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Sudden Age Forward

When the movie Big came out, I watched it with my parents. I was small then, and my parents were still together. We lived in a house in the country, and occasionally we did things like drive into town to see a movie as a family. Thinking back, that time itself seems movie-tinted now: edited and filtered through the cinematic gaze of memory.

As I remember it, my parents liked Big. They laughed at things that did not seem funny to me at all.

Big is a sudden-age-forward comedy, a popular subgenre of the body swap wherein a young person is thrown into the life of an adult. The plot is simple: a boy wishes to be big enough to fulfil his dream of accompanying a cute girl on a carnival ride and subsequently wakes up to discover he is Tom Hanks. Naturally, he’s appalled. His jeans don’t fit. He is hairy all over. This is not how he pictured adulthood. Forced to fend for himself, he finds the world beyond suburban picket fences garish and confusing. Being a grown-up looked like a sweet alternative to sharing a room with a baby, but in 1980s New York there are examples of urban lives gone awry muttering and staggering through the smeary neon of Times Square. Also, adults, it turns out, are subject to all kinds of ignoble oppressions. The senseless queues. The horrors of bureaucracy. The necessity of work.

Most of us have a moment of adult reckoning. It can come at any age, at any time. You suddenly become acutely aware that you are a cliché; you don’t like what you do every day; your job title and pay packet aren’t much different than when you first started in the workforce; you are becoming your mother or your father — or you are failing to. You come to the realisation that life is just not what you thought it would be when you were a child filled with fantasies of becoming an adult. Unlike Tom Hanks, though, you can’t play or whimsy your way to adult success.

My adult reckoning came at thirty.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, I turned thirty amid a mediascape littered with the details of my generation’s inadequacy. Millennials — those born roughly between 1980 and 2000 — are dubbed the ‘Peter Pan generation’ on account of our unwillingness to give up childish things such as high-tech toys and our childhood bedrooms. We are accused of adolescent spending habits. We like smartphones more than cars (don’t we ever want to actually go anywhere?). We are recalcitrant brats who refuse to take up responsible roles in the community. We are all a bunch of thoroughly bad adults.

These editorials came in thick and fast, a regular dose of hyperbole and panic to accompany my tea and toast each morning. They sell papers, these accusations. They also fuel the outrage machine. I did my best to swallow breakfast and move on, but some days the headlines swarmed the internet like locusts.

Worse yet, despite the sensationalising, and the general tone of paternal disapproval, this portrait of the Generation Y post-adolescent malingerer was not wholly without resonance. I could laugh, though just barely, at Daniel Clowes’ New Yorker cartoon of a man hanging up his doctoral certificate in his childhood bedroom, above the rock posters and high-school trophies. I could brush off the descriptions of kidults who were more interested in entertainment than in exercising their right to vote. Intergenerational sledging was an age-old pastime, I knew. Yet the descriptions lingered, leaving their oily trace on my self-assessment.

As I approached my thirtieth year, in circumstance my life was not very different from when I was twenty. I was still living in rental accommodation. I was still studying; working part-time in unchallenging, minimum-wage jobs; and pursuing various creative endeavours. All this felt fine — most often, more than fine. Nevertheless, with each new statistic, with each damning indictment, the sense of having missed some crucial memo on how to grow up got stronger.

This feeling was exacerbated by those around me, who did not fit the stereotype. One by one, my close friends all seemed to be breaking into grown-up society. Was it possible that I knew the only responsible, career-building, baby-making, mortgage-signing millennials in the world? Were those newspaper editorials aimed solely at me? As thirty approached, I became fascinated by other people’s decisions, making a pest of myself, like a toddler who can’t stop asking why. Mostly, my friends just shrugged. The consensus was that, eventually, marriage, babies, and mortgages is just what you do. This idea — so far from the vision of adulthood I imagined for myself, from how I saw my life — made me feel like an unwanted guest who accidentally stays too long at the party.

My family had been starting to have similar concerns about my life direction. I fought with my dad on census night.

