I'm going to say something that has never been said before. It may even upset you. But here it is: Peter Pan was a prophet. There it is. I said it. He spoke of Never Neverland and we thought it was fictional. But we were wrong because it exists; it exists in the very thing we call America.
Adolescent Adulthood and How to Overcome It
My first realization that many adults remain in a state of perpetual adolescence came in the summer of 2007, when several of my acquaintances, all members of a home education support group, engaged in a bout of bickering, slander, and name-calling reminiscent of an elementary school playground. Their bitter denunciations, ignited by a telephone quarrel between two women on the organization’s board, and fueled by a third woman to whom fighting comes as naturally as breathing, exploded into a firestorm of e-mails, public tears, gossip, and resignations, all of which eventually left the group a smoldering ruin of its former self.
While these men and women laid waste an organization founded, ironically enough, to enhance the religious education of their children, an impression formed within me regarding adulthood and the current status of the grownup. Like a new pair of glasses, the quarrels of these parents caused me to perceive certain phenomena which until then had lain hidden from my eyes, so that during the course of that long summer I became acutely aware of the massive number of adolescents masquerading as adults in our society.
President Bush, the field of candidates running for president, strangers in the street, most of my personal friends, and perhaps even I myself: nearly everyone I knew or knew of appeared permanently mired in some strange swampland of youth.
There were, it suddenly seemed to me, few real grownups left in the world.
Clothing first snagged my attention in this regard. In Asheville, North Carolina, where I make my home, many older people, tourists and natives alike, dress like teenagers. The vast majority of these geezers wear jeans or shorts, and a good many of them sport t-shirts with cute or crude slogans. Grown men attend Sunday church services in shorts and sneakers. Elderly men and women arrive at daily Mass dressed in sweat suits. Men whose grandfathers wore hats and suits in public stroll the sidewalks pot-bellied and hairy in their wife beaters and shorts.
Clothing, however, is only the most public symptom of stunted development in adults. Like their children—if indeed they have children—many of my acquaintances live for entertainment and pleasure. They stock their homes with the latest toys: widescreen television sets, iPods, BlackBerries, expensive cars, the latest kitchen appliances, wine cellars, saunas. They dine out frequently on the pretext that “we deserve it,” and treat themselves to trophy vacations designed in part to one-up their neighbors. A tax attorney I know talks of nothing but restaurants and wine tastings. Suffering depression and a midlife crisis, a female acquaintance seeks solace in The Secret, a self-help bestseller, and in other quirky New Age balms which any self-respecting grownup would spurn as fraudulent. A minister who sponsors soup kitchens and hunger banquets spends more on his daily intake of high-priced bottled water than many of us do on our food. Recently, a pediatric dentist informed me that his hobby is jetting all over the Western Hemisphere to attend various dental conferences.
These are the big money folks. The working class and the poor lack the means to pay for such glamorous addictions, but still indulge their own inner-child with the customary mix of alcohol, television, greasy foods, soap opera affairs, and domestic violence.
Worst among all these adolescent adults are the mothers and fathers who live vicariously through their children. These are the parents who spend their Saturday mornings at a soccer field, bellowing at six-year-olds whose only real interest in the contest is the post-game snack. These are the men and women who live out their weekday afternoons and evenings in vans, chauffeuring their precious darlings from piano lessons to karate to scouts. These are the adults who with their spouses and friends dissect in excruciating detail every facet of their children’s lives. Though some parents in the past may have micromanaged their children’s lives to such an unnatural degree—Douglas MacArthur’s mother rented rooms in the nearby Hotel Thayer the entire four years her son was at West Point—most adults were once too busy earning a living, running a household, or raising four or more children to indulge themselves in mollycoddling their offspring.
