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But You’re Still So Young
Apr. 5th, 2021 08:57 amI liked Kayleen Schaefer’s Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship” so much that I instantly put her new book on hold when it came out. That new book is But You’re Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining Adulthood.
The main thrust of this book is that the current thirtysomething generation has torn up the school-career-marriage-children roadmap that previous generations followed, and/or had it ripped out from under our feet as economic security has become more and more difficult to come by, and now we’re all wandering around the trackless wastes trying to construct our own futures.
The book is about the exhilaration and the terror of that freedom - and about the fact that the destruction of the road map often offers much less freedom than you might think, because it occurred in tandem with so much economic dislocation. The job market is like shifting sand: the book is littered with people struggling to build their lives on that constantly moving foundation, stuck in a long-distance relationship because they just can’t find jobs in the same city, or waiting to have children till they find an economic stability that always seems out of reach.
I came to this book hoping that it would offer - not guidance, exactly; possibly inspiration. But although it’s written just as engagingly as Text Me When You Get Home, and I enjoyed it while I was reading it, overall it’s kind of a bummer. The subtitle seems overly triumphal for the picture it actually paints. (I've noticed that a lot of nonfiction subtitles seem at best unrelated and at worst actively antagonistic to the book inside.)
Thirtysomethings are not actively choosing to redefine adulthood; they’ve had the old economic markers of adulthood snatched away from them, and because they believe they need their career in order before they get married or have kids, they put off and put off and put off marriage and children even when they really do want them.
There are also two separate couples in this book where one partner wants to get married and the other doesn’t, and Partner A says something like, “Don’t you think it’s societal pressure that makes you think you want to get married?”, and Partner B is like “Oh… uh… I guess…” and sticks around, even though they are miserable about the current level of non-commitment in their relationship and really do want to get married.
Obviously “one partner is more committed to the relationship than the other” is not a specifically modern problem. But man, “What you want is not convenient for me… so maybe you don’t actually want what you say you want, you’ve just been brainwashed by Society into thinking you want it!” is not a good look on anyone.
The main thrust of this book is that the current thirtysomething generation has torn up the school-career-marriage-children roadmap that previous generations followed, and/or had it ripped out from under our feet as economic security has become more and more difficult to come by, and now we’re all wandering around the trackless wastes trying to construct our own futures.
The book is about the exhilaration and the terror of that freedom - and about the fact that the destruction of the road map often offers much less freedom than you might think, because it occurred in tandem with so much economic dislocation. The job market is like shifting sand: the book is littered with people struggling to build their lives on that constantly moving foundation, stuck in a long-distance relationship because they just can’t find jobs in the same city, or waiting to have children till they find an economic stability that always seems out of reach.
I came to this book hoping that it would offer - not guidance, exactly; possibly inspiration. But although it’s written just as engagingly as Text Me When You Get Home, and I enjoyed it while I was reading it, overall it’s kind of a bummer. The subtitle seems overly triumphal for the picture it actually paints. (I've noticed that a lot of nonfiction subtitles seem at best unrelated and at worst actively antagonistic to the book inside.)
Thirtysomethings are not actively choosing to redefine adulthood; they’ve had the old economic markers of adulthood snatched away from them, and because they believe they need their career in order before they get married or have kids, they put off and put off and put off marriage and children even when they really do want them.
There are also two separate couples in this book where one partner wants to get married and the other doesn’t, and Partner A says something like, “Don’t you think it’s societal pressure that makes you think you want to get married?”, and Partner B is like “Oh… uh… I guess…” and sticks around, even though they are miserable about the current level of non-commitment in their relationship and really do want to get married.
Obviously “one partner is more committed to the relationship than the other” is not a specifically modern problem. But man, “What you want is not convenient for me… so maybe you don’t actually want what you say you want, you’ve just been brainwashed by Society into thinking you want it!” is not a good look on anyone.