‘Marital status?’ he said, in his best deadpan parody of a bureaucrat.

‘Never married.’

‘But you’re practically married,’ he protested. ‘It’s the same thing.’

‘No, it’s not,’ I said, tapping between the lines. ‘Never married.’

He raised an eyebrow, a skill I did not inherit. Dad is a journalist of the old school, and I was reminded, in his need to spin my life, of one of his maxims: ‘Give me a fact and I’ll invent you a story.’ He continued through the form, recording my lack of religion, my education level, my lack of a second language. Nothing tangibly adult, though. Nothing quantifiable.

This agitated Dad. He poured another glass of plonk. He wanted to record a milestone or two on that census night. And he held the pen. He was the scribe, the arbiter of fact; a role he had occupied since I was a kid. My relationship to him, ‘daughter’, in block letters, gleamed like an order on the muted orange form. There was duty in that word, centuries of paternalism drawn tight around it. Perhaps it was this (or perhaps the half bottle of wine) that got my hackles up. The editorials began ringing in my ears: I felt as if I’d been drawn into the ring to fight for my cohort once more. I was in the Y corner. Why, why, why?

Dad hesitated at ‘occupation’. I’d been working casual shifts at a greengrocer for years, while studying and writing. My income from all sources was just above the poverty line, with nothing distinguishing itself as a career through earning capacity. When he was my age, Dad was on his first mortgage, his second wife, his third city, his eighth car. He was busy building a house and planning a family with my mother. He was a heavy drinker and questionable decision-maker with a penchant for poor bets on the ponies, sure, but on paper he had locked things in — and for his generation he was a late bloomer. ‘I suppose you are a . . .’

‘Full-time student,’ I supplied.

‘Really?’

‘You know this, Dad.’

‘I think you’re more like a freelance researcher.’

‘I don’t know what that is.’

‘You can’t be a student,’ he said. ‘You’re almost thirty.’

And there it was. In the middle distance, a man wearing Brylcreem and suspenders rang the bell. Round one: Dad.

In a twist of fate, in Big it’s precisely the protagonist’s childlike qualities that make him a successful adult. He’s innocent — he doesn’t understand sexual innuendo. He does not kowtow to the manners and mores of the stuffy grown-up milieu. He is imaginative, creative. He wears appalling shirts and plays pinball. He looks at the world with an intoxicating sense of wonder. Here’s some adult stuff he doesn’t have: doubt, hatred, ambition, intellect, lack. He plays chopsticks on a giant piano with his feet. He embodies our culture’s reverence for childhood.

People did not always have such a solid distinction between child and adult, nor did they always revere childhood. Historian Philippe Ariès famously declared that in the medieval world ‘the idea of childhood did not exist’. Before the seventeenth century, high infant mortality rates meant babies were often given the names of deceased siblings so as not to tax the parental memory. Renaissance paintings show children as stern little adults; babies suckle at luminous breasts, their tiny faces sculpted into grimaces of mature distain. Improvements in healthcare laid the foundations for a more sentimental view of children, but even so, childhood as we know it was popularised after the Industrial Revolution. Before this, a thirteen-year-old going to work was no joke, and it wasn’t their creativity and innocence that was valued, but their small stature and smaller demands. When jobs became scarce, adult labour was prioritised. Let out of the engine bays and crawl spaces of labour, Tom Sawyer went fishing and Pip asked for more. Whimsical childhood as a protected space was birthed from these literary worlds, rather than from the wombs of actual women.

Now, far from enduring or distaining childhood, we think it is where we left our authentic selves. Childhood has come to dominate our cultural narratives. I remember my mother giggling at the scene where a grown woman suggests a sleepover with Tom Hanks, and he shows her his bunk bed. Now that I’m a grown woman myself, I find this film more hauntingly prophetic than funny. A man behaving like a boy is certainly no novelty in the dating scene. Play as the antidote to stuffy corporate culture is less of a joke in the age of Google campuses and advertising agencies with intra-office slides. But if the message of Big was to find our inner child, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, we got it.