A critical turning point in my realization that grownups are dying out as fast as World War II vets occurred one evening when I was watching Casablanca, one of my favorite movies. As the camera panned the smoky interior of Rick’s Café American, the thought occurred to me that the characters in the film were acting the way adults had once acted in life. What made them grownups wasn’t the fact that they all smoked or that they drank bourbon rather than white wine. It wasn’t that they dressed in formal wear rather than sweats and t-shirts. It wasn’t the gambling or the tough talk. What made these people grownups, from the teenage refugee whose husband was losing at roulette to the police captain to the stoic saloon-keeper Rick Blaine, was their capacity for suffering and their refusal to whine about that suffering. These people faced their troubles without self-esteem workshops or head sessions with Montel Williams. Furthermore, Casablanca presented the world itself as a grownup world. There isn’t a child in sight in this film.
The following evening, I happened to watch another favorite movie, You’ve Got Mail starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Both characters are working adults in their early thirties—Hanks is a hardnosed executive for a chain of mega-bookstores, Ryan an owner of a small children’s bookshop—who fall in love. You’ve Got Mail is a romantic comedy clearly intended for an adult audience, yet none of the characters, with the exception of an older female accountant, behaves like a grownup. Granted, the movie is meant as a comedy, but when compared to old-time comedies such as the ones made by Cary Grant or those of the Thin Man series, our modern films fall short in terms of maturity, sophistication, and wit.
They are adults, yes, but they are not grownups.
One movie that touches on this difference between adulthood and maturity is Kate and Leopold. Here a late twentieth century American woman, again played by Meg Ryan, encounters a late nineteenth century Englishman, played by Hugh Jackman. In dress, in behavior, and in language the contrast between the two is glaring. Leopold dresses formally for supper, displays a knowledge of table manners and an appreciation of civility, and has earnest scientific ambitions. Kate dresses like a slovenly teenager, slouches at the table, picks at her food, and creates deceptive advertisements to advance her career. The differences between the two not only create comedic situations, but again raise the question: Where are the grownups today?
To become an adult in our society is easy. It simply requires reaching the age of eighteen, or in some situations, twenty-one. Our legal system considers anyone of sound mind who has come of age an adult. I still remember the shock on my first-born’s face when, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, I explained to her that in the eyes of the law she was now an adult and could be held legally responsible for everything from bounced checks to credit card debt. Her actions, I told her, would have consequences which I might mitigate, but not necessarily alter. My daughter recognized responsibility when she saw it, though she didn’t especially care for what she saw.
Attaining the status of grownup as opposed to adulthood is a different proposition altogether. Maturity has no fixed age: grownups are made, not born. To become a grownup, one might normally seek out examples and mentors—relatives, friends, teachers, public figures. In our media-driven culture, however, such examples are in short supply these days. Movies, television, and even literature must share in the blame for the decline and fall of the grownup in our present age. A few hours spent listening to the radio, watching television—the advertisements, the juvenile comedies, the talk-show blather—or reading most magazines or novels must convince the most recalcitrant opponents of the truth of this argument. Is it possible, after all, to watch an hour of television without catching sight of some man blubbering, some grownup being ridiculed as stodgy, some enraged woman threatening to bust someone’s face?
To let the media take the fall for our culture’s immaturity, however, is too easy. Psychology, religion, and schools have also contributed much to the demise of the grownup. Analysts, pop psychologists, and authors of self-help books have taught us the value of our feelings and of being in touch with them, yet few of these professionals add the necessary proviso that feelings often play us false. Hundreds of books and articles in the last thirty years have touted the creation of self-esteem among American students, but not the importance of academic competence. In our churches, moral strictures and vertical worship have given way to self-fulfillment and self-worship. In the 1960s, for example, the Catholic Church abandoned the beauty and solemnity of the Latin Mass for guitar masses, liturgical dance, “you are special” hymns, and feel-good homilies. Such innovations may give us a thrill of pleasure, they may put us in touch with our inner selves, but they aren’t designed to produce grownups.
