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Dream Board

My friend Olivia is in possession of what I consider to be the all-time greatest dating anecdote. In this story, Olivia is a twenty-something art student. She’s dating an older man, a guy in his forties who is either in art school too, or has connections to the art-school crowd in their small city — the details are lost to time. It’s morning and she is at his house alone. He’s gone to work or to school and she’s making coffee and languidly snooping around, the way new lovers do when they are in the space of the beloved.

There is a chilly breeze coming in off the lake. She shivers and moves to pull down the window, but it’s stiff — one of those old wooden window frames suspended on a rope that has been painted over by lazy renovators so many times it will always stick and bang. It does just that when she tries to close it, sliding suddenly down the rope that’s crunchy with paint and slamming against the sill.

This disturbance causes a chain reaction. Maybe a broom that was leaning against the window tips sideways, snaking a collection of vintage wooden trains across the mantle. The trains collide with a cactus, which in turn upends a large sketchpad that has been placed open, displaying some charcoal or watercolour. I like to imagine an unspeakably banal still life fluttering as it falls to the floor.

‘Seriously, Doyle,’ Olivia said, half hysterical, calling from the boyfriend’s backyard just minutes after the fact. ‘It was like something out of a 1950s sitcom.’

Olivia tries to tidy up; she stubs her toe, swears, feels guilty, as if she has been busted, and then suddenly she sees it. A thing previously concealed by the placement of the sketchpad. A thing both marvellous and totally gross.

‘A dream board.’

‘What the hell is a dream board?’

‘Have you heard of the New Age self-help program called The Secret?’

I gasped: I had. I knew the book. The cover was cheap-looking: a ye olde–style map, like one a pirate might use to find treasure in a videogame, the title scrawled in blood red, the S stamped in digital wax as though sealing some pseudo-ancient communication.

‘A dream board is part of The Secret. You’re supposed to write your goals on it. Like, your ultimate goals, the things your life will move towards,’ Olivia confirmed.

‘How awful!’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘And do you want to know what my forty-year-old boyfriend wrote on his dream board?’

‘Oh my god, yes.’

‘Get ready,’ she said, giggling. ‘He wrote that he wants to be a famous artist.’

‘No!’

‘Wait. He also wants a million dollars, a Porsche, and a hot young wife.’

‘No!’ I said again.

‘Yes. A million dollars.’

‘Not a penny less, plus Porsche!’

‘Wife both young and hot!’

We yelped with amusement. We guffawed, chortled, and choked. We mocked his secret until we were exhausted. Then Olivia became serious.

‘I don’t know what to do, Doyle,’ she said. ‘I really like him, but I think he might believe in angels.’

I love imagining this man sitting down to the task of dream-board creation. I picture him racking his brain and then, selecting the gold pen, writing his goals in careful, broad letters: FAME. MILLION DOLLARS. PORCHE. HOT YOUNG WIFE. He’s decorating these words accordingly. Did he use a ruler? As an art-school alumnus — or student — he probably has a natural sense of design. He places it on the mantle and stands back to admire his work. He is filled with hope but also, what? Shame. The shame gets stronger. Is this his moment of adult reckoning?

He places the sketchpad in front of the dream board. He barricades it with the cactus. He doesn’t rip it up and throw it out, though. In fact, on star-bright, wistful nights alone, he removes the sketchpad and, standing reverently before his goals (naked, I imagine) — their promises of riches, speed, and succour respectively glittering in candlelight — he repeats his mantra, or does his power yoga, or whatever The Secret tells him to do when invoking the divine. Maybe he summons his fucking angel.

It makes me laugh, this story. It also highlights a uniquely contemporary confusion people have about what a successful life is and how a person can get one. We live in a world where forty-year-olds are making dream boards. It’s clear I’m not the only one having trouble working out what to structure my life around.

Adulthood was not always seen as a state of being, a characteristic that you acquire. For centuries, short life expectancy meant making it to thirty was a reasonable achievement. Tellingly, many cultures do not even have a word for adult, as distinct from woman and man. According to sociologist James E. Côté, ‘adult’ only appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary for the first time in 1657; ‘adulthood’ remained at large until 1870. The term marks a stage of life that is understood as more than just physical maturity, but when I thought about it, I realised that I viewed the idea of an adult as if through a paper telescope. There was an image there, but it was severed of context. I could pick out the features — the haircuts and ‘real jobs’, the things owned and things cared for, the eyes set forward with a look of commitment and forbearance. But I could not place this image in its environment, and, as soon as I tried to animate it, the image dropped out of frame entirely. Where did it go? Where did it come from?

