What Defines Youth
Everyone keeps telling us that we are so young. When they say that, I think about the First World War. At twenty-three, I would have been a well-seasoned soldier. Or, of course, a well-seasoned nurse, stenographer, fiancée. War crosses my mind in these moments not out of morbidity but in some attempt to contextualize that word: young. At twenty-three, I leave a plastic packet of rice boiling for too long while talking to a friend on the phone. The packet is charred and smoking. In some other slice of time and space, I could be a mother. There is no 10-minute, boil-in-bag option for trench warfare, or babies.
Surprisingly, humans are one of the only species on the planet that experiences childhood. True childhood: a period of physical independence but material and emotional dependence. The human child is weaned, and independent from its mother in the most basic sense, yet depends on her and on its community for every other need. Unlike weaned, juvenile chimpanzees, it can count on food to be supplied by grandmothers, aunts, siblings, neighbors: the village, as it were. The human infant has no pressing need to mature. It takes its time. Rather than urgently needing to learn how to suck the termites from the mound with a blade of grass, it can sit in the grass, look at the sky, and wonder: how high is that?
When people tell me I’m young, I calculate how many offspring I could have produced by now. I have produced none. In my brief career as a fully-grown human I have produced a seventy-page thesis in English literature, a CD, approximately sixty loads of laundry, and now, a mangled plastic package of long-grain brown rice, which I chose over Basmati in the grocery store because it looked healthier. Taken over the longer term, since 2006 to be exact, my career as a reproductively functional homo sapiens primarily boasts elaborate AP study guides, slack-jawed photos now stored for eternity on a nameless Facebook server, and small notes in the margins of books by Tamora Pierce. In the grand scheme of the universe I have very little to show for myself.
I stand in the metro each morning, studying the skin of my fellow passengers. My sense of age has disintegrated. I am older than almost every gymnast at the Olympics. I am older than my grandmother was at her wedding. I am older than all of the sword-wielding heroines in the Tamora Pierce books I used to read. I am older than all of the college seniors I looked up to, once upon a time. I feel old.
I am also younger than everyone at my office. I am younger than the three 30-year-old men who are my housemates. I can only imagine how it must feel to be one of them; the fridge is simultaneously full of beer and tomato sauce and papered with cheery wedding invites in pastel tones. We take turns, it seems, being the adults on the premises; they had a rager this weekend and I went to bed at eleven. I’ve never been so confused about how old I am. Perhaps this is why I reach back so desperately to other eras, trying to find some faint tick-marks on the wall against which to measure my progress.
In 1918, I could have been married at twenty-three. In 1952, I could have been married, as indeed my grandmother was. There are people from my high school class and yes, from my college class who are now married. But with the average age of marriage rising, and along with it the average age of first childbirth, we are seeing an even greater extension of what it means to be a child. Childhood stretches far into college, where the village still pitches in to keep us fed.
At the same age that people have and still do give their lives for their nation, we forget to separate whites and colors. We Snapchat our homemade mayonnaise. We pat ourselves on the back for knowing the difference between a Roth and a regular IRA, while still relying on our parents’ health insurance. We are overgrown children.
Most of the time, this bothers me. It feels self-serving and entitled. And there is something alluring about basic, unyielding independence, even at its most trivial. In daily life this often translates economically, I’ve found: those tiny, petty moments when you catch yourself doing something that your parents once did. I feel independent in Bed Bath & Beyond when I purchase hand soap or a Tupperware value-pack. Or in the grocery store, placing the carton of eggs deliberately in the basket, reflecting for a flippant second: I Am Buying Necessities For Life. Or at the restaurant, when the bill arrives, and three credit cards go into the receipt tray, the conversation not stopping. It becomes the ultimate sign of maturity to split it evenly three ways, never mind that Jay’s shrimp was a couple of dollars extra. When, later, I call my mother to ask if the wool work pants really have to be dry-cleaned, all of these small, privileged landmarks dissipate, and I am back to childhood again.
Yet evolutionary anthropologists believe that “the extra time for growth and development afforded by childhood enabled greater investments in physical and social capital of the youngster before maturation,” and possibly “greater brain growth and behavioral complexity.” My physical capital is probably roughly the same as it would have been in 1918, or 1818, or really anytime in the last 400,000 years, had I had such luck with nutrition and vaccines (unlikely). My social capital stands at several thousand Facebook friends, which are overdue for a purge. I can’t comment on brain growth. I can’t comment on whether I have reached maturation, though, by any offspring-centric standards, or rice-cooking standards, I haven’t. What I wonder, then, is what I’ve been doing instead.
I think I still operate under the illusion that one day, you wake up and shed your cocoon and spread your adult wings. Ironically, you really grow up the moment you realize that that will never happen. No one believes, to the core of his being, that he is an adult. Over millions of years, childhood grew longer and longer, until—perhaps—it’s meshed so thoroughly with adult life that we hardly notice it. Everyone keeps telling us that we are so young, but we aren’t young adults. We are all old children. The soldiers in the trenches on the Western Front were old children too. We have much in common. Endowing them with epic adulthood is a good way of making myself feel guilty, but it is also a way of masking the massive blessing that is growing up in peacetime.
Chimpanzees fight clan-on-clan, on the ground, for territory and food. Humans fight wars across continents, against people they have never met, for things like Liberty. With extended childhood comes some pull to make it worth the world’s time, to avoid being a burden, to take advantage of whatever behavioral complexity it has granted us, perhaps with the aid of a rice cooker. At twenty-three, I have been eligible to fight for Liberty for five years. I spent them in libraries, learning—I think—what Liberty means.