Five decades of such antics have created a vast horde of adolescent adults that can, it seems to me, be divided into three distinct groups. The first group, and by far the most populous, contains those adults who are largely unaware of their own juvenile behavior. They go about the business of being an adult without a cursory glance at their level of maturity. They purchase cars and homes, they raise their children and send them to college, they go to work. This appearance of maturity, however, is a façade. These adults live chiefly for pleasure, and regard both duty and responsibility as evils to be avoided whenever possible. The adolescent nature of such people emerges most often under stress; their façade falls apart under pressure. A son’s experimental use of marijuana, a daughter’s decision to date a pimply Baudelaire dressed all in black, the pain caused by a friend’s gossip, stress at work: any of these situations and a thousand more like them can drive these supposed grownups into bouts of rage, self-pity, and teenage-proportioned angst.
A second group of adults, much smaller in size but more cognizant of their situation, consciously resists growing up. These are the Peter Pans of the adult world. They revel in the state of semi-adolescence in which they find themselves. They refer to their more exotic possessions—their jet skis, their Jacuzzis, their electronic games, their motorcycles—as their toys. Some tend to avoid marriage and children altogether. Those Peter Pans who do have spouses and children don’t let either get in the way of their fun. They often remark with some pride, “I don’t ever want to grow up.” They enjoy more freedom than real grownups precisely because they eschew the responsibilities that accompany being a grownup. Like the teenagers whom they emulate, the Peter Pans of the adult world wish to avoid adherence to any code, social or otherwise, so that they may continue to create themselves anew whenever they wish.
The third group is more indeterminate in size than the first two groups. Here are the people who realize that they are flawed adults, that they are in some way deficient in maturity. Recognizing their inadequacy marks their first step toward greater sophistication, but unfortunately this is the crucial point at which they also often lack practical direction. With few examples available to them, members of this group struggle arduously to don the mantle of grownup behavior.
Below are some thoughts for them—for us, I should say—on how to behave like a grownup, ideas gleaned from watching the grownups of my childhood and youth, from reading, and from speaking with the few adults in my life today who qualify as grownups. Bear in mind that these ideas are formed from happenstance: what works for some may not work for others. Creative observers will doubtless blaze their own path.
1) Dress.
Next time you’re in Wal-Mart, observe the clothing of the employees and the customers. The employees dress in blue formless aprons that bring to mind Mao’s Cultural Revolution. As for the customers, this is about as awful as American fashion gets: women in sweats, jeans and shorts; fat women and fat men in sweats, jeans and shorts; men in sweats, jeans and shorts. Surely never in the history of our country were so many slobs brought together as might be found on any given day in a single Wal-Mart store. About a third of these shoppers literally look as if their wardrobes were put together by a blind clerk at a Goodwill Store.
The first rule in dress for grownups is: avoid dressing like a slob except in the privacy of your own home. Imagine George Washington wandering the streets of Philadelphia in a cut-off sweatshirt, jeans, and sandals. Imagine Abraham Lincoln in sweats. Bear in mind that it isn’t necessary to don formalwear to look upscale in our society. Standards have fallen so low that wearing what was once considered casual dress will give you the appearance of a grownup. Throw a sun dress on a young woman with dreadlocks and tattooed ankles, stand her next to a sixty-year-old grandmother wearing sweats, and the young woman will, despite her hair and tattoos, look more grownup to most observers than the grandmother. Put an eighteen-year-old in gray slacks and a white cotton shirt next to a middle-aged man in Bermuda shorts and a t-shirt advertising his favorite beer, and the young man will be the guy you want to ask about the stock market.
The second rule of fashion for looking like a grownup is to dress up rather than down on all occasions. If your customary work clothes are gray slacks and a white cotton shirt, add a tie to your attire. If appropriate, wear a suit to work a couple of times a week. Buy and wear a pair of those black gunboat shoes once favored by professors and attorneys. Wear a dark gray suit and see if your fellow workers treat you differently. Dress is one of the cardinal outward signs of looking like a grownup.
“Fake it till you make it” is the operative rule here.
2) Language.
