On Adulthood: The Long Adolescence of the Permanently Rebellious

The career is a rat race. The mortgage is a trap. Nice things are materialistic. Ambition is capitalism colonizing the soul. Marriage is bourgeois. Stability is conformity. Planning is oppressive. And the fact that everyone is still sleeping on everyone else’s couches well into adulthood is not evidence that nobody has quite got around to building a life. It is community.

This is, admittedly, a magnificent arrangement.

Human beings have always needed ways to distinguish between what they cannot have and what they do not want. Counterculture simply gives the distinction better clothes, several tattoos and an excellent playlist.

None of this is to say that conventional life is inherently superior. Plenty of people have escaped miserable marriages, pointless careers and suffocating expectations precisely because somebody was willing to question what a respectable life was supposed to look like.

But there is another possibility worth considering: sometimes what presents itself as rebellion is simply prolonged teenagehood with better vocabulary.

And sometimes what looks like a rejection of conventional adulthood is less a philosophy than a permanent refusal to arrive at one.

It is an impolite possibility.

Therefore, naturally, we should investigate it.

The Convenient Moral Failure of Everything We Don’t Have

Human beings possess an extraordinary ability to turn circumstances into philosophies.

The person who cannot afford a car discovers that cars are vulgar. The person who cannot buy a house discovers that homeownership is bourgeois imprisonment. The person whose career has gone nowhere discovers that careers are spiritually empty. The person who spends Sunday morning recovering on somebody else’s sectional discovers that brunch is an affectation of neoliberal consumer culture.

Perhaps.

But one occasionally wonders what would happen if everyone involved were handed $3 million.

Would capitalism remain quite so unbearable from the infinity pool?

This does not mean criticism of capitalism is merely jealousy dressed in linen. Capitalism produces real inequalities, absurdities and indignities. Plenty of wealthy people criticize it sincerely, just as plenty of people struggling financially defend it enthusiastically.

But there is a psychological maneuver available to all human beings that is so useful it should probably have its own tax deduction:

If we cannot possess something, we can diminish its moral value.

Aesop noticed this several thousand years ago. The fox could not reach the grapes, so the grapes became sour.

Modernity has improved considerably upon the fox.

The fox did not have Instagram stories.

Now the grapes can be described as problematic.

But What If They Actually Mean It?

There is, of course, another possibility.

Maybe the countercultural person does not fail to enter mainstream society.

Maybe she genuinely doesn’t want to.

Perhaps the person who dresses like a nomadic textile merchant, goes dancing until 6 a.m. and thinks corporate ambition is faintly embarrassing would continue doing exactly that after inheriting a fortune.

In that case, fair enough.

That person has a philosophy.

The distinction matters because there is a profound difference between choosing simplicity when abundance is available and declaring abundance morally suspect because it has never been available to you.

Diogenes lived in a barrel and told Alexander the Great to move out of his sunlight. That is commitment. If Diogenes had spent every evening refreshing Alexander’s LinkedIn profile while explaining that Macedonian imperial success was actually incredibly cringe, history might remember him differently.

The problem is that motives are almost impossible to audit, including our own.

The successful person insists success resulted from discipline. The unsuccessful person insists success is mostly luck and privilege. The beautiful person discovers that appearances matter. The plain person develops an unusually sophisticated theory about superficiality.

Miraculously, our philosophies have a habit of ratifying our biographies.

On the Aesthetics of Precarity

The interesting phenomenon here isn’t poverty. Poverty isn’t an aesthetic, and there is nothing romantic about genuinely not having enough money.

What is interesting is romanticized precarity.

There is a strange tendency, particularly in certain educated urban countercultures, to transform instability into evidence of authenticity.

No savings? Free spirit.

No career trajectory? Refusing the rat race.

Sleeping on someone’s couch after partying until sunrise? Community.

Three roommates approaching 40? Collective living.

Every weekend governed by whoever happens to be going wherever? Spontaneity.

A tattoo acquired in a kitchen at 2 a.m.? A story.