The image is slippery because adulthood is not a naturally determined state but a cultural artefact. In Ancient Rome, adolescence lasted until thirty among the nobles. This was the youngest a man could be admitted to public office. In 56 BC, Cicero famously defended a former student charged with political violence by deploying what critics have called a ‘boys will be boys’ defence: Cicero insisted that no one could expect a twenty-nine-year-old to take responsibility for his actions because such a youth possesses neither foresight nor wisdom. He was not yet a man. In Ancient Greece, you were a man so long as you had a good family name and a beard, but if you were rich, it was fair enough to stay in school until your late thirties, like Aristotle. In other places and times, people were adults as soon as they were old enough to work and procreate, and for most, there was no way to delay or control either. Right through the ancient and classical periods and well into the eighteenth century, free men and women worked from home growing food, making what they could, and trading for everything else.

The border between adulthood and childhood is not just developmentally but also legally and economically defined. It’s hard to discuss adulthood without emphasising that, for much of Western history, slavery endured in agrarian, industrial, and domestic labour and so only the minority were constructed as adults in a way we can recognise today — that is, in full possession of their bodies and futures, and empowered to make choices about what to do with them. For centuries, coming of age has occurred in economic systems in which people have been bought and sold as property. It’s telling that in the Americas, slaves were considered adult children. This structural injustice endures today in many ways, in many places. Age-based laws, meanwhile, that prevent people from working, or having sex, or voting, tie the term ‘adult’ to a discourse about rights and responsibilities. For instance, attitudes about the age of consent changed at the end of the nineteenth century. In England, a thirteen-year-old girl could reasonably take on the very grown-up roles of wife, mother, or sex worker until 1885, when the age of consent was legally enshrined at sixteen. In the United States, early feminists managed to get the age of consent raised to sixteen in most states by 1920 (it had been as low as seven in Delaware just twenty-five years earlier).

The more I looked, the more I found that what constitutes a ‘normal’ adult life at any moment in history depended almost entirely on what was required economically in the period one came of age. The modern concept of adulthood has its roots in the Industrial Revolution: more men began to leave the home for work, and consequently, women were expected to stay and labour unpaid — and so the idea of motherhood as a calling emerged, as did the necessity of infant–mother bonding. During the late nineteenth century, young people did not necessarily leave home, achieve financial independence, marry, and procreate in that order, or in a timely manner. Middle-class life trajectories were more flexibly defined and, according to historian Steven Mintz, ‘tended to swing between periods of relative independence and phases of dependence when they returned to the parental home’. This description caught my eye: boomerang kids, more than a century before they had a name!

The move to different kinds of manufacturing, and the emergence of new ways to bank, travel, and communicate led to the beginning of our modern idea of a self-selected career. In North America, when the labour movement grew in the late 1800s, the system of prescribed apprenticeships for young people, whereby one shipped children off to become butchers or soldiers or smiths, deteriorated. Partly as a consequence, many middle-class white children were able to pursue a longer and more comprehensive education, and this perhaps was the first hint of a world where young people were expected to scout their own opportunities and decide on the shape of their futures.

Today, though, despite all our rights and choices, social historians argue that adult lives in rich countries are more uniform than at any previous point in history. This, Mintz points out, is thanks in part to institutional innovations such as mortgages and income insurance, which smooth the transition from family of origin to a particular kind of family of reproduction. Looking at a comparative sample of Americans from 1880 and 1970, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania concluded that in many ways ‘growing up, as a process, has become briefer, more normful and bounded’ over the century.

Normful and bounded. They aren’t words that we typically use to describe modern life. And yet wasn’t this the very thing I experienced at my moment of adult reckoning? I was unable to see alternative ways of being and so became focused on the things I had not yet acquired.

