A cover story in Time magazine (24 Jan 2005) profiles a new youth phenomenon, an unforeseen generational sub-cohort termed the “Twixters.” This curious social outcropping rests in a novel cluster of demographic traits. Twixters:
- are 22 to 30 years old;
- have a college degree, or substantial college coursework;
- come from middle-class families; and
- reside in cities and large urban centers.
These features embody nothing unusual, certainly, but where they lead is surprising. What makes the Twixters different from other people with the same demographics from the past is the lifestyle they pursue after college. Consider the typical choices they have made:
- Instead of seeking out jobs or graduate studies that help them with long-term career plans — internships, for instance, or starting low in a company in which they plan to rise — they pass through a series of service jobs as waiters, clerks, nannies, and assistants.
- Instead of moving into a place of their own, they move back home with their parents or into a house or large apartment with several Twixter peers. In fact, Time reports, 20 percent of 26-year-olds live with their parents, nearly double the rate in 1970 (11 percent).
- Instead of forming a long-term relationship leading to marriage, they engage in serial dating. They spread their significant personal contact across many friends and roommates and sex partners, who remain deeply important to them well beyond college.
Despite their circumstances, Twixters aren’t marginal youngsters sinking into the underclass. They drift through their twenties, stalled at work and saving no money, but they like it that way. They congregate just as they did before college, hopping bar to bar on Friday night and watching movies on Saturday. They have achieved little, but they feel good about themselves. Indeed, precisely along the lines of [Charles] Reich’s understanding, they justify their aimless lifestyle as a journey of self-discovery. Yes, they put off the ordinary decisions of adulthood (career, marriage), but with a tough job market and so many divorced parents, their delays mark a thoughtful desire to “search their souls and choose their life paths,” to find a livelihood right for their “identity.” So Lev Grossman, the author of the story, phrases it. Social scientists quoted in the article, too, ennoble the lifestyles, judging Twixter habits (in Grossman’s paraphrase) “important work to get themselves ready for adulthood.” These young people take adulthood “so seriously, they’re spending years carefully choosing the right path into it.” University of Maryland psychologist Jeffrey Arnett dislikes the “Twixter” label, preferring “emerging adulthood.” They assume no responsibilities for or to anyone else, he concedes, but that permits them “this wonderful freedom to really focus on their own lives and work on becoming the kind of person they want to be.” Sociologist James Cote blames their delay on the economy: “What we’re looking at really began with the collapse of the youth labor market,” he says, which persists today and means that young people simply can’t afford to settle down until their late twenties. Marshall Heskovitz, creator of the television shows “thirtysomething” and “My So-Called Life,” gives the problem a social/emotional angle: “it’s a result of the world not being particularly welcoming when they come into it. Lots of people have a difficult time dealing with it, and they try to stay kids as long as they can because they don’t know how to make sense of all this. We’re interested in this process of finding courage and one’s self.” And a Dartmouth neuroscientist backs the economic and social resistances with brain chemistry: “We as a society deem an individual at the age of 18 ready for adult responsibility. Yet recent evidence suggests that our neuropsychological development is many years from being complete.”
Their comments apply a positive spin to what less sympathetic elders would call slacker ways. But even if we accept the characterizations — their brains aren’t ready, the cost of living is high, they take marriage too seriously to plunge into it — there is something missing from the expert observations in the article, an extraordinary absence in the diagnosis. In casting Twixter lifestyle as genuine exploration and struggle, neither the author nor the researchers nor the Twixters themselves whisper a single word about intellectual labor. Not one of the Twixters or youth observers mentions an idea that stirs them, a book that influenced them, a class that inspired them, or a mentor who guides them. Nobody ties maturity to formal or informal learning, reading or studying, novels or paintings or histories or syllogisms. For all the talk about life concerns and finding a calling, none of them regard history, literature, art, civics, philosophy, or politics a helpful undertaking. Grossman speaks of Twixter years as “a chance to build castles and knock them down,” but these castles haven’t a grain of intellectual sand in them. As these young people forge their personalities in an uncertain world, they skirt one of the customary means of doing so — that is, acquainting themselves with the words and images, the truths and beauties, of the past — and nobody tells them they have overlooked anything. Social psychologists don’t tell them so, nor do youth experts and educators, but the anti-intellectual banality of their choices is stark. What is the role of books in the Twixter’s world? Negligible. How has their education shaped their lives? Not at all. This is what the Twixters themselves report. One of them remarks, “Kids used to go to college to get educated. That’s what I did, which I think now was a bit naive. Being smart after college doesn’t really mean anything.”
In a word, the Twixter vision aligns perfectly with that of their wired younger brothers and sisters. It’s all social, all peer-oriented. Twixters don’t read, tour museums, travel, follow politics, or listen to any music but pop and rap, much less do something such as lay out a personal reading list or learn a foreign language. Rather, they do what we expect an average 19-year-old to do. They meet for poker, buy stuff at the mall, and jump from job to job and bed to bed. The maturity they envision has nothing to do with learning and wisdom, and the formative efforts that social scientists highlight don’t include books, artworks, ideologies, or Venn diagrams. For the Twixters, mature identity is entirely a social matter developed with and through their friends. The intellectual and artistic products of the past aren’t stepping-stones for growing up. They are fading materials of meaningless schooling.
Mark Bauerlein
Chapter Five, “The Betrayal of the Mentors”
The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future