Although best avoided if you wish to act grownup, obscenity is not the point here. The issue is instead the use of juvenile language. If you wish others to perceive you as grownup, you’ll need to speak like a grownup. Avoid talking too fast. Avoid slurring your words together. Avoid using the words “like” or “you know” as fillers in sentences. Prefer complete sentences and complete thoughts to broken sentences and incomplete thoughts. “He was, like, the best, you know, and I don’t know, but I, like, did the usual things, you know, but he was, like, unhappy, I guess, because he got rid of me.” This young lady may sound as if she and a young man were ending a romance, but she is instead speaking as a secretary fired for her inability to speak English.
Letters and notes written as e-mails also reveal the difference between the adolescent adult and the grownup. One woman with whom I used to correspond, a middle school English teacher, wrote letters that were at times nearly incomprehensible:
i have not started planning my x-mas trip waiting for a few weeks to make sure the money the weight of the bureaucracy called public school system is weighing on me the last couple of weeks last wednesday i thought i might have to rent my place out and move to some very small town in the south to paint and cook and rehab
Her use of language mirrored the adolescent language of her students. In other words, this teacher writes like a fourteen-year-old.
3) Comportment.
Outside their own homes, grownups should comport themselves like grownups. Grownup females don’t dress like Brittany Spears. Grownups don’t become drunk at parties and vomit off the back deck. At the gym they don’t ogle members of the opposite sex or the same sex. Grownups stand erect, give firm handshakes, and look at people when they are speaking to them. Our grandparents and great-grandparents once drummed these lessons into their children. It’s how they manufactured grownups out of adolescents.
4) Emotional restraint.
Stoicism and taciturnity were once marks of manhood. Modesty and a lightly-worn shyness were once remarked as virtues in women. In today’s society of perpetual adolescence these marks of character have tumbled to the comic, the loudmouth, and the brazen. Yet the engagement of these neglected virtues—silence, a holding back, a stoic approach to difficulties—can give the practitioner an incredible strength. As a teacher of high school students, I have twice in the last five years witnessed the impact of students who thought before they spoke and who then offered intelligent observations on the question at hand. By their restraint and insight they awed their classmates. They became the leaders of classroom discussions.
5) Ego.
If you are wondering what a grownup is, here we arrive at the heart of a definition. Grownups are adults who accept the idea that life is difficult, that inconveniences abound, that pain is as common a commodity as pleasure. In spite of the wishes of all the children who today inhabit adult bodies, grownups know that life is not a DVD player: life has no pause button, no rewind button, no fast-forward button.
In former times teachers and parents spent significant time and energy teaching children to meet the challenges of adversity, to put others before themselves, to make themselves servants rather than masters to those whom they would lead. If we look at today’s celebrities, at the leaders in entertainment, sports, and politics, we see how sadly diminished is this ideal of servant leadership.
Many great Americans once practiced disinterestedness, which is the old idea of putting the self and its desires to one side, of stifling our own emotions and personal wishes when confronted by problems. To be disinterested is to seek to be objective rather than subjective, to seek solutions to the problem at hand rather than benefits for ourselves. Thomas Jefferson once remarked that John Adams was “as disinterested as the Being who made him.” In An Education for our Time, Josiah Bunting wrote of the disinterested person that “his duty yields him the satisfactions not of power or invidious distinction, nor of exalted status or money, but only of knowing that he has done his best by and for those who have depended on him….”
Grownups are those who give up their personal desires, the salivating demands of the ego, who instead offer themselves in sacrifice to the needs of others: their employees, their friends, their children, their spouses. They understand that life requires patience and compromise. “You’ll have to think for both of us,” Ingrid Bergman says to Bogart in Casablanca, and so he does. He puts aside his love for her, reunites her with her husband, and goes off to fight the Nazis because it’s the right thing to do. It’s the grownup thing to do.
The road won’t be easy for those seeking this new way. The suit and tie, the dress, the manners, the firm “No” to the recalcitrant children in our home or to the recalcitrant employee at the office: all these may make our lives more miserable rather than happier. Being a grownup, after all, includes the acceptance of suffering and the practice of interior solitude. Once we commence our journey, however, I’m sure we’ll discover that we’re not as alone as we may think. Maybe I’ll see you walking down the street, stunningly attired in a dress and heels. Maybe I’ll see you in the check-out line at the grocery store, a model of restraint when the woman ahead of you is bullied by her four-year-old into buying chewing gum. We won’t speak to each other, you and I, but we’ll know each other. And I, for one, plan to acknowledge our common bond with a nod and a silent salute, Bogart’s signature line from Casablanca, his deliciously ironic—and grownup—salute to Ilsa:
Here’s looking at you, kid.