Given that childhood is now more prized than independence, it’s no wonder that its temporality has become stretchy. If we can assert our right to longer childhoods, when and how does adulthood begin? Looking for a sociological basis for the latest lagging generation, Jeffery Jensen Arnett coined the term ‘emerging adult’ to refer to the elastic, transitional period between adolescence and adulthood. He argues that this has recently become a socially entrenched developmental stage, in which people are granted a ‘moratorium’ from the responsibilities of adult life. Arnett’s research was inspired by his work with college students, and a series of interviews conducted in the 1990s that often began with the question ‘Do you feel like you have reached adulthood?’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, people’s responses tended to be ‘yes and no’. In developed countries, during your twenties, while you might be more independent than you were during high school, it’s likely you still have more in common with a seventeen-year-old than most forty-five-year-olds.

What Arnett refers to as emerging adulthood is called different things in the international media, but the pattern is the same largely throughout the Western world, and in some other countries too. In Korea, the sampo generation (sampo translates as ‘abandon three’) are a cohort said to have given up on dating, marriage, and procreation. The Japanese corollary is the satori generation, a kinder term referring to a cohort who seem to have transcended desire (satori means enlightenment in Japan). The satori generation work in undemanding jobs. They don’t often date. They don’t share the national passion for shopping, but neither do they save money for the future. They aim to have less stressful lives, to live within their means, says the press.

In North America, the terrible term ‘twixta’ was dreamed up to refer to those caught between adolescence and adulthood, typified by college graduates who can’t find work and continue to live at home long past the age they should be moving out. In the Middle East and North Africa, young adults are said to be experiencing a ‘waithood’, a new developmental period after the end of education where young people feel as though they are simply waiting for adult life to begin. Interestingly, this final formula has become an international relations issue: the prevalence of the waithood is described as part of the ‘youth crisis’ in the Middle East, which interests international organisations and the United States particularly in their consideration and representation of radicalisation.

While there are cultural nuances in each of these characterisations that make writing about, say, millennials in Argentina a project out of my depth, the fact that there are indications of a globally relevant trend is fascinating. Because that’s the catch for people of my age. Many societies have come to revere childhood, but they also haven’t let go of the idea of an adult as a productive citizen and an agent of the economy. Whereas once routes were more firmly mapped out, options more limited, today young people develop under a confusing imperative to simultaneously perform their age-appropriate roles and maintain their youthfulness: to be both Tom Hanks the CEO and the boy he once was.

As my thirtieth year approached, I felt simultaneously resistant to normative standards for adulthood and plagued by the fear that this obstinacy was a symptom of my own immaturity. I loathed previous generations for having what seemed an easier transition to adulthood, richer people for having an easier everything. Then I loathed myself for not feeling lucky, grateful, privileged. It was a hideous spiral fed by the media. I was conflicted, confused, and irrational. I found myself browsing realestate.com despite the fact that I had no money and no idea what city I wanted to live in. On Saturday-night dates with my sweetheart, I paused significantly in front of jewellers’ windows to gaze at the diamond rings (Diamonds! Appalling!) all the while incredulous at myself, my inner critic’s brow raised, Dad-like, as if to say ‘Are you serious?’

I wanted a clue as to how to approach the new decade of life I was about to enter, but I couldn’t stop mentally rehearsing the Mickey Rourke speech from Barfly — Mickey in bar-fight makeup before bad choices messed up his face for real, before he found the redeeming love of god and rescue chihuahuas; Mickey channelling Bukowski in the blue-lit bar: ‘I get so tired thinking about all the things I don’t want to do. All the things I don’t want to be.’

‘You’re not supposed to think about it,’ says the barkeep. ‘I think the whole trick is not to think about it.’

