Commencement is only the beginning

Margarete Schön in Kriemhilds Rache by Fritz Lang (1924).

David Brooks writes ("How Adulthood Happens", June 12 2015):

The most important rite of passage from youth to adulthood in our society has gone largely unnoticed, largely I guess because it has no ritual aspects, with no name, no theological underpinnings, and no ceremonies. It takes about eight years to complete, and the people who are performing it and their families have no idea it's going on. Or, putting it more simply, it isn't a rite. Why am I calling it a rite of passage? As a Friedmanesque paradoxical attention grabber, and to underscore my anthropological street cred with people who know even less about the subject than I do. They call me David Brooks.

As noted alliterationists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa wrote in their 2011 book Academicially Adrift: Learning in College Campuses and repeated in the opening chapter of their new Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates, which is the bit I looked at, some of the people who make their way through this thing, I have no idea how many*, go to four-year residential colleges where they are not taught to work hard but while away their time in checking each others' privilege, working out in expensive gyms, and hooking up. In bizarre contrast to the college-age students of the rest of human history, they are more interested in their social life than academics.

Then, when they graduate from these institutions, they are cut off from this rich existence and cast away, as adrift and aspiring as they were formerly adrift and academic, in a world of radical freedom, flux, and instability, in which they have no religious affiliations or political activities, but remain amazingly** optimistic about their future. At the same time, they are in no hurry to get there, as we learn from Getting to 30 by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett and Elizabeth Fishel***, and most likely move in with their parents.

They seem to have had no training in how to find a job, and are most likely to be unemployed, underemployed, or making less than $30,000 a year, as they flit from gig to gig, relationship to relationship, and city to city. Their realities are grubby.

The good news is, sooner or later they turn 30, and then it's all good! Their suffering has toughened them, they've learned to say no, they have found out what they love and don't love, they have discovered their own criteria by which they can make their own decisions, they piece together their mosaic. They have graduated from Fear of Missing Out and their parents can see that this phase was after all only a Thing, startling expressions that show how hep I am to this youthful lingo, making me more or less the ideal person to offer them advice. I can't even remember what it was I was worrying about.****

*In 2013, about 29% of US college students followed the traditional model of full-time study at four-year schools, and maybe a quarter of those were commuters living at home, and when you consider that only 40-some percent of all American 18-to-24s are enrolled in college of any sort, you begin to see what a very small number of people Brooks is talking about.

**Brooks's 133rd career use of "amazing/amazingly" in his stint as a columnist for the New York Times.

***Also known as Getting to 30: A Parent's Guide to the 20-Something Years, the "helpful, hopeful and engaging" book that "parents have been waiting for", which "draws on the authors’ 90 in-depth personal interviews, an online survey, and two national polls." Talk about your big data!

****Perhaps what he was worrying about was how to wind to some kind of conclusion in his Dartmouth commencement speech, of which I suppose this is something of a draft, scheduled for Sunday. The student newspaper The Dartmouth reported in April:

Of the 10 students surveyed by The Dartmouth, six expressed dissatisfaction with the choice of speaker and believed that they were not alone in their opinion.

Most cited his conservative views as the reason for their concerns. Three students said they did not know of Brooks before the announcement. Only one person interviewed said he was interested in hearing Brooks speak.

Though it might have been better suited to that imaginary ritual with which he began.

Update 6/15/2015:

Nice survey of the column by Hamilton Nolan at Gawker.  David Zweig for Salon has started unpacking some fraudulently presented and shamelessly misinterpreted statistics in the opening chapter of The Road to Character—apparently he's been recycling them for years, too (h/t Driftglass). So mad I didn't work on it myself; still, I suppose there's plenty of limp writing, fiction presented as fact, and even some plagiarism waiting for me.