While these men and women laid waste an organization founded, ironically enough, to enhance the religious education of their children, an impression formed within me regarding adulthood and the current status of the grownup. Like a new pair of glasses, the quarrels of these parents caused me to perceive certain phenomena which until then had lain hidden from my eyes, so that during the course of that long summer I became acutely aware of the massive number of adolescents masquerading as adults in our society.
President Bush, the field of candidates running for president, strangers in the street, most of my personal friends, and perhaps even I myself: nearly everyone I knew or knew of appeared permanently mired in some strange swampland of youth.
There were, it suddenly seemed to me, few real grownups left in the world.
Clothing first snagged my attention in this regard. In Asheville, North Carolina, where I make my home, many older people, tourists and natives alike, dress like teenagers. The vast majority of these geezers wear jeans or shorts, and a good many of them sport t-shirts with cute or crude slogans. Grown men attend Sunday church services in shorts and sneakers. Elderly men and women arrive at daily Mass dressed in sweat suits. Men whose grandfathers wore hats and suits in public stroll the sidewalks pot-bellied and hairy in their wife beaters and shorts.
Clothing, however, is only the most public symptom of stunted development in adults. Like their children—if indeed they have children—many of my acquaintances live for entertainment and pleasure. They stock their homes with the latest toys: widescreen television sets, iPods, BlackBerries, expensive cars, the latest kitchen appliances, wine cellars, saunas. They dine out frequently on the pretext that “we deserve it,” and treat themselves to trophy vacations designed in part to one-up their neighbors. A tax attorney I know talks of nothing but restaurants and wine tastings. Suffering depression and a midlife crisis, a female acquaintance seeks solace in The Secret, a self-help bestseller, and in other quirky New Age balms which any self-respecting grownup would spurn as fraudulent. A minister who sponsors soup kitchens and hunger banquets spends more on his daily intake of high-priced bottled water than many of us do on our food. Recently, a pediatric dentist informed me that his hobby is jetting all over the Western Hemisphere to attend various dental conferences.
These are the big money folks. The working class and the poor lack the means to pay for such glamorous addictions, but still indulge their own inner-child with the customary mix of alcohol, television, greasy foods, soap opera affairs, and domestic violence.
Worst among all these adolescent adults are the mothers and fathers who live vicariously through their children. These are the parents who spend their Saturday mornings at a soccer field, bellowing at six-year-olds whose only real interest in the contest is the post-game snack. These are the men and women who live out their weekday afternoons and evenings in vans, chauffeuring their precious darlings from piano lessons to karate to scouts. These are the adults who with their spouses and friends dissect in excruciating detail every facet of their children’s lives. Though some parents in the past may have micromanaged their children’s lives to such an unnatural degree—Douglas MacArthur’s mother rented rooms in the nearby Hotel Thayer the entire four years her son was at West Point—most adults were once too busy earning a living, running a household, or raising four or more children to indulge themselves in mollycoddling their offspring.
A critical turning point in my realization that grownups are dying out as fast as World War II vets occurred one evening when I was watching Casablanca, one of my favorite movies. As the camera panned the smoky interior of Rick’s Café American, the thought occurred to me that the characters in the film were acting the way adults had once acted in life. What made them grownups wasn’t the fact that they all smoked or that they drank bourbon rather than white wine. It wasn’t that they dressed in formal wear rather than sweats and t-shirts. It wasn’t the gambling or the tough talk. What made these people grownups, from the teenage refugee whose husband was losing at roulette to the police captain to the stoic saloon-keeper Rick Blaine, was their capacity for suffering and their refusal to whine about that suffering. These people faced their troubles without self-esteem workshops or head sessions with Montel Williams. Furthermore, Casablanca presented the world itself as a grownup world. There isn’t a child in sight in this film.
