The Fallacy of Being All Grown Up

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” is perhaps the single most common question children are assailed with throughout their development. Second only to “Are you lying to me?” and “Didn’t I tell you do this already?”. At least in my house growing up anyway.

This incessant focus on career is seemingly an American way of life. It is perhaps natural, as one of the most interesting things about children is their imagination and potential for what they might be when they “grow up”. It’s also generally true of more traditional cultures that there are rituals that youth undergo around puberty to catalyze their ‘adult’ or ‘mature’ persona. The evolution of a child away from raw, unfettered potential into a crystallized, stable person is a good, necessary thing for the health of the individual and everyone else.

Yet on the other hand, it is a particularly American ideal to harp on career. This is commonly reflected in the cultural attitudes of the most successful immigrant groups to the US - South Asians and East Asians -  in their education and career-oriented striving. This denotes a strong education is in the ether of what it means to be ‘successful’ in America. Though it is most glaringly obvious in these previously mentioned groups, as they are explicitly adhering to an ideal, it is also present in ethnic groups across all American society.

A child could want to be a rapper, a CEO, an astronaut, etc. The point is, they are assailed with the question without fail by nearly every adult they meet. The subtext being that at that some magical point when they “grow up” they will turn into this thing that they’ve been quizzed about since they can remember.

Yet it is this fallacy, that is so inherent to our culture, that the book Seasons of a Man’s Life (published in 1978) so thoroughly dismantles. This was not the direct aim of the book, but instead to delineate a more holistic and thorough approach to a concept of whole-of-life adult development.

The authors, Daniel J. Levinson et. Al., interviewed 40 men over a period of approximately two years to see if there were any discernable patterns common to various socio-economic and cultural backgrounds during the years of adulthood.

Lo & behold; there were. The men were of 4 professional occupations: workers, novelists, executives and biologists. They all were roughly around the age of 35-45. Most, 70%, held a college degree. They varied in race, cultural, and religious backgrounds. The research began in 1969 and so the participants were born in the range of 1923-1934. The study was restricted to men as Levinson felt that dividing the study would serve neither sex in a fulsome exploration of their particular life challenges. He did however write a book focusing on women, of a very similar title, in 1996.

Through his research Levinson explicated a basic framework for adult development. He clearly demonstrates, both in men and women, that adults go through a predictable series of oscillating periods of stability and transition. These periods are predicated on the timed lifespan challenges that emerge in concert with our evolved drives to meet these challenges and find our way in the world. Returning to this book, I will focus on the research conducted for the men, though the principles discussed do broadly apply to women as well. Yet, alas, I haven’t read that book on women, so any writing on the fairer sex here is more provisional. 😊

Let Them Live

One of the most wonderful aspects of this thoroughly researched book is the calming, common-sense wisdom that it delivers through exploring the lives of its subjects. Not one of the subjects had a smooth or easy time going into adulthood. These were people from an entire cross-section of society. Every life examined was filled with challenges and demands that are met with various success or otherwise and to varying degrees. As Levinson writes:

“Adulthood … is a more lengthy and complex process than usually imagined. …It takes a young man between the ages of 17-33 (give or take 2 years on either end) to emerge from adolescence, find his place in adult society and commit himself to a more stable life.”

So for the beleaguered youth of America, constantly sallied with the inevitable task to decipher their life’s work by the time they reach mid-high school, perhaps we could give them a break. Though our hearts are often in the right place or we’re simply trying to make conversation for brief moment, the question goes to the heart of a massive blind spot in American culture. We would do well by future generations to begin to change the way we phrase such an inquiry.

For although it is fundamental for youth to find their way in the world via career, the fallacy that they will know with utmost certainty the course of their life in this regard is utterly preposterous. No doubt they may have good intuition or already demonstrable potential in one area or another. But to constantly demand of them a degree of certainty that the majority of adults do not possess in their seasoned years, is to project our own insecurities on the naïve and befuddled youngins’.

Once one hits a certain age, likely around one’s mid-20’s – it is discovered for themselves. It is like finding out Santa isn’t real. The wide conspiratorial fiction is laid bare for one to truly behold the reality that had been obscured. Most adults do not know what they want to do.

The exception is some do, of course. As I read in a long-ago forgotten book; some are Mozart’s - born out of the cradle to be a virtuoso and flourish young. Some are Franklin’s (of the Benjamin type) - following meandering paths of varied content over a rich lifetime, contributing in several domains.

These are no doubt grand examples possible in the human experience. But they provide clear cases of the spectrum upon which people may develop in their occupations over time.

This is a more humane and wise way to appraise our lives, in conjunction with the same type of attitude change in our understanding of adulthood. With this newly adopted attitude we can withdraw misappropriated energies in the forms of anxiety, frustration, etc. We may then reapply our focus in a calm manner towards the fulsome development of ourselves.