On a cultural analysis, it’s no surprise I freaked out at thirty. According to the dictates of popular culture I grew up with, twenties = youth and thirty = adult. More insidious than this, twenties are the ‘aspirational age’, a marketing term for a demographic that those on either side aspire to be. This is the college years of American teen soap operas, the smudged, salt-licked utopia of capitalist coming-of-age. Contemporary cultural messages on adulthood are fairly unambiguous: if you are middle class it’s acceptable, if not wholly commendable, to blaze up your twenties in ‘a holocaust of desire’. Experiment. Travel. Think and talk about yourself — a lot. Get a job and save some money, sure, but this doesn’t have to be the centre of your life. It’s okay, when you are working out who you are, not to have a handle on your social position yet. Advertising and much of popular culture suggests using this time to exorcise your inner wild child, to take risks and wear gaudy sneakers. Just remember, all this behaviour has an endpoint, and it’s called thirty. Jeffrey Arnett terms it ‘the age thirty deadline’.

A cynical take on Arnett’s idea of emerging adulthood is that, like ‘pre-teen’ and ‘teenager’, it consolidates a market. While the freewheeling teen with money to burn on records and pizza drag-raced out of the post-war economic boom of the 1950s, the emerging adult as we know it today seems to have slumbered through the birth of Christ, the tough times of the Dark Ages, and the extremes of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, to finally slouch forth from 1970s counterculture, bolstered by birth control, changed attitudes to premarital sex, and gender roles, along with a heightened emphasis on education as the way to get ahead in life. It is an important demographic development, and the idea of self-involved youth has been cultivated to sell popstars and sneakers, cigarettes and meal-replacement milkshakes.

Of course, the idea of blazing up your twenties is not a universal. If we believe the shows on television, almost every twenty-something is a middle-class, English-speaking white person living in a developed country, and, while Arnett claims that the emerging adult will be a more-or-less globally apparent phenomenon by the end of the twenty-first century, it’s important not to erase the very real social relations of class with those of generations. Yet much of our popular culture, rooted in a woebegone sense of nostalgia, is inured to these differences of class and life experience, and is aimed at selling this period of life to teenagers and mid-lifers.

At thirteen, my best friend Annie and I longed to be twenty-something. We sat on the roof of the school library listening to the sound of bands playing in the bar across the street, focusing our longing. Life was only just over there, and yet it was so intolerably far. Something had to be done. We decided to use the method favoured by impatient teenagers ever since the distinction between teen and adult was officiated over by bureaucrats behind plexiglass: we got fake IDs.

We walked into the roads and traffic authority as children and walked out as adults. (Well, not quite adults; Annie’s lips were cut from the effort of smiling for the camera without revealing her braces.) We were both anxious to get back to school by fifth period. And yet things were different when we returned. Bureaucratic magic had bestowed us with many powers. Now we could buy cigarettes and beer, see rock shows and violent films. We stepped forth into our dreams, a bright age of fake majority. We were free.

It was the 1990s, the beginning of what would soon be declared as ‘the death of the adult’ in popular culture. In one of my favourite films, a teenage Winona Ryder described the future as a place where ‘we just grow up, be adults and die’. It was a perfect time to experience the freedoms of adulthood in tandem with the irresponsibility and security of adolescence spent under our parents’ roofs.

When my dad — rifling through my schoolbag looking for cigarettes to bum — found my ID, he made me hand it over. Dad was in his fifties, but he wanted to be twenty-five as much as we did. He understood, he said. He would keep the ID and I could borrow it from him to see rock shows, on the proviso that he knew where I was. For six months, he was reliably up the back at every show, one eye on us and one, aspirationally, on some actual twenty-something woman. He never gave us up, though, and eventually — when our age caught up with the fantasy — we realised that an aspirational age is not a real period of life. It is an illusion we could reach for eternally. Cigarettes and beer do not taste as sweet when you also have to buy your own food, when you are suddenly responsible for your life rather than simply perpetuating a splendid pantomime of it.

My actual twenties was a messy, dark, and difficult period. Sometimes I felt I was scrambling to get a foothold in some kind of sustainable life plan; other times I was still trying to muster the energy and certainty of that strawberry youth. It was a decade of contradictions, anxieties alternately crippling and energising, insurmountable limitations coupled with the broader cultural insistence that I would never be so free. During my twenties I worked crappy jobs, I studied and shoplifted, I wrote and danced and took a lot of long drives. And then I was thirty. This is the point when the moratorium ends, according to Arnett.

