The Twenty-Something Teens

On Delaying Adulthood

Olivia Rodrigo at the 2022 Grammys. Photo by Getty Images for The Recording A.

A number of weeks ago, Olivia Rodrigo released “vampire,” the lead single off her upcoming sophomore album GUTS, and was met with swarms of heartfelt tweets containing expressions along the lines of “Big day for twenty-something teenage girls.” Rodrigo’s debut album SOUR (2022) unraveled the tale of a seventeen-year-old scorned by first heartbreak, personal insecurity, and public scrutiny. While the album has been cherished by fans of all ages, young women in their early twenties have especially identified with the songs’ intense themes. Instead of actively relating to Rodrigo’s experiences in real-time, many seemed to possess a kind of retroactive angst - shaking their fists at the high school boys that mistreated them and the veil of comparison that attempts to enwrap teenage girls. But is the angst as retroactive as we think?

Olivia Rodrigo stans aren’t the only ones to wield the label “twenty-something teenage girls.” Fans of other young women artists - like actresses Rachel Sennot and Ayo Edebiri - have similarly graced their idols with the title. Based on my observations of these declarations, “twenty-something teenage girls” - or those who are knighted as such - appear to be young women in their 20s who possess the unapologetic, endearingly silly and messy traits of a girl growing through her teen years. These women are often energetic, sarcastic, hilarious, and have this air of stumbling through life and figuring things out as they go, regardless or not of their actual, material success. They have an approachability that separates them from A-listers but a sincerity that differentiates them from influencers. Their relatability feels unforced, absent of ulterior motives.

Tweet by @ally_sheehan on Twitter.

I understand why many are quick to identify with these traits. I know I’m not alone in my feeling that I should have a lot more figured out as an adult than I currently do. It seems as though many young people have made feeling lost in life their personal brand - millennials did coin the #relatable term “adulting” in the 2010s to complain about being inundated with responsibilities as a grown-up. Many people in a similar demographic as me may have parents and grandparents that were spouses, parents, and even homeowners before age thirty. Hitting those traditional life milestones by a certain age - if at all - may seem so out of reach that it’s laughable to many under thirty today.

There’s this sense that adulthood keeps getting delayed, like putting off jury duty for next year. Conversely, childhood feels as though it’s being extended, drawn out like a watercolor, the pigment running paler and paler. Research is showing that this is quantitatively the case as well - at least when you look at traditional Western markers for “growing up.” For example, psychologist Jean Twenge of San Diego State University corroborates the lag, reporting that American teenagers are less likely to have tried alcohol, had sex, acquired a driver’s license, had a job, or gone on dates than teenagers twenty years ago. Today’s teens are pushing those “firsts” into their twenties more and more, making modern-day twenty-year-olds similar, in ways, to teens of decades past. Perhaps it’s not a surprise that Rodrigo’s lyrics resonate with the demographic so much. 

It’s not the first time that this cultural tendency towards extending youth has proliferated. According to Nancy E. Hill and Alexis Redding, people have delayed adulthood throughout history during periods of economic uncertainty, such as a stretch of time beginning in the early twentieth century through the end of WWII. Though we often imagine marriages commencing and babies being born much earlier in the lives of generations past, it wasn’t uncommon for young people to continue living with their parents well into their twenties to save money in the early parts of the last century. In 1900, approximately 41% of adults ages 18-29 lived with their parents, and that figure rose to 48% in the aftermath of the Great Depression.

Similarly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the existential gripes that many young people face post-high school and post-college are nothing new either. Archived student interviews from the 1950s and 1960s reveal university-aged students experiencing anxiety over finding a job that enables them to survive while feeling intellectually and spiritually fulfilled. They expressed feeling pressure from themselves and their parents and mentioned feeling lost, unsure of where to turn to receive support. It’s not uncommon to find similar feelings expressed by young people on Twitter, typically in the form of esoteric statements about not feeling motivated to labor and contribute to the capitalist establishment, or blanket quandaries about delaying traditional paid work by going to grad school, shouted into a void that often responds.

It’s these types of online interactions and collective, ironic crownings of twenty-something teenagers that make the current wave of prolonged adolescence unique. Of course, being in a recession and a bleak job market doesn’t exactly welcome a fresh adult to jump off the high dive - that’s been a constant throughout history. It’s no young person’s fault that America’s political and economic landscapes make it challenging to live an ethical and personally rewarding life while making rent and saving pennies for rainy days. Yet, there’s a mutual identification - a branding of sorts - that makes this delayed round of adulthood feel particularly nuanced.

