Extended adolescence

I first published this post in February 2020 but I have updated it to accompany the first episode of Season 5 of my podcast, Talk About Tomorrow. In this season we are focusing on some of the big ideas that keep recurring in my work, starting with this one.##"Children grow up too fast these days.”You hear this said a lot, but is it true? I don’t think it is. I think some aspects of childhood have been compressed and others extended. Extended so far in fact that a lot of the traditional markers of adulthood are now things we don’t consider until well into our thirties. In the future, they might even be into our forties. In the meantime, we experience an extended adolescence.

Childhood compressed

What aspects of childhood have been compressed? Well perhaps inevitably with the advent of digital mass media, our children are exposed to more of the world, earlier. It is hard to completely shield them from some aspects of life without isolating yourself from the world in some form of religious retro commune. It is true of ideas about sex, politics, religion, celebrity, beauty, violence, crime, and more.The good news is that it is mostly just ideas they are exposed to, rather than the real thing. Rates of violence and sexual crime are down a long way from the peak in the 1990s. Crime against children aged 10-15 has fallen 30% over the last decade. Teen pregnancy rates are down around 60% since the late 90s . Kids are drinking less, and anecdotally, are much less likely to go to nightclubs when they are underage than my peers and I were in the 90s.

Markers of adulthood

On the other side of childhood, lots of things happen much later. Learning to drive (average now 26 (2016) - up from 22.8 in 2004). House buying (average age 33, rising to 37 in London ). Getting married (skewed by second marriages, but nonetheless, 37.9 for men, and 35.5 for women in heterosexual couples, rising to 40.8 for men and 37.4 for women in same sex couples). Having kids (30.6 for women and 33.6 for men).The net result is a kind of extended adolescence, where you are aware of adult things early, but don’t reach many of the traditional markers of adulthood until later. Do we need to re-write the social rules for what marks out adulthood? Or do we accept that our lengthening lives mean that we need to think differently about different periods in our lives now?

Extended life, extended adolescence

I lean towards the latter. ‘Adulthood’ now covers an average period of 62.96 years, from being allowed to vote, to being buried. There is a lot of stuff that happens in between. While we still need the general term of ‘adult’ for people legally permitted to do certain things, there is no harm in starting to think differently about different periods of our lives. Not least because it might alleviate some of the pressure I hear about from younger adults.Society’s pressures change faster than society’s expectations. I speak to people in their teens who are concerned about their lack of life plan. People in their twenties who are worried about the incoherence of their career path so far, or having not yet found a partner. I speak to people who feel like they’re doing something wrong because they don’t have a house as they approach thirty.What they need to know is that that is just normal now. We should allow people an extended period of experimentation and adaptation throughout their twenties. And arguably, into their thirties. There is simply more time now than there has been in the past. Time to do, in all but the most tragic cases, many of the things we traditionally saw as markers of early adulthood.There’s no rush to grow up.

Why The Future of Digital is Physical

I often have the same conversations many times over. Sometimes they’re with other people, on air or answering questions at a talk. Sometimes they are entirely in my head, as part of a blog post or just a thought process. It means I’m never quite sure what I’ve said and to whom. So forgive me if this is an idea I’ve shared before, but I couldn’t find reference to it on my blog.There’s a belief in the minds of many of the more mature that young people have given themselves over to the digital realm. That they are more interested in the screen than the sky and that this is somehow inherently damaging. And that they engage indiscriminately without thought to future consequence.Personally, I think this is nonsense on a number of levels.

Digital augments the physical

Firstly, my own observations of the young people I work with and how they use technology suggests that its primary function is to organise physical engagement — of every type. Why have services like Snapchat and Instagram become so popular? Because they encourage the sharing of your current real-world experience. Facebook is increasingly dominated by videos and photos. Tinder? Well, its success speaks for itself. These tools are being used to organise future real-world experiences and share the ones they have already had.There is an argument about the narcissistic, show-off culture that drives us to use these tools. And one that says we would be better off enjoying the experience than constantly trying to share it from behind a screen. But to say that young people use digital tools as an alternative to the physical? I think that is increasingly wrong.Young people’s TV consumption is falling as they consume more digital media on mobile devices and we have to see this as primarily a good thing: they are moving from a passive activity to a more active one, albeit one that carries risks.

Privacy conscious

Secondly, there is the charge that the young engage indiscriminately online, sharing personal information without a thought for risks. Again I have to say the behaviours I’ve witnessed and the success of private messaging services suggest this is not true.There was absolutely a generation who were young when social media was an absolute novelty and who embraced it without a second thought. That generation has probably shared a lot of stuff they’d now like to retrieve.But the generation that followed them is a lot more savvy. Hence the success of Snapchat and less public messaging services like WhatsApp and their diminished use of Facebook. They are careful about what they share, and where they share it.

Merging worlds

So what does this say about the future?Despite the so-far limited success of augmented reality (Google Glass etc), I believe strongly that we will increasingly see the physical and digital worlds merge as more items are connected and our interfaces to them become more natural and human. Our digital interactions will become more subtle: conversation and gestures, colours and vibrations, head up, not head down. We will become better at receiving, filtering and responding to information via multiple sensory channels. We’re capable: just look at how we deal with all of the information flying at us when driving a car at speed.Young people aren’t lost in some cyber netherworld. They’re mapping out our increasingly physical, digital future.