A quiet weekend planned in advance?

Apparently the bourgeoisie have won.

At some point it is reasonable to wonder when adulthood itself became embarrassing.

There was a time when growing older meant gradually acquiring competence. You learned how to cook something, host people, keep appointments, save money, make plans, care for others, and construct a life that did not depend upon six other people being available on Saturday night.

Now there exists a peculiar strain of prolonged teenagehood in which remaining permanently improvisational is treated as evidence that one’s soul has escaped domestication.

At 22, sleeping on someone’s couch because you danced until sunrise is an adventure.

At 35, it may still be an adventure.

But it is also reasonable to wonder whether the adventure could occasionally include a bed.

When Community Becomes a Failure to Individuate

Perhaps the most seductive word in all of this is community.

Community is wonderful. Human beings need friends, neighbours, chosen families and people who will show up with soup when things go wrong.

But adulthood also requires something less fashionable: individuation.

There is a difference between having a community and requiring a committee.

Some social worlds never quite make this transition. The friend group remains the basic unit of existence long after adolescence has ended. Weekends belong automatically to the group. Holidays belong to the group. Emotional crises are processed by the group. Entertainment requires the group. Decisions circulate through the group. Somebody always has a couch. Somebody always knows where the party is.

Romantic relationships enter this ecosystem but do not necessarily reorganize it.

The partner becomes another satellite in an already crowded solar system.

This can work perfectly well for people who want it.

But it can become deeply incompatible with another conception of adulthood: one in which romantic partnership eventually becomes a primary unit of life,,not the only relationship that matters, but the relationship around which a shared future can actually be constructed.

That requires a different muscle.

Two people must be able to make plans without assembling a quorum.

They must occasionally choose each other over whatever the group is doing.

They must build rituals that belong to them.

They must tolerate an evening in which nobody else arrives.

They must eventually possess enough of a private world that the relationship is not simply two members of a friendship network who also happen to sleep together.

This is not isolation.

It is intimacy.

And the distinction matters.

A person can be surrounded by friends and still never quite learn how to build a life with one other person.

The Strange Prestige of Codependence

Modern culture is rightly suspicious of the old model in which marriage swallowed every other human relationship.

But occasionally we have overcorrected so enthusiastically that dependence on a partner is considered unhealthy while dependence on twelve friends is called community.

A person who needs her partner for everything is codependent.

A person who cannot conceive of a weekend without consulting a group chat apparently has a vibrant social life.

There is something slightly peculiar about this arithmetic.

Dependence does not become independence merely because it has been diversified.

Nor does constant social activity necessarily indicate emotional maturity. Sometimes the inability to be alone is simply loneliness wearing ornaments.

The question is not whether adults should have close friends. Obviously they should.

The question is whether friendship supplements a life or substitutes for constructing one.

There are people whose friendships are deep precisely because everyone involved has become a separate adult. They have homes, relationships, obligations, ambitions and private lives, and they meet one another from those independent centres.

And then there is the permanent summer-camp model of adulthood: everyone forever wandering between apartments, couches, parties, breakups, brunches and group chats, emotionally entangled enough that nobody ever quite has to discover who she is without the audience.

It can look extraordinarily warm from the outside.

It can also make building a future with one person almost impossible.

A Partner Is Not Just Someone You Love

This is perhaps where youthful ideas about relationships collide most violently with adulthood.

When we are young, compatibility often means attraction, affection, shared politics, shared friends, shared music, shared humour.

Later, another question intrudes:

Could a life actually be built with this person?

It is a devastatingly unromantic question.

It is also one of the most romantic questions there is.

Because love eventually leaves the bar.

It has to survive Tuesday.

It has to decide where to live, what to prioritize, how money is handled, what weekends look like, whether plans are kept, what happens when somebody is exhausted, and whether two people’s visions of adulthood point remotely in the same direction.

A person may be kind, funny, politically interesting, socially adored and enormously lovable and still belong to a version of adulthood that another person has already outgrown.

Nobody has to be wrong.

But somebody may have to leave.

