Adulting is to blame for ideological inertia

How a generation of faux adults are corrupting the idea ecology

*short post alert: I often have hypotheses or models for some inexplicable phenomenon in our culture, and I will be sharing many of these ideas in shorter blog posts. Often I try to be as succinct as possible in laying out my idea, so expect a quick read!

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Urban Dictionary defines adulting as:

Being a responsible adult. Used by immature 20-somethings who are proud of themselves for paying a bill.

In essence, adulting refers to the puerile misconception of adulthood that befalls young people once the numerical age of adolescence expires but the promise of mystical cognitive transformation never happens. Adulting, in practice, is when altricial adults engage in activities that are stereotypically associated with adulthood to create a façade of maturity where earnest maturity is undesirable or unachievable. After all, becoming an adult is not easy, by design. Adulthood at its core requires the unglamorous and, typically, unceremonious rescission of youth.

There are good reasons to mourn the loss of our youth. Starry-eyed optimism, naïveté, and innocence in our youth protect us from the nihilism, mortality, and cynicism that confront us in adulthood. The transition, however, is inevitable. There comes a time for all of us to relinquish our childhood, but it isn’t clear what we are supposed to replace it with. Culture has invented myriad ways of facilitating this transition, such as the bar/bat mitzvah. The crystallization of this transition into a ceremony perhaps makes it more palatable for adolescents to relinquish their childhood. Our modern society has gone very much the opposite direction, though.

There is a growing sense of acceptance for postponing adulthood. It would probably take many years of thinking and many months of researching and writing to formulate a comprehensive list of the reasons why this is happening, but it is, and in quantifiable ways. Millennials are moving out later, both men and women are getting married later, and they are settling into careers later, but these effects are not just the result of poor economic prospects. Millennial attitudes are immature. Steady careers and nuclear families are not appealing to this generation of young adults; getting one’s credit limit increased to absorb the cost of a $22 avocado toast delivered to one’s doorstep is. Millennials, by and large, are not interested in actually being adults. But they love to appear as if they are adults.

Imagine what it might take for someone to appear older than they are. Without altering one’s appearance with makeup or a wig of grey hair, consider some of the cultural ways one might appear older. In our society we have many tropes that we associate with adulthood. Many of these would today be seen as outdated, conservative, or even prejudicial notions of adulthood, yet the association is built in to our axioms. Drinking coffee is a simple example. Owning a house is too, or if that’s too expensive, owning a vacuum cleaner and then posting about it on social media to signal one’s sophistication. But there’s one trope that stands above all the rest, and it’s incredibly easy to do (and generally free): reading the news.

There is a phase prior to adulthood where reading the news is considered lame and a waste of time, but everyone had that one friend who did. That friend was probably not the popular kid in school (22 Jump Street does a good job of flipping this axiom on its head). At some point, however, it becomes shameful not to read the news, and this transition is a relic of the social axioms our culture is built on. Keeping up with current events is noble, and I’m certainly not arguing against it, but if someone wants to live their life without regularly consuming the news, I think that should be encouraged.

Instead, there is a perverse incentive not only to read the news, but to signal to others that one has read the news. This signalling earns maturity points, and these maturity points can likely be cashed out at some later date for a more tangible benefit. The idea is that people will recognize you as the person who reads the news and thus take you seriously as an adult. This, in principle, is adulting. The coupling between reading the news and being an adult is nonsense, and is merely a relic of our culture, but it exists. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been responded to with admiration for merely mentioning something I read in the news. It’s bizarre.

What all of this has resulted in is a culture where signalling to others that you have read the news is incentivized, but earnest interest in understanding current events is trumped by whatever is trending on Netflix. So one spends the bare minimum time reading the news to do the signalling, after which the returns for continuing rapidly dissipates. I believe what this has created is a populous of young people incentivized to hold the views consumed in those brief minutes of news consumption with identitarian rigour. After all, one must avail themselves of the effort.

The stakes are thus: consume only enough news to convince others you are an adult who reads the news, and then hold those views in blind faith for fear of being exposed as a faux adult. The paradox: the less one understands the news the more faithfully the views must be possessed to reap the social benefit. Ideological inertia is this faith-like devotion to ideas that one did not even know about yesterday.

In my opinion, this answers the question, “why do so many young people blindly believe whatever the media tells them?” There is another, equally important question that follows: “why is the media feeding people bullshit driving them towards division and dehumanization of their peers?” And that is a question for another post.

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