Please help me, I'm falling at the Guardian Unlimited Observer is something of a review of The Myth of Maturity by Terri Apter, but as a piece on the general ailing of young adults thrust into the adult world without help from family, it's touching. [thanks, MetaFilter (discuss)]
I've got all this fear, too, that I'm not mature yet but should've been for a while. I'm ashamed that I'm living at home still (even though I'm busy going to school rather than working), that I haven't had a real job yet, didn't have one when I was in high school. I don't feel close enough to the wonderful parents I'm lucky enough to have.
Even daydreams of any random governmental TLA bursting in and arresting me for whatever--and would that be so bad? At least I'd know where I stand. It feels like that'd be being taken care of, even poorly, which is a very seductive promise for a totalitarian-to-be to make.
It's not just parents who expect them to be suddenly mature and self-sufficient the moment they turn 18. It's their teachers and their employers. Universities no longer believe they must act in loco parentis. Employers see no point in treating their young employees like apprentices for jobs for life, because if they're good, won't they be upping and leaving in only a day or two? ...
It's common for [young adults] to have been oversupervised and overscheduled as children, and they are likely to have had much more pressure put on them to excel and succeed.... They have much less experience with managing their own time. And because they're much less likely to have been roaming free... from an early age, they start out with much less street sense.
That's part of the seduction of Schismatrix, also: it's in the future, such a future such that there are biotechnological rejuvenations
people do to stay younger, and live to unfathomable ages (can you relate to being midway through life at seventy?). The message there for all of us at twenty or so is we're still children, so immature and helpless, so unimaginably lacking in responsibility.