Because one of the cruellest mistakes in relationships is assuming that love can compensate indefinitely for incompatible definitions of a life.

It cannot.

You cannot build a quiet house with someone who experiences quiet as deprivation.

You cannot build stability with someone who experiences planning as constraint.

You cannot build a partnership that wants to become a centre of gravity with someone whose centre of gravity will always remain elsewhere.

Eventually, what once seemed charmingly spontaneous begins to feel like living permanently in the arrivals hall.

Everyone is going somewhere.

Nothing quite becomes home.

The Great Betrayal of Becoming Comfortable

Perhaps the great betrayal of counterculture is not becoming rich.

It is discovering that one likes things that function.

A pleasant home. Plans made in advance. Weekends away. Restaurants where someone has considered the lighting. Knowing where one is sleeping tonight. Relationships in which people show up when they say they will.

There comes an age when one develops the deeply reactionary conviction that chairs should have backs.

This isn’t exactly joining the ruling class.

Yet there are social worlds in which wanting conventional comfort requires an ideological disclaimer.

One cannot simply say, “This hotel is beautiful.”

One must demonstrate awareness that tourism has complicated effects on local economies.

One cannot say, “I would like to earn more money.”

One must immediately establish that money isn’t everything.

Yes.

Obviously.

But sometimes a nice hotel is simply nicer than a bad hotel.

Civilization did not spend several thousand years inventing mattresses so that we could prove our moral seriousness by sleeping on Sara’s couch.

When Rebellion Becomes a Lifestyle Subscription

There is also something peculiar about rebellion that never ends.

Adolescence is naturally countercultural because adolescence requires differentiation. Parents like something; therefore it is suspicious. Society expects something; therefore rejecting it becomes evidence of individuality.

At 19 this is practically developmental biology.

But permanent rebellion raises a stranger question:

At what age does refusing to grow into conventional adulthood stop being rebellion and become its own form of conformity?

Because counterculture has uniforms too.

There are approved hairstyles for people who reject social expectations.

There are approved political opinions for independent thinkers.

There are approved neighbourhoods for people escaping bourgeois conventionality.

There are consumer products for anti-consumerists.

There are $280 distressed jackets available to communicate that material possessions are meaningless.

Capitalism, infuriatingly, has discovered how to sell people their opposition to capitalism.

The counterculture eventually becomes a culture.

Then it develops rules.

Then everyone dresses similarly.

Then everyone listens to the same music and holds roughly the same opinions while congratulating one another for refusing to conform.

Human beings are remarkably talented at rebuilding the village immediately after announcing that they have escaped it.

When the Revolution Becomes a Social Life

Political activism complicates all of this because, unlike the rave or the couch, it can involve genuinely serious work.

Societies need dissenters. Rights have been won because people marched, organized, unionized, protested and made themselves extremely inconvenient to people who preferred the existing arrangement. A culture without activists would be not mature but comatose.

And yet activism, like everything human beings touch, can become an identity before it remains a purpose.

There is a recognizable social world in which politics supplies not merely beliefs but an entire architecture of belonging: the demonstrations, the organizing meetings, the fundraisers, the group chats, the slogans, the causes that arrive one after another with astonishing reliability.

There is always somewhere to go, something to oppose, somebody to educate and another emergency requiring immediate moral attention.

It can produce the intoxicating sensation of living at the centre of history.

This is particularly useful when one’s own life feels stubbornly resistant to forward motion.

Changing the world is, after all, an admirably ambitious project.

Building a stable life can seem almost embarrassingly small beside it.

The revolution needs you.

Your retirement account merely sends emails.

And there is an odd psychological bargain available here:

Public struggle can provide meaning without requiring private progress.

A person can spend years fighting systems while remaining strangely incurious about the systems governing her own life.

She can diagnose inequality across continents while being unable to organize next Thursday.

She can explain precisely why society has failed an entire generation but react with suspicion when asked whether any of her own choices might have contributed to where she ended up.

The personal may be political.

Unfortunately, the personal is also still personal.

