The extended adolescence

In America people live in an extended adolescence. To understand this we have to look carefully at how we live today.

When the family was on the farm you worked dawn till dusk. Children were welcomed, they cost much less to raise and became productive much sooner and were a necessity. You lived close to, if not with, your extended family and never moved.

In these modern times children cost a fortune to raise, expenses for school, college and everything else and are no longer necessary for a persons survival.

An adolescent has to go through a painful step to enter into the world of adulthood.

The route out of adolescence into adulthood for men is through the initiatory rites of the tribe. The boy dies and a man is born, the narcissistic child ego is killed and a member of the tribe emerges, someone who is capable of engaging with the world as it is and not how they would like it to be.

The route out of adolescence for women is biological, with puberty the clock starts ticking and they are ready to receive and conceive, to awaken to being a mother. Henceforth the centrality of life will be home hearth and children.

This step is a painful step as it requires the surrender of the ego to a larger idea of life. But it is necessary for us to feel complete and whole (note, whole, not entertained) This is who we are.

In general women cant make the transition that men do, their psyche wont allow it, which is where the modern version of feminism goes astray. Doesn’t mean that women don’t need or can’t enjoy some kind of work, hobby, art or craft. They just can’t do so the way men do.

Wealth and the mobility and endless choices for entertainment it brings allows people, men and women, to skip this step altogether. They can remain in an adolescent psychic state almost indefinitely. Since the step is painful the opportunity to skip it is readily taken. Wealthy people don’t like to do painful things. They believe that wealth allows them to skip all pain.

The adolescent lives in a world of fantasy firmly convinced that something glorious is going to happen, it has to happen. The adolescent fully expects the world to be the way they want it to be and refuses to engage with it otherwise. The adolescent also believes fulfillment is the same as entertainment and so seeks it that way with poor results.

So you have men who live with no real responsibilities and a simplistic ‘us and them’ manichean view of the world.

And you have women in their thirties and forties still holding onto the fantasy of the ‘One’, the man who will come and ‘take them away’ while refusing all real life relationships and railing on angrily about men.

Even the technologies of our time are intended to appeal to the adolescent psyche. Things like Facebook and twitter allow us to regress or simply stay in a teenage introversion. They are popular precisely because we still indentify ourselves with that adolescent part of our psyche.

With the extended adolescence the culture goes into decline.