nd focus: Age: aging, but not growing up

It’s hardly a secret that Millennials – roughly those born between 1980 and 1995 – have a problem growing up. It’s not for nothing that they are also called Generation Y, with the Y being pronounced as the English “Why?” This alludes less to a particularly critical attitude towards the world than to the constant questioning and self-doubt to which those who have not reached the so-called second half of life and are stuck in the limbo of post-adolescence are thrown back.

Structurally, it all makes sense: If you don’t have a job with a long-term perspective and a salary that allows you to get a home loan and family planning, civil society doesn’t actually have any blueprint for the future to offer. The entire society experiences, so to speak, that permanent crisis requires a radical present, because instead of visions and progress there is only regression and one revival of the past after another. In a precarious existence, you don’t plan for the future, you hardly set your sights on a long-term development goal that would require consistency and responsibility. It’s more likely that you’re still stuck in the nostalgia of your childhood, watching the ninth “Star Wars” film again on the streaming provider or any other of the endless new editions of seemingly perfect eighties.

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Growing up is actually just aging. Instead of developing for the better, life is just a flow of the same thing, which will then simply stop at some point. We could admit to suffering from this state of general hopelessness – but instead it has led to an outright resentment of adulthood. Youth madness, anti-aging cosmetics and the infantilization of public communication are just the tip of the iceberg of a rejection of responsibility, maturity and instinctual sublimation. Just as the crisis of liberalism leads many to hate freedom, some would rather remain children of their own choosing than face the expropriation of their future.

Maybe it’s a completely self-conscious and responsible decision when men in their forties simply look like 16-year-olds in colorful sneakers and patterned socks, in shorts and a statement shirt, a cool backpack and a stylish baseball cap. Or when people who still identify with those in their early 20s have back pain and severe hangovers after the “partying” that they carry with them as a habit of life. But even if they do, such decisions are made “not under self-chosen circumstances, but under immediately found, given and handed down circumstances,” as Marx already noted. And these circumstances are a permanent immaturity from which people should be brought out – even grown up.

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