There is another seduction in permanent activism: it can preserve the moral clarity of adolescence.

There are good people and bad systems. Oppressors and oppressed. Complicity and resistance. Silence is violence; discomfort is growth; everything is urgent.

Adult life tends to be less cooperative.

It introduces compromise, competing obligations, imperfect institutions, mortgages, ageing parents, careers, partners, children, savings accounts and the irritating discovery that sometimes two contradictory things are true at once.

Maturity is partly learning to inhabit ambiguity without interpreting ambiguity as cowardice.

This is why serious activism and performative counterculture should not be confused.

The serious activist wants eventually to make herself unnecessary. She wants the law changed, the injustice corrected, the institution improved.

The permanent rebel has a more complicated relationship with victory.

Victory threatens the identity.

If your deepest understanding of yourself is the person standing outside the system shouting at it, what happens if the door opens?

What happens if society improves?

What happens if you succeed?

Worse:

What happens if you become comfortable?

There is something psychologically safer about a revolution that never arrives. It provides purpose without demanding the terrifying question that follows every successful revolution:

Now what?

Perhaps this is why certain forms of political identity fit so comfortably inside prolonged adolescence.

Both allow life to remain permanently preparatory.

The real world is always about to begin after capitalism, after the revolution, after the next protest, after society finally becomes just enough to deserve one’s participation.

Meanwhile, years pass.

The group chat remains extremely active.

And Monday morning keeps arriving with almost counterrevolutionary punctuality.

The Politics of Not Winning

This brings us to the uncomfortable relationship between political philosophy and personal circumstance.

Political beliefs cannot simply be reverse-engineered from bank accounts. There are socialists with trust funds and capitalists working three jobs. History is full of people who sacrificed considerable personal advantage because they genuinely believed society was unjust.

But status affects perception.

It would be bizarre if it didn’t.

People who experience institutions primarily as ladders tend to think institutions are useful.

People who experience them primarily as walls tend to think institutions are oppressive.

Both may be accurately describing the same building.

If mainstream society rewards someone (career advancement, money, recognition, professional respect, a comfortable home) the system naturally begins to feel less like an enemy and more like a place in which a satisfying life can be constructed.

If mainstream society repeatedly communicates that someone does not belong, rejecting it can become psychologically protective.

You did not fail to enter the establishment.

You transcended it.

The distinction is extremely convenient and occasionally completely sincere.

The trouble is that from the outside, sincerity and rationalization can wear exactly the same hemp trousers.

Would Everyone Still Hate Capitalism If They Were Winning at It?

This is perhaps the rudest question of all.

Would the person who despises corporate success continue despising it after becoming successful?

Would the person who regards luxury as vulgar maintain the position after acquiring money?

Would the person who dismisses career ambition as empty continue doing so after receiving an impressive offer?

Some absolutely would.

Others might discover, with astonishing philosophical flexibility, that a renovated Victorian house is actually compatible with revolutionary politics.

Human beings contain multitudes.

Some of those multitudes have granite countertops.

This doesn’t invalidate political criticism. It merely suggests that beliefs are rarely produced in laboratories uncontaminated by personal experience.

The wealthy capitalist may sincerely believe the system rewards hard work partly because it rewarded him.

The struggling socialist may sincerely believe the system is rigged partly because it disappointed her.

Neither observation settles the argument.

It simply makes both people more human.

There is also a revealing difference between criticizing a system one participates in and constructing one’s entire identity around being outside it.

The first position allows contradiction: I benefit from this system and still believe parts of it should change.

The second can require permanent estrangement.

Success itself becomes suspicious because success would complicate the story.

Belonging becomes capitulation.

And eventually alienation, originally experienced as a wound, can harden into an identity too valuable to surrender.

The Victimhood Temptation

There is, however, a darker version of countercultural thinking worth distinguishing from genuine political criticism: the worldview in which personal agency gradually disappears.

Everything becomes structural.

The career didn’t stall because of choices; the system prevented advancement.