‘I’m past the point where I can just have fun,’ says Rachel from Friends in the episode ‘The One Where They All Turn Thirty’.

In the 1970s, youth culture was cause for celebration and panic. In the 1990s, twenty-something nihilism became a top-selling posture. Teen angst was the best way to sell records. Urtexts such as the film Reality Bites and the novel Generation X set the tone for a whole genre. The messages of these texts still resonate. But a world without the internet, without constant conversation and comparison, is not the world in which I and most other millennials dwell. And, while the twenty-something is still a lucrative market demographic if you can just tell them how they are feeling (or better yet, let them tell you) and secure the rights to a hip soundtrack, youth itself is now currency in a far more competitive and complicated network of exchange. As Malcolm Harris notes in Kids These Days, where once corporate entities co-opted youth culture and repackaged it for mass consumption, now it’s the job of young people to design personal brand strategies and sell themselves to one another and to corporate backers. In the twenty-first century, most young people are painfully aware their youth as a finite resource, and many are anxious to leverage it for more durable forms of capital, whether cash, cache, or fame.

We all collaborate on the fiction of the aspirational age — young and old. We yearn for shared narratives, but this desire leads to the collapse of difference and the emergence of a false cohesion that makes us, above all, easier to market to.

In 2014, prime-time television in Australia was dominated by an advertisement for a mid-price family car known as a Sportage. The ad begins with a thirty-something mother reversing down her suburban driveway. Her mincing, worrywart husband and his reminders about milk shrink to a speck in her rearview. The Sportage (long, classy a sound) turns a mundane family errand into a vital space of rebellion and escape. The stereo powers up, conjuring 1990s rap superstars Salt-N-Pepa into the cabin, where they accompany the woman in a karaoke rendition of their hit ‘Push It’. From the car’s plush yet practical interior, the suburban mother postures with adolescent attitude. She’s sassy, making gang signs out the window and casting threatening glances across the hedges of her middle-class white neighbourhood. The advertisement closes with the slogan ‘Grow up, not old’, both a command and a promise.

This commercial is clever because it manages to parody the idea of aspirational age — what’s more embarrassing than a rapping mum? — while selling its vehicle via this very premise (rap, generic suburban mum; you are as young as you feel!) It presents youth as a series of stylised gestures and slogans. And yet the woman has the cultural trifecta of adulthood: a family, a house in the suburbs, an expensive car.

Texts such as the Sportage ad campaign and the film Big are reliant on the tension between two cultural narratives about ageing. The first, progress, insists that ageing and development is an accumulation of skills, assets, and status. This is the narrative we learn as children, when we are graded by age and expected to behave and achieve accordingly — a pressure we will likely continue to feel until we die. The second narrative, decline, insists that ageing is a slow process of inevitable decay. Your physical appearance degenerates. Breasts and scrotums sag. Hair thins. Brows furrow and crease. Memory becomes unreliable; even intellect and personality warp and crumble. Each narrative can be exploited for commercial gains. Our booming plastic surgery industry profits from narratives of decline, as do tech, fashion, and pharmacology. Purchasing power can stand in for progress in a pinch, meaning if you don’t feel as though you are getting somewhere, you can always buy a ticket.

Progress and decline are not mutually exclusive, though. In Aged by Culture, cultural theorist Margaret Gullette insists that our narratives about ageing help us to internalise the imperative of advancing, improving, and keeping up ‘while simultaneously never getting any older (because being young is the single best promise of being able to succeed in the future)’. For those who, despite having adult responsibilities such as babies and mortgages, still feel juvenile: Don’t worry, the ad says, drive a Sport-ahh-ge. The youthful consumer upgrades, they keep shopping; they stay frivolous and young at heart. It’s a desperate, anxious imperative.