As I often do, I’m quick to point initial fingers toward online communities. Twenge identifies “technology and the internet” as playing a large role in this delay in traditional social maturation. Since so much of young people's social lives exist online, there may be a greater desire to stay at home than to be out and about, which may have a way of stunting the growing-up process. 

Twenge also calls out that modern teens may have a greater concern for physical and emotional safety than past generations, which I suspect is also an outcome of our social lives shifting online. Compared to physical interactions, the internet offers a minimized risk of skinning one’s knees or being socially rejected. And in a time when therapy-speak is migrating more online and being reduced to buzzwords of the day (setting boundaries, healing your inner child, avoiding “triggers,” etc.), this desire to safeguard one’s emotional safety seems all the more important to young people - particularly in the context of “toxic” friendships and performing undesired labor.

However, in certain situations, what can seem like steps toward emotional maturity are actually steps backward, refusing effort simply because it’s hard and having responsibility is draining. For example, refusing to execute labor because there’s “no ethical consumption under capitalism” is relatively easy online, it simply requires you not to do work. However, this digital identity often doesn’t require you to “do” anything in lieu of your paid labor sacrifice - such as devoting your reserved time to spaces and causes that actively work against the pitfalls of capitalism. One can simply be anti-capitalist by rejecting work and scrolling on their phone. Such an effect is infantilizing - it releases the burdens of responsibility and replaces them with no thoughts, just vibes, much like the blank mind of a baby.

When communicating about a desire to delay adulthood and refuse responsibility in online echo chambers, I imagine it has a cumulative infantilization effect. Internet users yes-manning one another further and further away from the edge of the diving board until they don’t desire to take the big leap at all. Why would they? It’s comfortable alone and online, where you can observe, consume, and maybe discuss without shouldering the risk that comes from “doing.”

I’m not saying that all young people should start seeking out marital partners, pursuing careers that go against their personal values, and hoarding property irresponsibly. Those metrics, while helpful to understand how cultural mindsets about specific institutions are shifting, are arbitrary indicators of “maturity” - one can definitely be married and/or financially independent and still claim to be a “smol bean” who detests “adulting.” Nor do I believe adults should necessarily abandon all media that the masses claim is “juvenile,” and seek out so-called “serious” works. In many cases, what art we consider legitimate and child’s play has always been tied up with prejudice in some capacity. 

What I am saying is that - in the real world - there is a level of ownership that young adults should take in their own infantilization. Often, when we refuse accountability, we refuse autonomy - we place ourselves in a perpetual state of being incapable of hurting others and making the world a better place. And it’s not necessarily our fault in an explicit sense; our brain wants to stay a child to survive in many cases. In this brilliant article for Dazed, James Grieg discusses with professor and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen how not having access to economic maturity subliminally necessitates a delay in emotional maturity. On self-infantilization, Cohen says:

“From a psychoanalytic perspective, [self-infantilization] makes uncannily good sense. It is a kind of identification with one’s own powerlessness, and so gives it a veneer of active choice…Childishness grants [people] a perpetual innocence; they are constitutionally incapable of being in the wrong.”

When one feels devoid of agency, it’s not uncommon to actively identify with that which makes them feel helpless. It’s like walking into a room on a “bad hair day” and declaring your hair looks terrible before someone else gets the chance to. Or beginning to solve an algebraic equation by telling your peers how bad you are at math. We think that claiming powerlessness as our own will somehow prevent it from poisoning our competence and others’ perceptions of us. But like all forms of self-degradation, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Cruel systems in our world - patriarchy, capitalism, and racism - are fueled by exploitation. These systems thrive off making humans feel incapable of being in control of their lives. Grieg touches on this, writing:

“The struggle against [infantilization] has always formed a part of feminist, anti-racist, disability justice and anti-colonial movements, which recognized that there is no better way to rob people of agency than treating them as something lesser than an adult.”

We have reasons to be upset at a world that is so out of our control. If adults were fully capable of economic independence and self-sufficiency, they would step into adulthood more completely. It’s a part of our nature to desire autonomy, as is it to seek human connection. But if we throw in the towel and refuse effort, we can’t expect anything to change. If we constantly choose submission, the machine will keep churning, it won’t let up and it won’t give you a chance to grow up as it knows that could lead to its cessation. 

Where possible, in the face of the challenges of our modern world and with an awareness of our own very real softness and personal challenges, I think we would benefit from pushing back against a world that reaps the returns of our infantilization. A life free of responsibility - as mind-numbing as it may feel - isn’t necessarily a better one.

Screenshot from a Google image search for “adulting.”

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For more on growing up, I suggest checking out my article, “How To Grow Up,” which explores the topic as it relates to women more specifically.