The Death of Adulthood in American Culture
I hid in the clouded wrath of the crowd,
but when they said, “Sit down,” I stood up.
— Bruce Springsteen, Growing Up
In the NYT Magazine, A.O. Scott reflects on the death of adulthood in American culture:
What all of these shows grasp at, in one way or another, is that nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore. Adulthood as we have known it has become conceptually untenable. It isn’t only that patriarchy in the strict, old-school Don Draper sense has fallen apart. It’s that it may never really have existed in the first place, at least in the way its avatars imagined. Which raises the question: Should we mourn the departed or dance on its grave?
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