{"id":30784,"date":"2015-03-25T05:00:17","date_gmt":"2015-03-25T09:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30784"},"modified":"2015-03-24T21:08:25","modified_gmt":"2015-03-25T01:08:25","slug":"millennials-philosophical-malaise-and-the-moving-target-of-adulthood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/03\/25\/millennials-philosophical-malaise-and-the-moving-target-of-adulthood\/","title":{"rendered":"Millennials, philosophical malaise, and the moving target of &#8220;adulthood&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <em>Spiked<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spiked-online.com\/review_of_books\/article\/kant-peter-pan-and-why-generation-y-wont-grow-up\/16742#.VRIIiOGqp8F\" target=\"_blank\">Tom Slater<\/a> reviews a recent book by Susan Neiman, calling it &#8220;the philosophical kick up the arse my generation so desperately needs&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Why Grow Up?<\/em>, the latest book by American philosopher and essayist Susan Neiman, begins with a slyly subversive statement: \u2018Being grown up is itself an ideal.\u2019 In Britain today, this couldn\u2019t seem further from the truth. Today, we\u2019re told, is the worst time to be reaching adulthood. With economic strife, rising house prices, tuition fees and widespread youth unemployment weighing on Generation Y\u2019s pasty back, coming of age merely means coming to the realisation that debt, destitution and living with mum and dad into your thirties is your inevitable inheritance. And that\u2019s hardly an adulthood worth having.<\/p>\n<p>The question this book seeks to answer is why growing up seems such a grim prospect today. From the off, Neiman dispenses with the sort of neuroscientific apologism that we\u2019ve become accustomed to in recent years. Within the current, fatalistic climate, adulthood has been defined down. The Science now says that adolescence stretches into your mid-twenties. But, as Neiman observes in her introduction, there\u2019s nothing scientific about growing up. The lines between childhood, adolescence and adulthood are mutable, and have changed over time. Less than a century ago, childhood, as a time of pampered play and dependence, lasted barely a few years for the vast majority of the population. And when most young people were out of school and married by the end of their teens, adolescence \u2013 the rebellious grace period between Tonka trucks and 2.4 children \u2013 didn\u2019t even exist.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, Neiman presents adulthood as a process of coming to terms with the circumstances you find yourself in and then committing to changing them \u2013 reconciling the \u2018is\u2019 and the \u2018ought\u2019. She situates this in the history of Enlightenment thought, in which the doomy realism of Hume clashed with the rugged idealism of Rousseau. \u2018It would take Kant\u2019, Neiman writes, \u2018to appreciate the fact that we must take both seriously \u2013 if we are ever to arrive at an adulthood we need not merely acquiesce in but actively claim as [our] own\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Spiked, Tom Slater reviews a recent book by Susan Neiman, calling it &#8220;the philosophical kick up the arse my generation so desperately needs&#8221;: Why Grow Up?, the latest book by American philosopher and essayist Susan Neiman, begins with a slyly subversive statement: \u2018Being grown up is itself an ideal.\u2019 In Britain today, this couldn\u2019t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,25,28],"tags":[86,956,576,139],"class_list":["post-30784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-economics","category-media","tag-criticism","tag-millennials","tag-philosophy","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-80w","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30784"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30785,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30784\/revisions\/30785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}