coming of age
are we living in the golden age of adolescence or witnessing its end?
There’s this line in Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha that I think about all the time. Our messy, unemployed heroine has invited a boy out for dinner after receiving an unexpected tax return, only to realise that the restaurant they’ve eaten at only accepts cash or credit card, and she has neither. This is typical of Frances, who spends the movie in a perpetual state of chaos that she can’t quite explain away and which her friends seem to have suddenly outgrown. Faced with the fumbled dinner, the only excuse she can give is ‘I'm so embarrassed. I'm not a real person yet.’
It could be a slogan for adolescence, that transitional space where one is neither child nor adult, hovering uncomfortably between categories yet not fitting anywhere. Yet Frances isn’t quite an adolescent anymore; she’s twenty-seven and teetering on the edge of adulthood with a dancer’s balance, unable to make up her mind whether to let go and fall. Frances Ha came out over a decade ago, in 2012, but in the language of today’s internet, Frances was the first 27-year-old-teenage girl.
And here we are, three paragraphs deep into the essay with the elephant in the room: girlhood. The topic on which everyone has a take; as Eliza McLamb wrote in a recent essay ‘it seems that every other twenty-something teenage girl is announcing her newsletter dissecting womanhood and culture’. Guilty as charged! At this point, everyone knows that the internet’s obsession with girlhood is symptomatic of a deeper feeling of alienation and disassociation among young women, a collective flight into a comforting fantasy of youth and femininity. When I wrote about this last year, I discussed Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of the 'easy path’ of self-objectification which is readily available to women, a capitulation to patriarchy bound up with the comforts as well as the constraints that traditional femininity provides. Yet the girlhood discourse is bound up with age as well as gender, an element which has been underplayed in much of the criticism. Adult women are freaking out about appearing older, seeking solace in invasive surgeries and shelves full of retinol, whilst indulging in the visual aesthetics and innocence / ignorance of little girlhood — and the school playground bullying, if the comments on influencer Courtney Ball’s ‘raw face of a 28 year old’ TikTok are anything to go by. Meanwhile, the obsession with anti-aging makeup and skincare has snared even the youngest children, causing a panic about ‘Sephora tweens’. This trend has been tied to the decline of kid-centric spaces both on and offline, and the conflation of children and adults within the same advertising algorithms. This isn’t just a gender issue, though the pressure towards beautification is deeply rooted in patriarchal gender roles. It speaks to a new attitude towards age, adolescence, and aging, as the first generation to grow up alongside the internet comes of age.
What does ‘coming of age’ even mean today? Adolescence or young adulthood is not a universal category, but one which is historically contingent and culturally conditioned. The ’27 year old teenage girl’ meme may be ironic in tone, but for how long? Perceptions of aging have never been stable and the markers of adolescence have shifted across time. In the Renaissance, men were still considered ‘youths’ in their mid-twenties, with male adolescence linked to apprenticeship, professional status, and readiness for marriage as well as mental development. Youth in the past was a more nebulous category than it is today, which seems to begin at the age of 13 and end with the end of formal education and entrance into the workplace, a process tied to the ‘invention of the teenager’. In the 1950s and 60s, the post-war era of economic prosperity, expanding technology, and increased leisure time enabled greater independence and socialisation for young people outside the family and workplace and led to the identification of a new phase of life. New music, fashions, and meeting places influenced the formation of a distinct youth identity, broken into different subcultures — and increased adult anxiety over juvenile delinquency. As Dick Hebdidge wrote in 1988, youth is characterised as both ‘commercial’ and ‘political’, as the ‘youth market’ and the ‘youth problem’, shoppers and rioters, though the boundaries between the two collapse under scrutiny. In the 1950s climate of prosperity, the ‘youth market’ became tied to ‘conformism’, taste, and acceptability, opposed to radical acts by the young, though in reality the two overlapped.
The word teenager establishes a permanent wedge between childhood and adulthood. The wedge means money. The invention of the teenager is intimately bound up with the creation of the youth market.1
Today adolescents aren’t just consumers within the ‘youth market’, but themselves consumed, as both children and adults idolise youth. This is a normal desire — who doesn’t remember being a child, looking up to the older, cooler girls, and who doesn’t want to erase the first wrinkle or grey hair? — yet increasingly this desire is an attainable reality and a standard which all ages are under pressure to meet. Accessible beauty and skincare products, plastic surgery, social media’s filters and anonymity, these things enable us to indulge in the fantasy of an unending, aestheticised, and apolitical adolescence which anyone can buy into regardless of age, whilst shows like Euphoria blur the lines between teen experiences and the explicitly adult. If adolescents are consumers, any consumer can buy into youth, whether that involves reading YA fiction as a thirty-something or raiding drugstore shelves for retinol products as a pre-teen.
