Students starting their third and final year will no doubt already have been hit by the looming prospect of adulthood. At what point does one reach maturity? Is it necessary to recognise a cut off point from adolescence?
We all want to avoid becoming a sad displaced specimen, still wearing a sixth form leavers’ hoodie, downing alcho-pops and retreating under a Ghostbusters duvet cover to shelter from the harsh realities of life in your twenties. Perhaps the realisation of adulthood comes with the acceptance of responsibility for one’s self. No longer deferring reality, but realising that if you want good things in your life – a career you enjoy, a social life, and good relationships with your family – you have to make them happen.This feels especially true of careers at the moment: no-one’s just going to give you a job as soon as you step off the graduation stage.
For the first time in our lives there is no designated route, we have passed from nursery to primary school, on to high school, then university, now the conveyor belt has stopped. The increased perception of the real world will inevitably involve a shift in priorities, perhaps in ideals. Graduating students may have to alter their standards to find work in the current sparse job market. It’s easy to maintain your expectations of a dream career as an adolescent unfamiliar with the convolutions of reality, especially if you are at a university as highly ranked as York – so far so good. But now with the onset of adulthood the prospect of scary “real life” looms closer.
Some may have already had to face up to harsh facts: parents’ redundancies, mortality, that health actually depends on your behaviour and is not assured regardless of it. Such imperfections make you look at things in a different way Stephen Fry’s autobiography of his childhood and teenage years, ‘Moab is my Washpot’, (he’s had to split his whole autobiography over several books – he knows a lot of words) recreates the single-minded claustrophobia of adolescence and presents it as not just a state to be passed through but a sense of self to be lost. As we get older our own feelings are rationalised by an outward looking pragmatism, rather than being driven by selfish desires. As people grow up they are forced to adjust themselves in order to adapt to the increased responsibility and self-determination that being a grown-up requires.
Once you are left unsupported by your home and parental handouts, cut loose from education and family life, the emphasis is suddenly placed on self-direction and motivation to earn a living and find a place in society.
It’s no longer possible to just “opt out” and leave the greatest lifestyle choices you make to be expressed by music taste and fashion sense. Can youthful idealism weather the storm of career politics, increased lifestyle choices, greater responsibilities both to one’s self and the world we live in? Or sooner or later, will we all have to sell out because we can no longer opt out?