In the final years of the last millennium, when I was working to finish high school, local newspapers ran editorials accusing Gen X women of forgetting to have kids. They were too busy with their careers, said the media. They were short-sighted and selfish. They were narcissists, and now we were paying for it. Gen X women in their late thirties and early forties were clogging the waiting rooms of fertility clinics, listening to Pavement on their Discman, clutching copies of Infinite Jest. Wastoids. Looking back, these stories managed to combine generational sledging and a patronising anti-feminist agenda. Working hard in a depressed economy, women, a segment of the workforce with statistically less opportunity to attain seniority, are unlikely to ‘forget’ that for many centuries their main social function has been having babies.

Generational portraiture is always political. In 2013, the year I turned thirty, after Time ran a cover story dubbing millennials the ‘Me Me Me Generation’, Elspeth Reeve of The Atlantic pointed out that the magazine had made these claims before — in 1990, when analysing the defects and challenges that characterised Generation X.

Laziness, entitlement, apathy, and narcissism have been the best way to describe every generation since such observations were first declared a story. An article from a 1907 edition of The Atlanta Monthly cites the ‘worship of the brazen calf of the self’ as the reason American marriages fail. In 1976, gonzo journalist Tom Wolfe used the cover of New York magazine to declare ‘The Me Decade’, hilariously citing everything from LSD, post-war prosperity, changing gender roles, and haemorrhoid-reducing meditation practices to back his charges. In this era of the third awakening, Wolfe cried, we ‘begin with the most delicious look inward; with considerable narcissism’.

This look was so far inward that it coalesced on the haemorrhoidal rectum as a mystical and spiritual centre. Wolfe conjured the image of a convention centre full of New Age devotees, a closed feedback loop in which energy is reabsorbed as quickly as it is generated: a whole epoch meditating fiercely on the importance of their own arseholes.

The way we describe people matters. The way we frame adulthood in both private and public discourse matters — because it works to include and exclude people from social engagement. As in class conflict, acrimony between young and old divides people, allows them to blame one another for inequality, and facilitates wilful blindness to the broader social context.

James E. Côté argues that the adult of the contemporary moment is linked with the rise of the individual, whose freedoms are seemingly greater than ever, as the primary economic agent (as opposed to families, villages, tribes, and other groups). The popularisation of adulthood as something one sets out to achieve coincides with the modern idea of the middle class, a group of people whose potential is manifest in their possession of a great deal of human capital. Theoretically, a middle-class individual has freedom, and a range of choices grounded by their economic responsibility; but what if the definition and attendant privileges of the middle class is changing as populations grow? Our understanding of adulthood is linked to the growth of capitalism, and can consequently be deployed in its service. Does this mean that definitions of adulthood can be deployed to induce people to fill social and economic roles on an ad-hoc basis?

This is probably why passions run so high in generational sledging matches. Time’s 2013 article purports to give the ‘cold, hard data’: ‘The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that’s now 65 or older.’ The spate of editorials from older people characterising my generation as selfish whingers has been met with equally vehement accusations of parsimoniousness and greed aimed at my father’s generation. Younger people in Australia, wrote one millennial critic in The Monthly, ‘have been locked out of the housing market, locked out of affordable education, locked out of the welfare system and secure employment’. They have seen ‘their political power and real wealth shrivel’ at the hands of baby boomers, who have ‘been the drivers of economic policy for decades’.

Reading these kinds of editorials really gets the blood pumping. I can jump up from my desk and left-hook the sky, but the anger or the thrill is cheap and short — surely the economic and social reality we are currently living in can’t simply be reduced to the behaviour of one group, old or young?

Tracking the accusations, it’s clear the media can and does cite anything as a harbinger of generational inadequacy. Recessions are as big a culprit as boom times. Spirituality. Nihilism. Too much happiness or too little. Too much responsibility, leading to a politically conservative generation, or too little, creating a Jersey Shore–level spoiled brat. Every generation is more self-centred and lazy than the one before. At this rate, by the end of the century we will only be capable of squatting in front of our screens, pleasuring ourselves to home movies that depict us squatting in front of our screens pleasuring ourselves . . .

My anus itches just thinking about it.