At the same time, the less desirable parts of adolescence have trapped people well into their thirties, such as a lack of economic independence caused by low wages, the rental market, and competition for jobs. In the early 2000s, sociologist Frank Furstenburg wrote that ‘the conveyor belt that once transported adolescents into adulthood has broken down’, citing housing costs and the job market as driving young people into a perpetual adolescence, dependent on their parents well into their twenties. Social media has only made these real-world pressures worse. Previously distinct age-groups between twelve and thirty are being compressed together into one extended, catch-all adolescence, whilst losing access to the communities, subcultures, and friendships which traditionally grew up around teen culture. The ‘commercial’ side of youth is slowly swallowing up the ‘political’.
If everyone is an adolescent, is anyone really an adolescent? By which I mean: is the category of youth changing, warping under the influence of social media, consumerism, and an increasingly isolated, homogenised social life? It feels as if we’re operating within an outdated terminology, champing at the bit of the categories which define us whilst struggling to find viable alternatives which can adequately contain our experiences of age. It feels as if none of us are real people, as if we’re all trapped in transition. Are we living in the golden age of adolescence, or witnessing its end?
Midway through the second year of my undergraduate degree, I experienced what in hindsight I can only view as an episode of mania. I was twenty and didn’t know my place in the world anymore; I’d lost my footing. I didn’t feel like a real person. I was reminded of this period of my life when I was invited back to Oxford last month to watch Best Years of Our Lives, a new play preparing to tour the Edinburgh Fringe this summer. Best Years of Our Lives follows a group of twenty-something students navigating, and sometimes drowning, under the weight of the social expectations they have internalised. There’s anxious James on the verge of a mental breakdown, Grace, forced to drop out by her tutors, playboy Toby constantly underrated by his peers, and rich girl Hannah, desperate to make her relationship work.
The small cast and cramped black-box staging drive home that this is student theatre, but also theatre about students, the tight-knit, emotionally fraught relationships which develop in the stage between childhood and the adult world. There’s a confessional authenticity to the show which is sometimes lacking in professional theatre, though at times I felt the story needed more space to develop. The students in Best Years of Our Lives are trapped in a common predicament; constantly told to make the most of it, that they only live once, that these will be the best years of their lives, whilst also under enormous pressure to set up the foundations of a stable, appropriately ‘adult’ life. When they imagine their futures, they talk about careers, grades, and accomplishments, running the risk of sounding like a star-studded LinkedIn. But they can’t help but feel those dreams come at a cost:
GRACE: We would make time [in the future].
HANNAH: That’s not a guarantee. What was a guarantee, so I thought, was all of us, in the same flat together before life…takes off.
Why should an ‘adult’ life come at the cost of love, community, and solace? Why do we live in a world that makes making time so hard, why shouldn’t we fight it? At the end of Best Years of Our Lives, after their golden bubble is punctured by a friend’s suicide, the group’s supposedly ‘adult’ dreams ring uncomfortably hollow and the ironies of the play’s title are revealed.
Our need to achieve isn’t healthy; the disconnect between expectation and reality leads us to assume that ‘through accolades and achievement, we will experience a measure of reward and satisfaction’, yet this satisfaction rarely manifests as we want it to. Happiness is tied to our interpersonal relationships, not our achievements, no matter how large or enviable they may be. Yet it’s nearly impossible to accept this in a culture which sells a shiny vision of success, especially to young people, and especially online, when hobbies have become side hustles and our feeds bombard us with a constant stream of people living the dream. We’re meant to achieve, but we’re also meant to have fun, look good, existing in a perpetual shining youth.
In Frances Ha, Frances and Sophie also discuss the future, when a drunken Frances asks Sophie to ‘tell me the story of us’. In this back and forth, the girls echo one another and speak in plurals, imagining a future where their lives remain entwined even as they follow their separate passions.
Sophie : We are gonna take over the world.
Frances : You'll be this awesomely bitchy publishing mogul.
Sophie : And you'll be this famous modern dancer... and I'll publish a really expensive book about you.
Frances : Those d-bags we make fun of will put on their coffee tables.
Sophie : And we'll co-own a vacation apartment in Paris.
Unlike Hannah and Grace’s atomised vision of the future, this carefully woven ‘story of us’ is stitched with two pairs of hands. But it’s bittersweet, coming right before Sophie’s revelation that she is moving out of the apartment and taking a new step into the (adult) future — alone. Or if not alone, with her secure, sensible boyfriend, rather than her best friend, by her side. Frances isn’t a teenager, but the strength of her feeling and attachment to this shared dream are distinctly adolescent in tone. It’s why we love her and are infuriated by her — she’s a dreamer who can’t accept defeat.
Adolescence makes dreamers of us all, whether we’re dreaming of a better world or a charmed life with our best friends. But the divide between expectation and reality is widening. The myth of adolescence, which is now being marketed to a far wider age group, tells us these are the best years of our lives, the years which set the foundation for our future successes. The ‘youth market’ sells us a dream yet the material realities of the world tell us otherwise. Is it any wonder that Gen Z are sleeping earlier and longer, making less friends at work, and seeking solace in social media and online shopping? The students in Best Years of Our Lives live together, love each other, but they barely seem to know each other, defensively talking at crossfires when they do interact: ‘Gosh is this twenty questions?’ / ‘No, I’m just curious. I can’t ask you questions now?’.