The following evening, I happened to watch another favorite movie, You’ve Got Mail starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Both characters are working adults in their early thirties—Hanks is a hardnosed executive for a chain of mega-bookstores, Ryan an owner of a small children’s bookshop—who fall in love. You’ve Got Mail is a romantic comedy clearly intended for an adult audience, yet none of the characters, with the exception of an older female accountant, behaves like a grownup. Granted, the movie is meant as a comedy, but when compared to old-time comedies such as the ones made by Cary Grant or those of the Thin Man series, our modern films fall short in terms of maturity, sophistication, and wit.
They are adults, yes, but they are not grownups.
One movie that touches on this difference between adulthood and maturity is Kate and Leopold. Here a late twentieth century American woman, again played by Meg Ryan, encounters a late nineteenth century Englishman, played by Hugh Jackman. In dress, in behavior, and in language the contrast between the two is glaring. Leopold dresses formally for supper, displays a knowledge of table manners and an appreciation of civility, and has earnest scientific ambitions. Kate dresses like a slovenly teenager, slouches at the table, picks at her food, and creates deceptive advertisements to advance her career. The differences between the two not only create comedic situations, but again raise the question: Where are the grownups today?
To become an adult in our society is easy. It simply requires reaching the age of eighteen, or in some situations, twenty-one. Our legal system considers anyone of sound mind who has come of age an adult. I still remember the shock on my first-born’s face when, shortly after her eighteenth birthday, I explained to her that in the eyes of the law she was now an adult and could be held legally responsible for everything from bounced checks to credit card debt. Her actions, I told her, would have consequences which I might mitigate, but not necessarily alter. My daughter recognized responsibility when she saw it, though she didn’t especially care for what she saw.
Attaining the status of grownup as opposed to adulthood is a different proposition altogether. Maturity has no fixed age: grownups are made, not born. To become a grownup, one might normally seek out examples and mentors—relatives, friends, teachers, public figures. In our media-driven culture, however, such examples are in short supply these days. Movies, television, and even literature must share in the blame for the decline and fall of the grownup in our present age. A few hours spent listening to the radio, watching television—the advertisements, the juvenile comedies, the talk-show blather—or reading most magazines or novels must convince the most recalcitrant opponents of the truth of this argument. Is it possible, after all, to watch an hour of television without catching sight of some man blubbering, some grownup being ridiculed as stodgy, some enraged woman threatening to bust someone’s face?
To let the media take the fall for our culture’s immaturity, however, is too easy. Psychology, religion, and schools have also contributed much to the demise of the grownup. Analysts, pop psychologists, and authors of self-help books have taught us the value of our feelings and of being in touch with them, yet few of these professionals add the necessary proviso that feelings often play us false. Hundreds of books and articles in the last thirty years have touted the creation of self-esteem among American students, but not the importance of academic competence. In our churches, moral strictures and vertical worship have given way to self-fulfillment and self-worship. In the 1960s, for example, the Catholic Church abandoned the beauty and solemnity of the Latin Mass for guitar masses, liturgical dance, “you are special” hymns, and feel-good homilies. Such innovations may give us a thrill of pleasure, they may put us in touch with our inner selves, but they aren’t designed to produce grownups.
Five decades of such antics have created a vast horde of adolescent adults that can, it seems to me, be divided into three distinct groups. The first group, and by far the most populous, contains those adults who are largely unaware of their own juvenile behavior. They go about the business of being an adult without a cursory glance at their level of maturity. They purchase cars and homes, they raise their children and send them to college, they go to work. This appearance of maturity, however, is a façade. These adults live chiefly for pleasure, and regard both duty and responsibility as evils to be avoided whenever possible. The adolescent nature of such people emerges most often under stress; their façade falls apart under pressure. A son’s experimental use of marijuana, a daughter’s decision to date a pimply Baudelaire dressed all in black, the pain caused by a friend’s gossip, stress at work: any of these situations and a thousand more like them can drive these supposed grownups into bouts of rage, self-pity, and teenage-proportioned angst.