I pop one of the vitamins from the assortment of glass and plastic bottles that line my desk. Energy. Stress. Women’s balance. Memory. Hair, skin, nails, eyesight. Stabilised probiotics, because the gut is the new mind. Birth control, because I do not have time for menstruation. Herbs — I don’t know what the fuck, my naturopath gave them to me and now I’m scared to stop. Flower essences based on my flower taro. Don’t ask me what that is. It can’t hurt, that’s all I know. I don’t want to spend my life inefficiently, delinquent and lacking in some vital force only to find out at sixty that I have a rhododendron deficiency.

I decided to put aside the comparisons as they appeared in the media and attempt my own small-scale comparison of the last few generations. Had my cohort really dropped the ball? I suspected not, but I could not back my suspicions at an intergenerational dinner party. This was a severe handicap, given that my opponents could always point out that they understood this progression more fully, simply because they were older. And they had years on me when it came to holding dinner parties, too.

In his book The Greatest Generation, American journalist Tom Brokaw recalls his parents’ cohort, those who came of age during the Depression of the 1930s and lived through two world wars. He describes their lives as a collective ‘towering achievement’. ‘Looking back,’ he writes, ‘I can recall that the grown-ups all seemed to have a sense of purpose that was evident even to someone as young as four, five, or six.’

This was my grandparents’ generation, and in many ways it is the generation to which each subsequent cohort has been compared. It was a point in history where media was relatively centralised, and an adult in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and parts of Europe was depicted as someone who could make do, and pitch in — not for a war so much, but the war effort. Rose Bonavita Hickey embodies the ideal adult in the United States (which influences so much of Western culture) for this period. She was one of the many Rosies that inspired the propagandist figure Rosie the Riveter.

Born in 1921, Bonavita grew up hard. At eighteen, she worked in a laundry. At twenty-one, on an assembly line building Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers, she and a friend set a new work record, drilling 900 holes and driving 3,300 rivets in their six-hour shift.

I knew Rosie from the feminist student collective badges that were handed out at uni, but I didn’t know that she married her high-school sweetheart during a break in his service to the US Navy. She was twenty-five and pregnant by the time he was redeployed. She left the workforce after the war and raised three children, becoming a housewife in Long Island. Her parents lived upstairs, and her in-laws next door. She went to Mass every day and baked a fresh apple pie for her children to come home to after school. Has there ever been an adult life in which one person is required to fill and abandon so many different roles?

My maternal grandmother stepped up like a good Rosie. The photographs of her during World War II are of a strong, vivacious young woman with a purpose. By the time I met her, she was a reserved, sharp-tongued sixty-something with an appallingly racist worldview.

‘She had a good war,’ Dad liked to say to me when, as a child, I complained about my grandmother’s heavy-handed, strict discipline and intolerance of noise or precociousness.

It took me decades to understand that ‘a good war’ was code for a brief form of female becoming that opened up in that historical moment and then closed again, ushering women back into the home, whether they were suited to it, as Rosie B. seemed to be, or immensely irritated, as my grandmother surely was.

In the conventional picture of generations, the next generation is the baby boomers. Yet a description in the introduction to Renata Adler’s essay collection After the Tall Timber interrupted this continuity for me: Adler writes about belonging to a generation ‘unnoticed even as we spread clear across what people call the generation gap’ — that is, the gap between the world of my parents and grandparents. Those who were born at the end of the Great Depression were children during World War II and looked on, as Brokaw did, at their parents pitching in and making do.

‘We grew up separately,’ Adler writes, ‘without a rhetoric, drawing our ideas from age and cultural groups already formed, as we were not.’

This description resonated with me as though it were written yesterday. Perhaps there is something specific in being born at the very beginning of a generational cohort, as I am. You operate in a transitional space, paving the way for some future change of which you can’t quite take ownership. I wondered, too, as I read more descriptions of generations, what the impulse is to write in such a mode. We all know this kind of writing demands stereotype, is reductive to the point of being class- and colour-blind. And yet there is a connection between people born within a decade or two of one another. There is an understanding that moves through other social categories. Generations certainly exist. Is the desire to write about them always a desire to defend and explain one’s self to one’s parents? Or is it about writing history, not in terms of events, but in terms of the everyday — the ways that history produces our psyches before we even know it? I feel this impulse strongly, but I can’t quite decode it.