This may be particularly valuable for those who were born, like myself, into socio-economic strata that place a premium on early career and education attainments as markers of optimal life achievement. I attended a suburban, upper-middle class high school where the valedictorian could be reliably expected to attend an Ivy with success, along with a cohort of fellow budding academicians of varying pedigree. The superintendent had attended Brown University. There was immense social pressure in the very air of the school that we all breathed to “succeed”. A great deal of money and time was spent on tutors, college tours, coaches, camps and the like to accelerate and improve one’s chances of scoring high on the SAT or receiving a sports scholarship.

Though there is nothing inherently wrong with competitive striving, naturally there are always costs and benefits to any system. The culture present at my school, and many others across the country like it, place immense emphasis on achievement garnered in high school as the fundamental event that will determine the rest of the student’s lives. Though this is broadly true in the abstract, the reality is much more varied. And the entire system is based on a fallacy that we have begun to see is patently false.

18 years of age is far from the culmination of adulthood, though it is tacitly treated as such to a strong degree. Adulthood takes much longer to catalyze. There are many factors to the successful catalyzation of a healthy person that are not taught in high school, nor by society writ-large. In fact, the anxiety, doubt and frustration inherent to a monolithic system that evaluates lives based on credentials of dubious value may cause more harm than good. If not at, least as much good as bad.

Given the massive level of suicide, overdose and incarceration that American society is and has been experiencing in the last several decades, it seems worthwhile to reimagine the way we understand the formation of adulthood. What if instead, we viewed the graduation of high school as the beginning of a substantial “novitiate” process? If we take Levinson’s work seriously, we can begin to do just that.

First we must reconfigure our view of people in terms of a Life Cycle. This means acknowledging that life is a process and journey that occurs in a seasonal quality of an oscillating nature. Life occurs for the individual on multiple levels and across a time span. The basic components of all individuals’ lives are biological, psychological and social. These levels of analyses are all interconnected, yet are clearly distinguishable. This is absolutely crucial to understand. We are evolved creatures operating on numerous levels of development. Levinson credits his a priori framework as being derived from a confluence of Freud, Jung and Erikson. Truly eminent grand patri of psychology.

(As an aside, for a further developed understanding of the bio-psycho-social model of human develpment, I highly recommend Steve & Pauline Richards of the Jung to Live By YouTube channel. They have a similar intellectual background to the book were exploring here. They have done extensive and thorough work to update Jung’s canon, as well as Freud and Adler’s work for the 21^st century. Their work dovetails elegantly with the writing of Levinson. However, they are outside the scope of this essay and so let us return to the main thread. )

The pillars of every life cycle, for every human being can be identified as such; Occupation, Love-Marriage-Family, Friends-Peers-Mentors, and cultural affiliation. By no means an exhaustive way of explicating the fundamental challenges of life, they are absolutely core to the vast majority of the stuff we all experience. The degree to which an individual finds a satisfactory state that enables them a healthy relating between their personal values and the society one is placed in, is a sure yardstick for measuring the success and vitality in a given life.

This is the concept of Life Satisfaction, which is a much more humane and wise way to gage our lives rather than outward yardsticks of success. The key prerequisites are that in the afore-mentioned pillars of a life cycle; adult finds harmony between their own personal values and dreams and what the society finds acceptable and valuable.

This broad framework gives considerable leeway to the individuals “pursuit of happiness” whilst simultaneously positively constrains them within the bounds of society. Given a healthy-enough society, there is plenty of room for personal customization and exploration of a life. Through this prism we can evaluate our lives within the four core pillars until we reach an equilibrium of satisfaction. A beautiful component of this principle being it's inherent dynamism.

Living the Dream, Baby

A key subcomponent of Life Satisfaction worth explicating is the formulation of a “personal dream”. This is an iterative process that must go on throughout the man’s life for him to have a good chance at achieving Life Satisfaction.

A dream may start off as quite fantastical – “I want to live on my own private island sipping Mai Thai’s all day” – but if the man is in the world and his psyche is not pathological, it will eventually be attenuated to his particular talents, capabilities and tastes.

A dream is so critical because it informs a man internally about what he wants to be in the world. It is a gold mine for motivation to go out and achieve in is his own unique way. Like the men in this study this can range from many things - from running one’s own metal shop, to winning the Nobel Prize in biology. Regardless of what normative level of success the dream represents, the formulation and striving of it provides the man with a critical sense of purpose, happiness and intrinsic reward.

The Dream was not and is not a silver bullet however. Even for men who achieved the dream, they often felt a bizarre level of disappointment in its culmination. For even in its attainment it did not solve all life’s problems, nor were they forever vaunted, in their own eyes and the eyes of others, as heroes.

Instead, life went on; including their own insecurities, challenges and crises on various levels. That being said, men who achieved or strove for their dream did derive a great deal of satisfaction from it. Those who struggled to formulate and live-out their dream often floundered in their work and personal lives. Several men of this type succumbed to early death due to a feeling of uselessness in the world. Levinson writes:

“Whatever the nature of his Dream, a young man has the developmental task of giving it greater definition and finding ways to live it out. It makes a great difference in his growth whether his initial life structure is consonant with and infused by the Dream or opposed to it. If the Dream remains unconnected to his life it may simply die, and with it his sense of aliveness and purpose.”