At thirty, I didn’t own a car. I didn’t feel frivolous, but my life wasn’t consequential, either. I walked that tension between the narratives of ageing like a tightrope. We live in a culture that idealises childhood and youth, and reduces adulthood to career and family, so naturally the move between the two can be a bit traumatic. Particularly if, at that point when you can no longer ignore your adult status, career and family are nowhere around.

At the grocery shop where I have worked since I was twenty-five, most of us have regrettable tattoos. I have a set of skeletal conjoined twins on my left shoulder. (Annie and I got the same image together on my twenty-first birthday. Having had access to cigarettes, beer, and violent films for almost a decade, we really had to turn it up a notch.) I also have the word Vegas tattooed across my wrist like a watch. That’s right. It’s always Vegas time. When someone asks me about this, I comfort myself in the only way I can muster: by remembering all the tattoos I do not have. I don’t have The Dead Kennedys logo on my forearm. I don’t have a spine tattooed on the skin over my own spine. And, most importantly, I don’t have a pixie sitting in the shade of a toadstool, making a wish on a dandelion, just above my butt crack.

One of my co-workers has the advertising-slogan-worthy sentiment ‘Growing up is giving up’ scrawled across her thigh. ‘Of course the person with this tattoo would end up at law school,’ she said with a laugh when I noticed it.

But this tattoo is almost totemic. It shows how, in our imagining of youth, and in the way we describe and police the roles of adults, maturity has become something to fear and loathe, and youth something to guard against losing. It seems impossible to even begin addressing the question of how to construct a meaningful adulthood if one is totally consumed with the colossal task of measuring losses against gains and freaking out about the deficit. This is what I was doing when I lingered outside the jewellers, sent futile emails to realtors, and booked ridiculous holidays. I was trying to acquire an adult identity all at once. I didn’t go so far as to buy a Sportage. My adult fantasy was a rental, and it was plum crazy.

Statistics tell us we are more likely to chuck a tantrum or make a rash decision before our major birthdays, with thirty featuring large. In my thirtieth year, despite my resolve not to declare some minor apocalypse, a statistically predicted significant event found me. A week after my birthday, my dog died.

Cassady, my splendid ridgeback cross, had cancer. Like any death preceded by a long illness, the circumstances were sad and difficult.

I felt numb as I drove her to the vet in a borrowed car, stopping en route at the park for a final moment together. We leant against each other, both on all fours in a patch of winter sunlight. The moisture from the grass seeped into my jeans. Cassady leaned into me slightly and sighed. I offered her a treat, but she just closed her eyes.

I tried to hold on to the moment, to draw it out so as to be sure to remember it vividly, but all I could feel was her pain, my desperation. Resigned, we staggered back to the car, and I helped her slump onto the passenger seat. I turned the key in the ignition, and the engine choked. I tried again: only splutter.

I opened the car door. It was cold outside. A lone jogger lapped the park’s perimeter.

I got out my phone and scrolled through the names of the people in my life. There was not one I could call. Everyone would be busy: at work, or juggling life while looking after children, or moved away, or not close enough to me to be here in this sad moment. I turned to Cassady but she was sleeping — dying, really. The numbness broke and I wept, staring tearily out the windscreen at a pair of teenage goths sharing a set of headphones and a cigarette on a park bench. Why was I so alone, so disconnected from the lives of those around me? Where was my community, my family? My car?

More than a decade ago, Cassady had crawled out from under a caravan in Humpty Doo, a tiny town in Australia’s Northern Territory, and locked her strong jaw on my life. I loved her and our life together. She was my first real responsibility. We were inseparable for eleven years, as I watched her grow in dog years from a puppy to an adolescent to a reliable matron. I have never been so sure of what I wanted from life as I was the day I picked up that tiny brown puppy.

The common wisdom is that you don’t know what you want when you are a teenager. I felt as if I was experiencing the opposite: I knew less the longer I lived. Possibilities broadened, but my perspective lost its rigidity, and my will, once certain and uncompromising, was becoming reedy. My understanding of the world and my place in it was less certain. It struck me, in the weeks after Cassady’s death, that she had aged and died without my making another big life decision.

