts and university credits done during our third decade of living we are still on the way towards an unclear future. Instead we are living in yesterday and push send: “He has so soft lips and such a funny laugh, but I don’t want to have his babies or anything like that. Since upper secondary we have been told that the traditional cycle of living has got out of hand. 30 is the new 20, and as kidults we sleep with whoever we want without matrimonial motives.
Generation Y, kidults, twixters, or may it be the lost generation. The nicknames of us born between 1980 and 1994 are many. In the beginning of the 21st century the pop-punk band Vanilla Sky bellowed their analysis over the new life phase that had started to develop: A thousand missed calls and texts I shouldn’t have sent. The truth is I’m 30 but I’m living like I’m 20 – that’s how I feel.
Often it’s stated that we never grow up, sometimes it is explained by saying that we don’t have a chance. That all the possibilities, the unemployment rate and the living situation makes it impossible for us to settle down. That culture and economy has created this new life phase which sociologists sometimes choose to call the prolonged teens.
Nowhere else is that statement as apparent as in a student life where the youth recreation centre has been replaced by another basement now called nation. Where childishness has it’s right to take any disguise and everything that happens is done waiting for real life happening later. As long as you’re here you’re safe. That’s what our parents did, and so do we.
The big difference is that the average age today for graduating from Swedish universities is 29 years old. The age of establishment, that being when three quarters of an age group have employment, was in the year of 1990 20 for women and 21 for men. In 2011 it was 28 for women and 26 for men. The chairman of the largest right wing party’s student organisation called this situation a threat against the Swedish welfare state on the Svenska Dagbladet’s debate page in September. As a solution he suggested a depreciation of the student loan for those students graduating faster. The Social Democrats had previously come up with the suggestion of a three-term system to make young people generate a larger amount of hours to the economy. Because who would contribute to the welfare when everybody spend a decade studying random courses and going on round-the-worlds trips?
But if we disregard the economic growth craze and those who are concerned about all the twenty-something people who spend their time on everything else except on getting a stable income. Then what consequences does the pause button, the life between two life phases, have? Meg Jay is sure of her ground: -If you don’t start planning you will end up without the life partner you dreamt of, without the career you wanted and without getting the number? of children you suddenly want.
In her book The Defining Decade (2012) she breaks the myth saying that it could be a good thing during a certain amount of time not belonging to specific branch. That the oceans of time it takes to define ourselves and decide about our future results in nothing being done. She is irritating, but maybe also reasonable when arguing. And when time is up of our twenty something the outcome is random. Then soft lips and a funny laugh could do good as matrimonial material. Because then, as Meg Jay expresses it, reality has caught up and the expectations of the society on what we should have accomplished by a certain age puts us in such a stressful situation that we grasp at the first that comes around.
At the same time someone strikes a discordant cord. Is probability calculus and checklist really the right way, the truth and life? Isn’t the problem rather that society makes us unhappy when we aren’t able to give firm decisions or lack a settled plan?
The American author Frank Partnoy assert in his book Wait: The Art and Science of Delay (2013) that it is a good thing to wait with crucial decisions until the last minute. That the problem today is that the world around us insists on our attention and our opinions, at the same time as the evolution has trained us into taking fast decisions ever since the time.
Text: Annika Skogar
Illustration: Annie Axelsson