Financial instability has nothing to do with habits; capitalism created it.

Relationships fail because society is emotionally toxic.

Success belongs to privileged people.

Failure belongs to structures.

It is an extraordinarily comfortable philosophy for an uncomfortable life.

A serious understanding of structural inequality should expand our explanation of human outcomes, not eliminate individual agency altogether.

Otherwise politics becomes less a tool for understanding society than a highly sophisticated permission slip never to ask oneself an unpleasant question.

Sometimes society failed you.

Sometimes you made a bad decision.

Sometimes you were unlucky.

Sometimes you didn’t try hard enough.

Sometimes somebody else really did have an advantage.

Sometimes you could have done better anyway.

Adulthood begins somewhere inside the intolerable possibility that several of these things can be true at once.

Sometimes the Emperor Has Trousers

Counterculture performs an essential function. Every society needs people willing to point out that the emperor is naked.

But there is another possibility nobody finds nearly as exciting:

Sometimes the emperor has trousers on.

Sometimes institutions work reasonably well.

Sometimes your parents were right about something.

Sometimes saving money is useful.

Sometimes getting eight hours of sleep improves your life.

Sometimes the person who wakes up at noon is not resisting capitalist time discipline.

She is hungover.

Rebellion is intellectually seductive because it automatically casts the rebel as protagonist. The establishment is enormous, grey and oppressive. The rebel is small, colourful and free.

But refusing conventional wisdom indiscriminately is no more intelligent than accepting it indiscriminately.

Some conventions survived because they are useful.

Reliability is useful.

Financial stability is useful.

Planning is useful.

Commitment is useful.

Being able to entertain oneself is useful.

Being able to spend a weekend without summoning a committee is useful.

Building something that will still exist after the party ends is useful.

A decent mattress remains one of civilization’s more persuasive arguments.

The Radical Discovery of Boring

Perhaps the great discovery of middle adulthood is that many things dismissed as boring at 23 are actually rather pleasant.

A partner who comes home.

A comfortable apartment.

Work that produces something.

Friends one loves deeply but does not need in order to manufacture every weekend.

A trip somewhere beautiful.

Enough money that an unexpected expense is irritating rather than catastrophic.

A relationship with enough gravity to become a home rather than another event on the social calendar.

A life that does not require constant recovery from the previous evening.

None of this is revolutionary.

That may be precisely its appeal.

There is an adolescent pleasure in imagining that ordinary life was invented for ordinary people and that we, through superior taste, political consciousness or unusually interesting tattoos, have escaped it.

Then one day it becomes apparent that ordinary life contains some excellent things.

Clean sheets.

Financial security.

Reliability.

Competence.

Privacy.

A person one loves beside them.

A future that can actually be planned.

And perhaps adulthood is partly the moment when a person stops needing her lifestyle to communicate how unconventional she is.

She simply builds a life she enjoys living in.

The rave can still be fun.

The tattoo may be beautiful.

The socialist may be right about quite a lot.

The activist may be fighting something that desperately needs fighting.

Community may be one of the great protections against the loneliness of modern life.

And the woman wearing seven scarves may indeed possess insights unavailable to the rest of us.

But distance from the mainstream is not, by itself, evidence of depth.

Chaos is not authenticity.

Dependence does not become independence simply because the dependence is distributed among friends.

Political consciousness does not absolve anyone from personal responsibility.

And refusing to construct a conventional life does not necessarily mean one has invented a better one.

Sometimes people aren’t trapped in conventional adulthood.

Sometimes they worked rather hard to reach it.

Sometimes the great act of maturity is not escaping every structure, but deciding which structures are worth building.

Because eventually rebellion faces the same question as everything else:

What did you build in its place?

And if the answer, after twenty years, is still mostly parties, protests, couches, group chats and explanations for why everybody else’s version of adulthood is morally compromised, perhaps the establishment was never the most interesting thing being resisted.

Perhaps adulthood was.

And adulthood, unlike capitalism, does not particularly care whether you believe in it.

It arrives anyway.

S.N