We made the Time Magazine!

[tartytwenty]

The new TIME has an article about "twixters". People in their 20's not growing up. There is debate as to whether we refuse to, or just don't have the means too. They go into how a college degree just doesn't pay out like it used to, and if you don't have one, you most likely end up working for minimal wages. Even Garden State is mention as a movie us Twixters site showing our predicament. (I still haven't seen...) SO pick up a mag, or read it online (only a bit is available online) They didn't mention qlc, to my suprise, but hey, it's a good read. Oh and the problem isn't just in the USA. The magazine covers a snippet of a few other countries and what they call qlcers.

http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101050124/story.html

[shimmer728]

Twixters, that's a new one. I haven't read the article yet, so I could be talking out my ass, but I do get irritated when I hear the implications that we, as a generation, "just don't want to grow up." I think it's bullshit. Most of us are doing the best we can.

[kimmer23]

i'll have to read the article. i hope its not as disapointing as the others have been.

[tartytwenty]

Originally posted by shimmer728
Twixters, that's a new one. I haven't read the article yet, so I could be talking out my ass, but I do get irritated when I hear the implications that we, as a generation, "just don't want to grow up." I think it's bullshit. Most of us are doing the best we can.

That's the glory of the article. They are saying we aren't lazy, we are just taking our time to make more educated choices in our journey to adulthood. There is also a lot of support on how times have changed and how student debt strains us, and the high paying jobs aren't there for us anymore. So i think you'll enjoy this article. I think it's very level-headed, and not "spoiled brat kids" at all.

[GetMeOuttaDC]

Those researchers fear that whatever cultural machinery used to turn kids into grownups has broken down, that society no longer provides young people with the moral backbone and the financial wherewithal to take their rightful places in the adult world.


well, they're right. I have seen nothing but financial and societal roadblocks to becoming a real "grownup" since I graduated college. And it's worst for those of us who do "the right thing" of going to college and getting the "right" job.

[yankeeyosh]

Frankly, I would discount any notions that our generation is lazy. I personally think that if you consider all the education, activities, etc. we did since we were barely old enough to talk, we are the hardest working generation in history. I just think it's the same people who fussed over Gen "X" and their purported lazyness 10-15 years ago.

But "twixters" is definitely a new generational term that i haven't heard, and I have a keen interest in generational theory. It sounds similar to "adultolescents", which was featured in a Newsweek article a couple of years ago. I think you can find stuff on that online.

As I mentioned in another post, I think one reason why we're not so inclined to move on and leave the nest is because the generation gap with our boomer parents is much less than any other generation in the past. So we don't mind being under their roof, especially when we're giving free or nominally cheap food, lodging, utilities, etc. And parents don't want to let go either...even though we're technically full-fledged adults, they really dont' want to let us get out of their sight. Student loan debt and low starting salaries may have something to do with it, but there are plenty of 25 year olds out there who have upper middle class backgrounds and $50,000/year jobs but are still living with mom and dad.

[corrie3000]

call me a "twixter"

It makes me think of "Twister"

[tartytwenty]

Originally posted by corrie3000
call me a "twixter"

It makes me think of "Twister"

LOL, Twizzlers.

[GetMeOuttaDC]

Originally posted by yankeeyosh
Frankly, I would discount any notions that our generation is lazy. I personally think that if you consider all the education, activities, etc. we did since we were barely old enough to talk, we are the hardest working generation in history. I just think it's the same people who fussed over Gen "X" and their purported lazyness 10-15 years ago.


I think the expectations for our generation are too damn high if you ask me!!! I do have the "right" degree and a well-paying job, and I am actually looking at buying a (small shitty) condo by the end of the year... But to my employers, family, etc, it is not good enough because I am not a homeowner yet, don't have my MBA yet. And let's not forget that since I am not married, there is NO WAY that anyone should even think of considering me a real adult, and by "virtue" of being single, I must go out and get drunk/high/laid every night of the week.

Basically, we're expected to do everything our parents had done (in terms of family, etc) by our age, even though it was easier for them because there WASN'T the pressure of 5 and 6 figure student loans to pay off, and cost of living to salary ratio wasn't so outrageous that they could actually save money, and we're also expected to have our careers all established and be all successful NOW - stuff our parents didn't accomplish until they were in their 40's.

No wonder our generation is such a "dissapointment"... I'm sure if the majority of us DID accomplish this stuff, some stupid-ass parents and some stupid-ass journalists would find other things we should be accomplishing - turning water into wine perhaps? raising people from the dead? making the blind see?

[hopeless]

Thanks for the info.!! Is the article in this month's issue already? I rather buy the magazine so I can save the article. & the word twixters sounds like a catchy term, is this a new word they created since I've never heard of it.