A second group of adults, much smaller in size but more cognizant of their situation, consciously resists growing up. These are the Peter Pans of the adult world. They revel in the state of semi-adolescence in which they find themselves. They refer to their more exotic possessions—their jet skis, their Jacuzzis, their electronic games, their motorcycles—as their toys. Some tend to avoid marriage and children altogether. Those Peter Pans who do have spouses and children don’t let either get in the way of their fun. They often remark with some pride, “I don’t ever want to grow up.” They enjoy more freedom than real grownups precisely because they eschew the responsibilities that accompany being a grownup. Like the teenagers whom they emulate, the Peter Pans of the adult world wish to avoid adherence to any code, social or otherwise, so that they may continue to create themselves anew whenever they wish.
The third group is more indeterminate in size than the first two groups. Here are the people who realize that they are flawed adults, that they are in some way deficient in maturity. Recognizing their inadequacy marks their first step toward greater sophistication, but unfortunately this is the crucial point at which they also often lack practical direction. With few examples available to them, members of this group struggle arduously to don the mantle of grownup behavior.
Below are some thoughts for them—for us, I should say—on how to behave like a grownup, ideas gleaned from watching the grownups of my childhood and youth, from reading, and from speaking with the few adults in my life today who qualify as grownups. Bear in mind that these ideas are formed from happenstance: what works for some may not work for others. Creative observers will doubtless blaze their own path.
1) Dress.
Next time you’re in Wal-Mart, observe the clothing of the employees and the customers. The employees dress in blue formless aprons that bring to mind Mao’s Cultural Revolution. As for the customers, this is about as awful as American fashion gets: women in sweats, jeans and shorts; fat women and fat men in sweats, jeans and shorts; men in sweats, jeans and shorts. Surely never in the history of our country were so many slobs brought together as might be found on any given day in a single Wal-Mart store. About a third of these shoppers literally look as if their wardrobes were put together by a blind clerk at a Goodwill Store.
The first rule in dress for grownups is: avoid dressing like a slob except in the privacy of your own home. Imagine George Washington wandering the streets of Philadelphia in a cut-off sweatshirt, jeans, and sandals. Imagine Abraham Lincoln in sweats. Bear in mind that it isn’t necessary to don formalwear to look upscale in our society. Standards have fallen so low that wearing what was once considered casual dress will give you the appearance of a grownup. Throw a sun dress on a young woman with dreadlocks and tattooed ankles, stand her next to a sixty-year-old grandmother wearing sweats, and the young woman will, despite her hair and tattoos, look more grownup to most observers than the grandmother. Put an eighteen-year-old in gray slacks and a white cotton shirt next to a middle-aged man in Bermuda shorts and a t-shirt advertising his favorite beer, and the young man will be the guy you want to ask about the stock market.
The second rule of fashion for looking like a grownup is to dress up rather than down on all occasions. If your customary work clothes are gray slacks and a white cotton shirt, add a tie to your attire. If appropriate, wear a suit to work a couple of times a week. Buy and wear a pair of those black gunboat shoes once favored by professors and attorneys. Wear a dark gray suit and see if your fellow workers treat you differently. Dress is one of the cardinal outward signs of looking like a grownup.
“Fake it till you make it” is the operative rule here.
2) Language.
Although best avoided if you wish to act grownup, obscenity is not the point here. The issue is instead the use of juvenile language. If you wish others to perceive you as grownup, you’ll need to speak like a grownup. Avoid talking too fast. Avoid slurring your words together. Avoid using the words “like” or “you know” as fillers in sentences. Prefer complete sentences and complete thoughts to broken sentences and incomplete thoughts. “He was, like, the best, you know, and I don’t know, but I, like, did the usual things, you know, but he was, like, unhappy, I guess, because he got rid of me.” This young lady may sound as if she and a young man were ending a romance, but she is instead speaking as a secretary fired for her inability to speak English.