I decided to speak to someone, choosing a psychologist who specialised in helping people deal with grief. Miraculously, she also turned out to be a dog tragic who referred to her standard poodle as a person.

‘Cassady was at the centre of my life,’ I sobbed in her office, crumbling under my first crucial dose of sympathy. ‘And now, right when I need one, it feels like my life has no core.’

My psychologist talked about identity foreclosure and recommended a book by an Auschwitz survivor that made me feel like a total arsehole. Then she drew block diagrams representing the stages of life. They were, I found out later, Abraham Maslow’s famed Hierarchy of Needs. ‘In your twenties,’ she said, ‘you spend most of your time on the fundamentals: working out how to feed yourself, have clean sheets, and turn up to things on time. If you get this far, you might start to exercise. You might work out that if you drink too much you get sad, and if you behave poorly, people stop inviting you over for dinner. These are basic things, but they aren’t easy. Some people don’t work this stuff out until well into their fifties — I see men particularly who become widowers and realise they don’t know how to feed themselves. It’s nearly impossible to attain higher meaning in life unless you have mastered the basics.’

‘I have clean sheets!’ I protested. My sheets had been at least moderately clean for seven years. I’d been exercising and flossing my teeth. I could cook and drive and meet deadlines. My needs were less basic and more existential.

‘It’s a difficult time to become an adult,’ she admitted. ‘I see a lot of young people, especially women, between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-two, who are having trouble deriving satisfaction from their lives.’ She blamed helicopter parenting and underemphasising resilience in childhood. She blamed popular culture and advertising. She blamed the changing nature of work and the vapidity of social media. She said we were all too busy comparing ourselves to one another, and that status updates and photos of fancy holidays and babies exacerbated the feeling of falling behind the pack.

She was right, of course. But it was impossible not to make comparisons. We all know the pain of envy and fear-of-missing-out that stabs us when we scroll through the reams of cute baby, new house, island getaway, great haircut on Facebook and Instagram.

Instead of collecting those things, I had spent my late twenties in various bedroom-cum-offices writing a complicated dystopian novel and a dissertation on the apocalypse in contemporary film and literature. ‘Those are very depressing choices,’ my Dad had observed, more than once, seguing into nervous suggestions about courses in photography or HTML.

I never found the apocalypse, world destruction fantasies, or virtually impenetrable books of theory depressing, though. Anyway, if all those devastating waves, exploding skylines, and vociferating adverbs did get too much, I would simply grab the lead and walk it off. Cassady and I rambled through the suburban scrublands and across the dirty streams of Melbourne. We swam and dug up the beaches of Sydney. We curled up together in a caravan in Darwin. After she died, I realised how important ‘walking the dog’ had become to my day. It had become praxis; a method of engagement.

Each morning, I pulled myself reluctantly from dreams of dogs, ignoring the pitter-patter of ghost feet downstairs. I made tea and sat down in front of my screen. ‘Fin-de-siècle Apocalypse’ read the heading of a new chapter. I sighed, looked over my notes. Hours passed. Downstairs, the ghost dog got restless. Outside, the rain fell. I paced the house, made endless cups of tea. Ghost dogs walk themselves. In the city where I live, when it rains it hails.

Melbourne winter. Endless and unfair.

‘It’s a cliché,’ the psychologist had said, ‘but everything is very abstracted at the moment.’

I’d nodded. A dog is very helpful in an abstracted life. I told her about reading Baudrillard during my undergraduate degree when a filthy stick dropped on the pages and I looked up to see Cassady, panting and drooling as if to say, You wanna know what’s real? Dirty stick. That’s what’s real.

‘You would probably get that feeling from having a baby,’ she said.

I screwed up my face. ‘But I don’t want a baby.’ I didn’t want a baby for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I could not spend the next fifteen years teaching someone how to get along in a social organisation that I felt extremely dubious about.

‘That’s fair enough,’ my psychologist said. ‘But you’re right, then: you need to work out what’s important to you.’