My parents were the children of adults from the so-called greatest generation, and so their experience includes an insider perspective. My mother was dropped off at boarding school early, and held at an emotional and physical distance for much of her childhood. My dad describes the absence and frustration of his own father, who fought in World War II and who demonstrated the necessity of ‘staying out of combat if you can’ (this, along with ‘stay away from factories if you can’, were the earliest, most sensible pieces of life advice Dad imparted). My parents’ experiences of childhood, and the other, similar descriptions that litter the biographies of members of their cohort, go some way to providing a counter-narrative to the one woven by wartime propaganda, and the nostalgic descriptions of great optimism and social connectedness amid a climate of sadness and terror. Interestingly, in Australia we have an alternate name for the greatest generation — we call them the silent generation, a haunting epithet that evokes the trauma that so many brought home from war.

Before the media began its campaign to caricature my generation, I received private coaching in intergenerational sledging from my dad.

‘Rhythm and blues?’ Dad scoffed in 1993, as I danced around the living room. ‘That’s not rhythm and blues.’

Nor was rap ‘music’, and Cat Stevens should have sued Ugly Kid Joe. As a kid I had loved my parents’ records, and Dad’s mythologising, nostalgic stories. But as I grew into a teenager, I hated how there always seemed to be a boomer around to tell me that the music I was listening to was derivative or mislabelled, or to make smug comments when I read or watched something from the ’70s, or brought home vintage finds from the op shop. Parents wanted to own everything, yet were always telling you to share. It wasn’t fair.

Now I realise that the sudden assumption of expert opinions on the young might, in fact, be a true milestone of adulthood. I catch myself, at dreaded toddler’s birthday parties, or in the waiting room at the doctor’s, judging tiny humans quite harshly. They are totally hooked on that iPad, I think. They don’t seem to be able to tolerate boredom at all! It can’t be good for their imaginations. What will become of them? What will become of our future?

Nevertheless, I carried my resentment against boomers effortlessly into my twenties, and rarely bothered to subject it to critical scrutiny. I wasn’t alone. I don’t know what it felt like to protest in the countercultural heyday of the 1960s and 1970s, but in the late 1990s and early 2000s, whatever we protested, it felt as if we were also protesting our parents’ generation, their greed and their policies. University intakes and fees were increased, and hadn’t classes been capped and free for our parents? Joining the union was voluntary, and didn’t casual work enslave the young? MV Tampa was refused entry to Australian waters, but didn’t my own parents both come here by boat?

‘It’s totally ridiculous, though,’ an activist friend pointed out. ‘This is a generation that instigated women’s shelters and legalised homosexuality, and we’re going to hold them to account for not being able to stop neoliberalism? Tell them, “We hate you because you didn’t protect us from our own failure to organise in defence of our own rights?” It’s like if, when I’m old, my kids are like, “I can’t believe that there was fresh water when you were a kid, and there were all these islands in the Pacific Ocean.”’

He was right. Yet we sought, rightly or wrongly, to weaponise our sense of alienation in a battle against our parents.

Both my parents are first-line baby boomers born into that fabled post-war prosperity. They were middle class, if at opposite ends of that spectrum. My mother went to university in South Africa. She did not acquire any student debt, but was expected to graduate into marriage rather than a career. Like so many of her peers, she defied expectations and forged a legacy for the next generation of young women. After university, she immigrated to Australia and a workforce in which new professional career paths were appearing every day. She took a job that did not yet have a clear entry requirement, becoming a psychologist with a Bachelor of Arts with honours and a combined major in Theatre Studies. In her late twenties she met my father, a journalist and rogue about town. They got a small loan, bought a block of land, and built a house with a minimum of fuss. They had their only child relatively late (at thirty-five) and were separated by their early forties. They followed different paths to their parents, but this was pioneering, not malingering.

‘I belong to that generation of American and European women who, having come of age in the 1960s, discovered that so great a gap existed between our mothers and ourselves that we had almost nothing in common,’ wrote Sigrid Nunez, considering the ‘generation gap’ and her own adult fantasies.

I know that my mother felt this way as she moved far from her family of origin and their expectations for her life. Perhaps this feeling would make adult life easier. If you have nothing in common with your parents, you would never expect them to know you. Today, though, we communicate far too much to be able to claim not to understand each other. If anything, in the rhetoric between boomers and their children, generations X and Y, there is too much understanding going on. It is comprehension as a form of violence.