Letters and notes written as e-mails also reveal the difference between the adolescent adult and the grownup. One woman with whom I used to correspond, a middle school English teacher, wrote letters that were at times nearly incomprehensible:
i have not started planning my x-mas trip waiting for a few weeks to make sure the money the weight of the bureaucracy called public school system is weighing on me the last couple of weeks last wednesday i thought i might have to rent my place out and move to some very small town in the south to paint and cook and rehab
Her use of language mirrored the adolescent language of her students. In other words, this teacher writes like a fourteen-year-old.
3) Comportment.
Outside their own homes, grownups should comport themselves like grownups. Grownup females don’t dress like Brittany Spears. Grownups don’t become drunk at parties and vomit off the back deck. At the gym they don’t ogle members of the opposite sex or the same sex. Grownups stand erect, give firm handshakes, and look at people when they are speaking to them. Our grandparents and great-grandparents once drummed these lessons into their children. It’s how they manufactured grownups out of adolescents.
4) Emotional restraint.
Stoicism and taciturnity were once marks of manhood. Modesty and a lightly-worn shyness were once remarked as virtues in women. In today’s society of perpetual adolescence these marks of character have tumbled to the comic, the loudmouth, and the brazen. Yet the engagement of these neglected virtues—silence, a holding back, a stoic approach to difficulties—can give the practitioner an incredible strength. As a teacher of high school students, I have twice in the last five years witnessed the impact of students who thought before they spoke and who then offered intelligent observations on the question at hand. By their restraint and insight they awed their classmates. They became the leaders of classroom discussions.
5) Ego.
If you are wondering what a grownup is, here we arrive at the heart of a definition. Grownups are adults who accept the idea that life is difficult, that inconveniences abound, that pain is as common a commodity as pleasure. In spite of the wishes of all the children who today inhabit adult bodies, grownups know that life is not a DVD player: life has no pause button, no rewind button, no fast-forward button.
In former times teachers and parents spent significant time and energy teaching children to meet the challenges of adversity, to put others before themselves, to make themselves servants rather than masters to those whom they would lead. If we look at today’s celebrities, at the leaders in entertainment, sports, and politics, we see how sadly diminished is this ideal of servant leadership.
Many great Americans once practiced disinterestedness, which is the old idea of putting the self and its desires to one side, of stifling our own emotions and personal wishes when confronted by problems. To be disinterested is to seek to be objective rather than subjective, to seek solutions to the problem at hand rather than benefits for ourselves. Thomas Jefferson once remarked that John Adams was “as disinterested as the Being who made him.” In An Education for our Time, Josiah Bunting wrote of the disinterested person that “his duty yields him the satisfactions not of power or invidious distinction, nor of exalted status or money, but only of knowing that he has done his best by and for those who have depended on him….”
Grownups are those who give up their personal desires, the salivating demands of the ego, who instead offer themselves in sacrifice to the needs of others: their employees, their friends, their children, their spouses. They understand that life requires patience and compromise. “You’ll have to think for both of us,” Ingrid Bergman says to Bogart in Casablanca, and so he does. He puts aside his love for her, reunites her with her husband, and goes off to fight the Nazis because it’s the right thing to do. It’s the grownup thing to do.
The road won’t be easy for those seeking this new way. The suit and tie, the dress, the manners, the firm “No” to the recalcitrant children in our home or to the recalcitrant employee at the office: all these may make our lives more miserable rather than happier. Being a grownup, after all, includes the acceptance of suffering and the practice of interior solitude. Once we commence our journey, however, I’m sure we’ll discover that we’re not as alone as we may think. Maybe I’ll see you walking down the street, stunningly attired in a dress and heels. Maybe I’ll see you in the check-out line at the grocery store, a model of restraint when the woman ahead of you is bullied by her four-year-old into buying chewing gum. We won’t speak to each other, you and I, but we’ll know each other. And I, for one, plan to acknowledge our common bond with a nod and a silent salute, Bogart’s signature line from Casablanca, his deliciously ironic—and grownup—salute to Ilsa:
Here’s looking at you, kid.