It’s hard to beat your own path through the scrub, and seemingly ill-advised, too, when there is a well-lit road that runs straight past it. How do you structure an adult life that resists normative definition without finding yourself shut out in the cold?

It got me thinking about the possibilities for alternative conceptions of what it means to be an adult today, and how we can start a conversation about them.

Sociologists talk about five adult milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying, and having a child. While it’s easy to conceive of reasons a person might not want or be able to hit these markers — and we all know someone who can tick all the boxes and yet behaves like a toddler with Benjamin Button disease — milestones are the foundation for how we constitute and describe adult life at this point in history.

I wondered, was it such a radical thought to ask if they should? Does our tenacious need to measure adulthood on a standardised scale work to conceal all the ways in which the world is changing? Given the relatively brief existence of the adult as we currently understand it, how can we be shocked that these key moves are executed later, or with less ardour, or in the wrong order, or not at all?

My father and his parents immigrated to Australia in the 1950s. He was raised in boarding houses and apartment towers in inner-city Sydney, schooled as a choirboy at St Mary’s. He received a scholarship to teachers’ college in the late 1960s but dropped out because life felt pressing and vital. He became a journalist. By thirty, he had the adult game stitched up. It’s not surprising, then, that he wondered what I was doing with my time. Our fight on census night came about because the differences between parent and progeny alarmed him. They produced anxiety about my progress. He worried — I worried — about my place in the world.

He might well have been imagining the census form flying off express to a room of judgemental aunties who would cluck disapprovingly over the details, and was trying to save me the ignominy. He might have been trying to jam the statistics to keep the national profile on track. But there was another possibility, too. My life might just hint at a discreet challenge to my father’s decisions. If a child’s choices are different from their parents’, could they also suggest that what constitutes a ‘good life’, a meaningful adult existence, can be different? What are the possibilities for alternative forms of adult life today, and how can we start a conversation about them that doesn’t end in misunderstanding, disappointment, and intergenerational sledging?

It is a truism that economic and social conditions shape people. Could it be possible that, unlike my father’s baby-boomer cohort, many of whom took their malcontent to the street and cried out to transform society via revolution, my generation are embracing a different method of change? Perhaps in a moment of entrenched capitalism, in which markets have the uncanny ability to co-opt cultural moments as soon as they cohere, social structures come under challenge by way of shifting behaviours within them. Resistance, by this model, could be as simple and as unromantic as not owning a car, not signing a mortgage, because the future is too slippery to bond with our calculations of it. Is there a way to understand recalcitrance as an act of agency rather than a symptom of laziness and selfishness? If so, the so-called Peter Pan generation might be thought of as taking the first baby steps towards different forms of social organisation. Instead of asking why Gen Y are not replicating the models of adulthood we in the West have known for the last century, we could ask different kinds of questions. For instance, what would a society that doesn’t centre on traditional gender roles, the couple, and the family look like? So, too, what would it mean to advance higher education to embolden curiosity rather than aspiration?

In researching this book, I have started to believe that adulthood, as measured through markers such as marriage and mortgage, is no longer a very useful term. The goalposts of a traditional adult life are getting further away the longer you run at them. It’s exhausting. And while sometimes I think I’d take the shot, at other times it seems more sensible to sprawl out in the grass and watch the clouds stretch and blur across the sky.

There is a great moment in Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, a thoroughly adult book. Towards the end of a chapter, some neighbours are sitting around gossiping, as neighbours do, passing judgment on the lives of the protagonists. ‘I don’t think they’ve figured out yet how to live,’ says one neighbour to another, smugly.

Like all nosey neighbours, or readers of dense texts, the idea that you can work out how to live, as if it is a complex stratagem to be decoded, appeals to me.

I can see problems with this plan, of course. But the promise is still enough to leave me hanging over the fence, peering into the world beyond and speculating how it came to be like that and why. How, I wonder, does anyone ever get along within it?

The possibility that I can work out the answers is my own adult fantasy.