I have a lot in common with my parents, and this might be true even at the level of the generational cohort. Like baby boomers, millennials are exceptional. We are seduced by utopias. We are pop-culture-obsessed. We hate capitalism but love Beyoncé (or Bob Dylan) and being our own boss. We desire change yet crave security. The world, unconcerned with our similarities, has altered. Free or low-cost tertiary education, new opportunities in the jobs market, relative affordability of housing, new media technologies, and the fierce energy emanating from the women’s movement and civil rights struggles combined to produce a unique world for my parents to matriculate into. The world I get is unique too, but its logic is not the same.

To counterpoint the various sledging battles that have dominated the media, another narrative has emerged recently in which millennials and baby boomers are asked to empathise with one another. The Guardian recently published an article where a representative woman of each generation ‘swaps lives’, à la Freaky Friday, in order to write about the relative challenges of the other. Rhiannon, twenty-eight, can’t help envying seventy-two-year-old Michelle’s North London flat and free education. After looking at how the other side lives, she wonders if the time she spends online affects the amount of time she can spend ‘out and about’, noting how Michelle, ironically, appears to be so much more socially connected. Michelle has dinner parties with her friends, who talk about art and politics rather than work and relationship stress. They ‘seem much more comfortable in their own skins and at home with their eccentricities than me and my friends’, Rhiannon observes, with a trace of longing. Other than her distrust of social media and smartphones, Michelle defies stereotypes and has nothing but sympathy for Rhiannon’s student loan and unfathomable rent. In the London of the 1960s, she says, they had ‘appalling racism, homophobia, slums’, but landlords couldn’t be quite as greedy. ‘My friends and I were terrified witless of nuclear war, but we didn’t have to panic about finding a home or work.’

My mother resembles the sympathetic boomer delegate from this article. She bemoaned the proposed increase to the retirement age in Australia. ‘Now, hang on!’ she yelled at the TV news in her best whistleblower shrill. ‘When are we going to let young people work?’

Mum abhors tax breaks and refuses to invest in negatively geared rental property because ‘it’s just wrong’ (and I agree), though it also means she has far less for retirement, which is a burden I worry we will share.

Mum doesn’t think it’s my fault that I haven’t set my life up yet, but she is worried about me, and I suspect she still doesn’t quite see me as an adult. As a psychologist, Mum is professionally trained to measure development and worry about it. She is on the front line of an industry that popularised the understanding of life as a developmental project — psychology was instrumental in establishing normative descriptions of adulthood and in popularising anxiety-inducing imperatives such as fulfilment. Adulthood and its problems are in some crucial sense a product of psychology, and my own adult problems, doubly so.

As a child, I had already learned that adult life was a manifestation of all the dreams and talents I was cultivating. The messages I received from my storybooks, from my mother’s love, from the way I was spoken to and about all through my childhood in the 1980s and 1990s, reflected the dominant line for middle-class kids at the end of the twentieth century: YOU are special and YOU can do anything!

Everybody agreed on this — or, rather, if anyone disagreed they’d have my mother to answer to. My Grade Three teacher dared to suggest that fountain pens should be a privilege reserved for peers with better penship than me. Mum paid her a visit to remind her how special I was, how important it was that I was given every opportunity to learn. My teacher didn’t look me in the eye for the rest of the term. I left inky fingerprints all over the classroom.

My mother was big on extracurricular activities. I took creative dance. I was a junior forest ranger. I set the kitchen bench on cold blue fire with my chemistry set. I was a junior scientist with the CSIRO, enlisted in a study that involved collecting local earthworms and killing them by immersion in methylated spirits. I learned to play awkward sonatas on the piano, joyless jazz on the saxophone, plaintiff waltzes on the clarinet. I wore homemade dresses. I didn’t know how to talk to other children. During dinner parties, I sat at the table with the grown-up guests. I had a sherry glass full of riesling.

During lulls in the adult conversation, I amused the guests by reciting the titles of self-help books from my mother’s shelves.

‘Fat is a Feminist Issue,’ I interjected. ‘I’m Okay, You’re Okay.’