It’s hard not to feel that we’re losing something sacred when we shrink our lives down to the individual unit and refuse to move beyond what comforts us, or what we’re told will comfort us. Influenced by today’s individualised therapy speak, would Frances just cut off Sophie when she feels betrayed, or vice versa, removing any chance for their messy but loving reunion? ‘I’ve treasured our season of friendship, but we’re moving in different directions in life. I don’t have the capacity to invest in our friendship any longer.’ Watching Best Years of Our Lives, I was struck by the way communication can break down when people can’t see beyond themselves, tiny fissures contributing to a total collapse of a relationship, and just how common this situation is for young people today. When her boyfriend James accuses her of ‘never listen[ing]’ and ‘have[ing] a hard time thinking of anyone but yourself’, Hannah lashes out.
HANNAH: You say I don't listen and only think about myself, but I do listen. You're the one too wrapped up in your own head to see that all I want from you is the time of day. If I don't listen that's a small response to how selfish you've been. Woe is me all the time. Well James, you're not the only one with things to deal with. We all have our own lives, same as you.
It’s in these moments of miscommunication that the play feels wincingly true to life, as friends and lovers talk at rather than to each other, failing to see what matters most of all. Best Years of Our Lives begins with a night out dancing and ends with a funeral, both communal experiences, built on love and solidarity, but the progression from one to the other is painful. I sense the production wanted to signal a coming together in the wake of a tragedy, but suicide as the end-point of a character arc is perhaps overused in drama about young people and the structure of the play actually does the opposite. It’s hard to believe the group’s final promises, watched over by James’s ghost, that they’ll stick together. By the end of the play, they’ve been forced to grow up. But if only they could have grown up in a different way.
Instead of rejecting adulthood to embrace a perpetual adolescence which doesn’t really bring us any joy, I wish we were capable of reimagining what adulthood could be. This is how Frances finds her place at the end of the movie; by acknowledging that she has outgrown the place she seeks comfort, that she no longer fits. That rather than fun and freeing, adolescence has become a cage. Yet this isn’t a revelation many of us are comfortable with, nor is it the dominant one in pop culture. As film critic
discusses in relation to women’s biopics, the coming of age or girlhood stories which have dominated our screens in recent years often end with ‘the filmic foreclosure of adulthood’, as when Sophia Coppola’s Priscillia drives off into the sunset. Within this genre, even in a film which is about escaping the prison of girlhood like Priscilla, ‘an adult life, or a free one, is a life that no longer has meaning.’ Why is it that our culture (at least online) assumes only youth has meaning? Like Peter Pan, we erroneously believe that if we grow up, we can never return to freedom, imagination, play.
I think adulthood can be meaningful too — in fact, I think it has to be. If we claim that a capacity for radical dreaming and action is the sole preserve of young people, whilst adults are relegated to ‘realism’ and ‘pragmatism’, how can we ever effect meaningful change within society or our own lives? Aging shouldn’t be a process of complacency, no matter the old adage about growing into conservatism.
Maybe this is why I found Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things so compelling. Poor Things is about growing up done differently, about aging not into conservatism or complacency but aging into a radicalism grounded in the material reality of the world and its horrors. It’s a second-go at coming of age, a challenge to do it better this time. A challenge to look at the violence of the world and react as a child would — with disgust and horror and innocent sympathy — yet with an adult’s ability to try and put things right. Growing up requires us to negotiate the chasm between dream and reality, to make our own spaces and communities, carve out our own niches and decide who we really want to be and what we want to do with the space we take up in the world. It also requires us to accept that life doesn’t end when we’re no longer desirable to Leonardo Di Caprio or when we discover our first grey hair, to stop trying to stave off the inevitable with retinols and overpriced sunscreens. Instead of clinging to the dream of vast achievements and unprecedented success, of everlasting youthful beauty, and individual comfort above all else, we must try and find happiness and solace in our everyday, in-person intimacies.
I want to be excited to be adult, not see aging as a shutting door. I want to feel like a real person. Who’s to say the best years of our lives don’t lie far off in the future?
Best Years of Our Lives by Yellow Brick Productions will tour the Edinburgh Fringe this summer. Further information can be found on their social media: Yellow Brick Productions on Facebook and @yellowbrickprods on Instagram and TikTok
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Dick Hebdidge, Hiding in the Light: On images and things (1988), p. 19, 29
i love this. it's so interesting how you brought up that men were considered youths well into their 20s... meanwhile women were ofc old hags if they weren't married and pregnant by like 14. the ancient greek lawmaker solon had this theory of 'seven year age cycles' and by his estimation men are basically still growing/changing/at their 'peak' until they're 56. i think about age a lot.
this is incredible thank you for this