Why does growing up feel so wrong
Why Does Growing Up Feel So Wrong?
Growing up!! First off, this is really hard to write about. I’ve been staring at blank pages all day because… where do I even start? I’ve always wanted to grow up, and I’m sure it’s the same for most people. As a child, I had dreams—grand dreams. Growing up was supposed to mean realizing those dreams, personifying them, bringing them to life. Then I actually started growing up, and now? Now I just want to grow down. Back to a time when the most serious thought in my mind was whether my crush liked me back.
In popular psychology, there’s something called the “quarter-life crisis.” It’s that period where you feel “lost, scared, and confused about what steps to take in early adulthood.” Apparently, 75 percent of young adults have experienced this. That should be a consolation, but it’s not. Personally, growing up feels so wrong because now I have to choose—from way too many options. Barry Schwartz calls this the “paradox of choice.” The more choices you have, the more confused you become. Growing up feels like standing on a cliff, staring down at a canyon filled with infinite doors. You have superpowers, so you can jump into any door you want. The problem? Picking the right one so you don’t screw up the rest of your life. That’s a lot of pressure for a 20-year-old, at least in this generation.
I have a hypothesis: older generations had an easier time choosing what to do. Maybe it’s because they had a roadmap—go to school, get a job, work hard, retire, become a millionaire. Pretty straightforward. Culture has shifted dramatically since then, thanks to the hustle bros, 4-hour-workweek bros, tech bros, and crypto bros. Basically, growing up now means figuring out how to make more money than your friends without working as hard as they do. That’s my bias, though, so take it with a heap of doubt.
Ugh, social media makes it worse. I dare you—open Instagram and look at the first 20 posts. At least one of them will feature someone showing off. Maybe it’s a 21-year-old who makes $50K a month by building an app or something equally infuriating. It’s no wonder we have more depressed young adults now than any generation before us. I can only imagine what the generation after us will be like.
Growing up feels wrong because we’re made to believe there’s a strict timetable for life. Graduate at 21, get married at 28, be better than all your friends in every area, and… don’t you dare make a mistake. We’re living in a growing-up dystopia.
Eric Erikson, a psychologist, developed a framework for thinking about development1. According to him, each stage of life comes with a specific challenge. Completing it results in a sense of competence and a healthy personality. Failing? That leads to feelings of inadequacy. The stage most young adults are in is called Intimacy vs. Isolation (a.k.a. finding love). The problem is, many of us haven’t passed the previous stage: Identity vs. Role Confusion. This stage, which Erikson places at ages 12–18, is when you’re supposed to figure out your identity and your role in society. So, here we are, young adults trying to find love but unable to, because we haven’t even found ourselves.
I think the real reason growing up feels wrong (at least to me) is because I haven’t truly found myself yet. Sure, I understand some things about me, but I haven’t reached that enlightenment of self. That’s why we’re so easily swayed by social media, why we fall in and out of depression, why we constantly compare ourselves to people who honestly don’t care about us. Growing up is hard because it means finding ourselves and being comfortable with who we are. Growing up is hard because we have this annoying ego that loves to taunt us every chance it gets.
So, yeah, growing up feels wrong. But maybe that’s just part of the process.