(At the time, all I felt was the glory of a successful performance. Looking back, I can imagine the kinds of comments those liquored-up, nut-loaf-stuffed diners made about the fate of psychologists’ children as they reversed their cars up our long, unpaved driveway.)

I spent afternoons marvelling over the covers of those books, with their bold capitals and artwork of flowers, leashed tigers, smiley faces, and sunsets. The Road Less Travelled. Women Who Run with the Wolves. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The future was blue skies, bright and full of adventure: a man rolling out a highway like a rug.

Mum frequently diagnoses her friends’ grown children and their failure to launch in ways that transfer seamlessly to me. ‘I get the sense that he is very restless,’ she said pointedly of one of her favourite cases, a guy whose degree has stretched on for half a decade and spanned several disciplines and departments. ‘He’s a bit stuck. I don’t know what his relationship status is, but certainly in terms of his work, the lack of commitment has really hindered his progress.’

On a good day, I half-listen to these analyses. On a bad day, I can’t let it stand. ‘What if accumulating things isn’t the goal? What if the lack of commitment comes from the general shittiness of what you are trying to commit to?’

‘I suppose,’ said Mum. She never blocks my input. It is not her professional or parental style.

‘I just think sometimes we worry about people because we are comparing them to an impossible or redundant standard.’

‘Yes,’ Mum said. ‘That could be true.’

Dad is more hardline. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he says, flapping his hand in a beak-like motion as I decry the state of my rented home, or the insecurity of my casual job. ‘Get on with it. The trouble with your lot is . . .’

Dad thinks that most of the obstacles I cite are in my head and that a good bit of determination and resourcefulness would put me on the fast track to the right kind of life.

Late capitalism, so it goes, is all about choices. We can be whoever we want to be. Our lives are a canvas (or a dream board) for us to fill, and so on. This is the contemporary line, and it comes with a cunning reversal: we are solely responsible for the kind of life we have. If Olivia’s ex doesn’t get that Porsche, it’s probably because he wasn’t dreaming hard enough, or he chose the wrong colour pen or called up some slacker angel. If the current crop of young people have not hit their adult milestones on time, it’s probably because we are lazy and deficient.

But what is this normative description of adulthood wielded in aid of now? What Rosie the Riveter–type roles are we being enlisted for? Is our equivalent of war-time nationalism the effort to bolster the illusion that our global economy and environment are fine and that human enterprise over the next century will look the same as it did in the last?

If so, is it any wonder we are stressed out and pissy? If this is our task, a dream board seems as realistic an approach as any.

I never said any of this to Dad. I know how he would have replied. And anyway, on reflection, a win in this round wouldn’t have helped with the adult problem that weighed on me the heaviest: Dad was right to doubt me. Though I possessed some of the qualities that adults at various times have had, I did not seem to possess the right ones for now, and, worse still, I didn’t feel grown up at all.

‘I need something substantial to structure my life around,’ I told Serge a few months after Cassady’s death, parroting the wisdom of my psychologist.

But what was that thing? How do people build a meaningful centre for their lives? I scrolled through the volunteer databases. I began and abandoned roles that I hoped would catapult me into the community. The aged-care facility was far away and left me sad; the after-school homework-helpers, too maths-intensive. I asked around, but many of the volunteer positions my friends had required long, intensive training followed by year-long commitments, something I wasn’t prepared to make. Eventually, I called a local animal rescue agency and signed up as a foster carer.

‘We really need someone for large and difficult dogs,’ said the woman on the phone. ‘We need someone to teach them how to live sensibly in the city.’

I almost laughed. I was counting on the dog to help teach me.

I drove to Melbourne’s Lort Smith animal hospital to pick up a dog called Mishka, a kelpie cross, blonde with fierce eyeliner and a white tip on her anxiously wagging tail. Her beleaguered carer looked at me with relief.

‘She’s too much of a handful,’ she said, apologetically. ‘My first priority has to be to my family.’

‘I have no family.’ I smiled at her.

I loaded Mishka into the back of my van. On the radio, some classic rocker sang it out: ‘Oh yeah, life goes on. Long after the thrill of livin’ is gone.’

Mishka and I yowled along as we lurched through the grey streets of Melbourne. There was solidity in our chorus, tuneless as it was.