Failure to Launch, Revisited

By Alan Jacobs • October 11, 2012, 7:53 AM

artiomp / Shutterstock

The shrewdest moment in Laura Bennett’s smart and sobering essay on twentysomething life comes here:

So perhaps it’s not the twentysomethings whose self-obsession is driving this trend. All those stories about emerging adults bear a suspicious resemblance to another overcrowded genre about the worries of a small and privileged class: the parents who continue to invest in and manage their kids into adulthood. “I sometimes imagine that there’s an editor at the Times who’s got a thirtysomething kid that he can’t get out of the house who’s putting his shoes up on the coffee table and eating Cheetos on the couch,” the sociologist Michael Rosenfeld told me.

Robin Henig, for her part, says that she never intended for her book to be a blanket statement about all young people. “We were uncomfortable from the very beginning acting as though we were saying anything about a generation,” she told me. She wanted the title to be something like Cusp or Brink, she added, but her editors insisted on Twentysomething. Her main hope was to address the world of her daughters. “If there’s an emotion I want people to come away with from this book, it’s feeling comforted,” she said. A nearly 300-page professional collaboration between a mother and her twentysomething daughter — designed to reassure the daughter’s peers that everything will be OK — feels a bit like helicopter parenting seen through to its logical conclusion. While some of the anxiety at play here is surely the twentysomethings’, perhaps even more of it belongs to the boomers whose basement couches they are occupying.

Touché. And as Bennett also makes clear — something that never happens in the endless series of New York Times articles about those fascinating young things in Williamsburg — the whole phenomenon of aspiring-artists-working-as-baristas-in-Brooklyn is confined to a tiny percentage of Americans, those in the upper and extreme upper-middle classes. You can only bide your time in a part-time job in some greening part of a big city, writing or painting or designing in your free time, if you have a significant parental subsidy. But the overwhelming majority of young Americans come from families with no spare income to support a finding-yourself period. Would that the media saw fit to notice them, because they have hopes too — but hopes that they can’t nurture for a leisurely decade. It’s good that Laura Bennett reminds us of this.

P.S. I’m the parent of a 20-year-old college sophomore. Check back with me in five or six years to see if I’m part of the solution or part of the problem.

UPDATE: Great comments below. See especially Nick’s.

Tagged laura bennett.

11 Responses to Failure to Launch, Revisited

Jake Meador says:

October 11, 2012 at 10:45 am

Thanks for posting this. I’ve got a really weird relationship to those kinds of twenty somethings b/c I am trying to break into publishing and writing, so I totally get that longing. But I come from a lower middle class family (first in my dad’s family to go to college and I went to the state university b/c it was all we could afford), one grandpa has worked just about every job you can imagine (in warehouses, driving an armored car, etc.) and the other came back from WW2 and worked on the railroad for 30+ years. So I don’t have anything like what most of the NY twenty somethings that get profiled in Slate or the NYT have. Last year I got a job as a para in a special ed classroom where I spent most of the year getting punched, hit, kicked, spit on, etc. by a couple of esp. rough students. (I got sent home on day on a kind of medical leave b/c the nurse thought I might have a concussion.) But I had to have a job and that was all I had.

Looking back on it, I actually think people who don’t have those kind of experiences are missing out… there’s a toughness and resilience that those sorts of jobs teach you. My year was nothing like as difficult as life has been for my grandparents’ generation, but I think I understand it a bit better b/c of how hard my economic life has been post-college. I wouldn’t have experienced that if I had parents who bankrolled my life while I “found myself.”
Ethan C. says:

October 11, 2012 at 11:26 am

You might be able to get an educated guess which one you are now: What’s your sophomore’s major? And does he or she already have a plan of what they expect to do with that degree after school’s over? And by plan, I don’t mean, “Move to Portland.” More like, “Get certified, teach high school.” Or “Get a library degree, work in a library.”

And the result can be different for different kids. My older brother had to rely on our folks for a really long time after he dropped out of college, but he’s become a lot more self-sufficient in the past couple of years. I lived at home during library school, but now I’m married and independent (mostly; I still do laundry at their house). My younger brother is just about to graduate at 23 with a theater degree, and I’m worried that he’ll take quite some time to get established. But we’ll see.
Nick says:

October 11, 2012 at 11:30 am

An excellent post and an outlook for which I have a lot of sympathy. I will say, though, that in my recent “Brooklyn years” I lived among a fair number of people who were flying without a safety net. That is to say, they scraped together work to pay the rent and ate once a day if need be in order to pursue the same creative work and way of life as their more cossetted peers. It’s also worth remembering that not everyone in this cohort is a barista or an intern. I myself come from a solidly middle class family who could help me out here and there were not in a position to write a rent check every month. Luckily I managed to get work in the insane world of high-end private tutoring, which paid very well and allowed me to see the otherwise unapproachable homes on Park Avenue and Easthampton. In New York especially, the presence of the ultra-wealthy creates economic opportunities that in any other city would be impossible bonanzas. Obviously, I was lucky to have gotten an education that prepared me for this work, but it was also a job that rewarded hustle and ingenuity.