The Dream, and a man’s relationship to it, will be modified over his lifetime in concert with his other developmental stages. These stages may include both hindrances and support of the dream on various levels. The Dream “grows out of a primordial sense of self-in-the-world. It lends excitement and vitality to one’s life. It is associated with the ‘I Am’ feeling: the experience that ‘I exist’, that self and world are properly matched, that I can be myself and can act in accordance with the self.”.

Given a man’s talents, proclivities, social station, choices and life structure, this Dream will likely need to be modified. Whether he achieves it fully, very near or not at all; one will have to change his relationship to the dream.

One cannot be the hero or “promising young man” forever, and usually transitions to a more senior mentor role after a time. On the other hand, if a man has not pursued his dream, or even formulated one, he will have to deal with the attendant negative consequences. This will most likely precipitate in some form of neurosis, likely depression, to say the least. This will be true no matter if the dream is wildly ambitious or modest. The reality of the dream must be worked out in the world, the man must participate in its fruition, or suffer the consequences, which can be dire.

The Dream, stemming from unconscious and childhood fantasies, is myth-like. It is so in the sense that it is a timeless pattern that must then be located in temporal and personal reality. It is an inside out process.

The young man, should he formulate a dream and act on it, will feel that he is the hero and to a degree invincible. This is an illusion. “He may suffer momentary defeats and at times all may appear lost, but if he preservers he will triumph. Beliefs of this kind tend to be strongest in the Early Adult Transition (17-22), when the dream is taking shape and has less grounding in reality, and in Becoming One Own’s Man (approx..40-45) when one has the ‘now or never’ urge to realize aspirations of early adulthood.”

The sense of invincibility is inevitably shattered by life, and a man’s sense of being a hero is severely hurt. “Jung speaks of ‘ego inflation’, when a man experiences his internal hero as all-powerful. The inflation is followed, says Jung, by a period of ‘deflation’ in which the hero is badly wounded. Painful as it is, deflation is a necessary step in overcoming the internal dominance of the hero and forming a more integrated self…”.

The reality of striving for one’s dream and crashing into the shoals of life, if catalyzed in a productive manner, leads the man to a more humane approach to himself and others. He realizes that despite his best efforts, he may not get what he wants. He is not immortal. Despite being good, or trying to be good, bad things may still happen to him. He can better recognize his own imperfections, proclivity to fantasy and wishfulness, and the limits of his time and energy.

This is all a heathy improvement away from his youthful, narrow, ego-centric striving. Though it is necessary, it is inherently limited in important ways. The deflationary period offers a time to take stock of these short-comings and to adopt more holistic, caring attitudes about self and outer relationships.

The Dream, as well as the four pillars of the Life Cycle are worked out in reality through various stages the Life Structure. Summarizing from Levinson et Al. I would define it like: The fundamental dynamic of adult development characterized by periods of stability (usually lasting 6-7 years, no more than 10 and not without change themselves) & transition (typically 4-5 years) in alternating fashion throughout the life span.

These periods were reliably forecasted by Levinson and his team to take place within given times in a life, with a margin of error of +/- 2 years. For example; the Age Thirty Transition beginning at 28 +/- 2 years.

The Life Structure transition period is defined by Marker Events within the pillars appropriate to the given age. EG going to college at 18, or getting married at 24, or having children at 26.

 The stability refers to the relatively unchanged nature of the pillars within a time span, whereas transition periods are characterized by one or more significant changes of particular pillars in a life structure.

All times of transition require development and adaptation. The Dream is woven throughout this process and colors these events in many ways based on a man’s relationship to it. The ability for a man to adapt and develop in each window of transition is imbued or hindered by his ability to live in a stable and satisfactory way.

This is the essence of how we should conceive “growing up”. Not as some fixed point held tightly for dear life. But as a process, filled with adventure and maturation

Overall, we have seen that the journey to adulthood is far more complicated than we portray to each other. As a society often become expert in giving a ‘good’ answers to that interminable question of “what we do” by hiding the true depth and challenges of what it is really like to mature.

In doing so we thereby deny a good deal of our own humanity. We also become susceptible to the subtle imposition that there will be a point when change will cease, that the growing will be done. Yet this is demonstrably not so. As Levinson thoroughly shows, and as many of us know once we have entered the adult world and had candid conversations with the denizens therein. Life continues to go on once you get a degree, get married, a mortgage and 401k.

Levinson’s Et. Al. work shows us that there is a more fulsome way to understand ourselves and others. We can withdraw and assuage a great deal of negativity and misbegotten pressure put upon us by those in society who stay stuck in denial.

We can rest firmly in knowing that our life path, should we not hinder it with any major pathologies, is one that can be hurried up through its own due time. We can find serenity in the fact that there are guide posts and guides to take us along the shoals of life. We can draw strength from our inner resources and derive joy from hewing them into concert with reality.

With this newfound understanding of ourselves and life writ-large, we can find peace in the acceptance of our own greatness, foibles and mortality – knowing it is all the stuff of life. Perhaps then we can be stronger and kinder, for ourselves and others.