Part of the reason I can’t really stand Lena Dunham’s take on this way of life is that it focuses exclusively on the least-sympathetic echelon of young Brooklynites. To those of us who lived in that same world while still hustling to support ourselves and feeling damn proud of it, its extremely frustrating to have to remind people that even in the rarefied atmosphere of hipster Brooklyn, the idle, whining offspring of the upper classes are NOT the majority.
Ben CS says:

October 11, 2012 at 12:27 pm

I want to second what Nick wrote about flying without a safety net. There are contradictory tendencies to excoriate young people for being lazy parasites (see, reaction from my older, more conservative relatives to the Occupy movement, which they saw as emblematic of all twenty-somethings) while also accusing them of being rich and privileged (reaction from blue-collar people to in my neighborhood to hipsters moving in). In fact, very few of the transitional twenty-somethings I know receive any form of parental subsidy. Most of them worked extremely hard during college and racked up a lot of student debt. They’re paying the rent somehow. I wish people who are concerned with “the younger generation” would spend less time worrying about our supposed character flaws and more time on structural problems, like student debt and high unemployment.
Nick says:

October 11, 2012 at 2:36 pm

I’d also say that “flying without a safety net” is relative. That is, I skipped meals and walked everywhere (and drank as cheaply as I could) before I found steady work because I really didn’t have the money to spare. But I also knew that if disaster truly struck there were havens to which I could retreat. In the last resort I could have moved home or accepted a timely loan — I was never in danger of being out on the street. And that counts for a lot, and is a form of privilege all its own, though ultimately what would family be for. The point is that I worked hard to avoid just such a disaster (insofar as that as in my power) because I didn’t want to be bailed out, I wanted to do it on my own. The well-deserved scorn aimed at those who at least seem to be fine with living off of their families is too often aimed at their whole generational cohort.

And having said that, I loved living in Brooklyn. I had moved there when it was already heavily gentrified and probably passe, but it was fun and exciting and hard and it breaks my heart to see it turned into a trope of lazy privilege.
Matt says:

October 11, 2012 at 8:29 pm

Both Jake’s and Nate’s posts put me in mind of a great post on Random House Canada’s blog on how difficult it is to make it in some fields (i.e., journalism) when you don’t have parents to subsidize you taking an unpaid internship: http://www.randomhouse.ca/hazlitt/feature/how-succeed-journalism-when-you-cant-afford-internship

The writer, Alexandra Kimball, comes from a working-class family and was only able to break in to journalism once she got a surprise inheritance. Apparently the expectation that journalism majors will go three months without pay in an internship is now almost univeral, and neither she nor her parents could afford it. She had no resources, as the OP says, to nurture her hopes over a leisurely decade.

She therefore got a PhD in English: not to find herself, but because it provided a small salary and time to keep building her resume without being dependent on parents who couldn’t afford to keep her. Which is not unlike what I’m doing now. And much like Kimball’s experience in journalism, it looks to me like the winners in academia may be those who can afford to travel to distant conferences, and to dedicate their summers to writing. I can’t, and so although I’m sticking with the PhD for the stipend and the challenge, I don’t really expect to land the fabled TT job.

That said, even if I end up scrounging for work in a much less glamorous field, I’m grateful for the privilege that has let me pursue the degree in the first place.
Orthodoxdj says:

October 12, 2012 at 1:15 pm

What strikes me as odd is that living with parents has come to be seen as a problem by Americans, but after dating an Arab girl for a while I’ve learned that a good chunk of the world lives that way as a normal-even expected-way of life. Staying with family, for many cultures, is viewed as the most natural and meaningful thing a person can do. American individualism has fed the mistaken notion that “independence” is the highest value.
Surly says:

October 12, 2012 at 9:35 pm

I sent the link to my 24 year old daughter because I knew it would make her crazy. She replied with a breathtaking rant about her peers. She’s an upper middle class white kid with a $200,000 bachelor’s in something “useless” from an elite school, but you know what? She’s supported herself since she graduated. First as a Jesuit Volunteer and now as a teacher’s assistant in a country that has a very low cost of living. She has had to improvise, live in a house with a group of people and eat rice and beans, and go without a lot of things. She will be honest about the fact that she is privileged to be able to choose that lifestyle, having no debt and having parents with the means to provide a safety net. Santa was very generous last year with clothing, for example. Anyway..here’s the conclusion of the rant:

“Which, you know, is not to say these twentysomethings are bad people. I´m sure they´re very nice and write pretty poems and make delicious vegan cookies. But if they´re bored or not feeling self-fulfilled, I know a lot of organizations that could really use some help. It would require getting off Tumblr, of course. And exactly inverting that one asshat´s “making my experience your own” mantra, which as it stands may be the most self-indulgent BS I´ve ever heard…well, this week at least. How about “make other people´s experiences yours,” if we have to give it a catch phrase? There´s a whole country and beyond that a whole world full of people that are struggling. So my prescription is that these people get off their blogs, go out and meet people that aren’t exactly like them, find causes they care about, read a damn book once in a while, and get to work.”
Alan Jacobs says:

October 13, 2012 at 8:41 am

Surly, your daughter is an impressive young woman.
Surly says:

October 13, 2012 at 10:56 am

Thanks Alan!
isaacplautus says:

October 13, 2012 at 2:07 pm

I got my degree in 2009 in literature and classics. Worked a 9 dollar an hour job for 3 years for the YMCA. Lost my health insurance when I turned 26. Now I’m moved back in with my parents getting my teaching license for high school English. 9 dollars an hour is a very hard way to live, and that isn’t even minimum wage so many Americans have to make do on less. I can’t count the number of times the past 3 years when I’ve had to turn down getting a beer or going to a movie because such a choice would have meant not being able to eat. And I have had it way, way, way better than most and am extraordinarily blessed. For me, the natural use of a liberal arts degree is the teaching field. It has taken me 3 years to figure that out, but better late than never.