[tartytwenty]

Sunday, Jan. 16, 2005
Grow Up? Not So Fast
Meet the twixters. They're not kids anymore, but they're not adults either. why a new breed of young people won't—or can't?—settle down
By LEV GROSSMAN
Michele, Ellen, Nathan, Corinne, Marcus and Jennie are friends. All of them live in Chicago. They go out three nights a week, sometimes more. Each of them has had several jobs since college; Ellen is on her 17th, counting internships, since 1996. They don't own homes.

They change apartments frequently. None of them are married, none have children. All of them are from 24 to 28 years old.

Thirty years ago, people like Michele, Ellen, Nathan, Corinne, Marcus and Jennie didn't exist, statistically speaking. Back then, the median age for an American woman to get married was 21. She had her first child at 22. Now it all takes longer. It's 25 for the wedding and 25 for baby. It appears to take young people longer to graduate from college, settle into careers and buy their first homes. What are they waiting for? Who are these permanent adolescents, these twentysomething Peter Pans? And why can't they grow up?

Everybody knows a few of them—full-grown men and women who still live with their parents, who dress and talk and party as they did in their teens, hopping from job to job and date to date, having fun but seemingly going nowhere. Ten years ago, we might have called them Generation X, or slackers, but those labels don't quite fit anymore.

This isn't just a trend, a temporary fad or a generational hiccup. This is a much larger phenomenon, of a different kind and a different order.

Social scientists are starting to realize that a permanent shift has taken place in the way we live our lives. In the past, people moved from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to adulthood, but today there is a new, intermediate phase along the way. The years from 18 until 25 and even beyond have become a distinct and separate life stage, a strange, transitional never-never land between adolescence and adulthood in which people stall for a few extra years, putting off the iron cage of adult responsibility that constantly threatens to crash down on them. They're betwixt and between. You could call them twixters.

Where did the twixters come from? And what's taking them so long to get where they're going? Some of the sociologists, psychologists and demographers who study this new life stage see it as a good thing.

The twixters aren't lazy, the argument goes, they're reaping the fruit of decades of American affluence and social liberation. This new period is a chance for young people to savor the pleasures of irresponsibility, search their souls and choose their life paths. But more historically and economically minded scholars see it differently. They are worried that twixters aren't growing up because they can't. Those researchers fear that whatever cultural machinery used to turn kids into grownups has broken down, that society no longer provides young people with the moral backbone and the financial wherewithal to take their rightful places in the adult world. Could growing up be harder than it used to be?

The sociologists, psychologists, economists and others who study this age group have many names for this new phase of life—"youthhood," "adultescence"—and they call people in their 20s "kidults" and "boomerang kids," none of which have quite stuck. Terri Apter, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge in England and the author of The Myth of Maturity, calls them "thresholders."

Apter became interested in the phenomenon in 1994, when she noticed her students struggling and flailing more than usual after college.

Parents were baffled when their expensively educated, otherwise well-adjusted 23-year-old children wound up sobbing in their old bedrooms, paralyzed by indecision. "Legally, they're adults, but they're on the threshold, the doorway to adulthood, and they're not going through it," Apter says. The percentage of 26-year-olds living with their parents has nearly doubled since 1970, from 11% to 20%, according to Bob Schoeni, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan.

Jeffrey Arnett, a developmental psychologist at the University of Maryland, favors "emerging adulthood" to describe this new demographic group, and the term is the title of his new book on the subject. His theme is that the twixters are misunderstood. It's too easy to write them off as overgrown children, he argues. Rather, he suggests, they're doing important work to get themselves ready for adulthood. "This is the one time of their lives when they're not responsible for anyone else or to anyone else," Arnett says. "So they have this wonderful freedom to really focus on their own lives and work on becoming the kind of person they want to be." In his view, what looks like incessant, hedonistic play is the twixters' way of trying on jobs and partners and personalities and making sure that when they do settle down, they do it the right way, their way. It's not that they don't take adulthood seriously; they take it so seriously, they're spending years carefully choosing the right path into it.

But is that all there is to it? Take a giant step backward, look at the history and the context that led up to the rise of the twixters, and you start to wonder, Is it that they don't want to grow up, or is it that the rest of society won't let them?

SCHOOL DAZE
Matt Swann is 27. he took 6-1/2 years to graduate from the University of Georgia. When he finally finished, he had a brand-spanking-new degree in cognitive science, which he describes as a wide-ranging interdisciplinary field that covers cognition, problem solving, artificial intelligence, linguistics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology. All of which is pretty cool, but its value in today's job market is not clear. "Before the '90s maybe, it seemed like a smart guy could do a lot of things," Swann says. "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.

'Oh, good, you're smart. Unfortunately your productivity's s___, so we're going to have to fire you.'"

College is the institution most of us entrust to watch over the transition to adulthood, but somewhere along the line that transition has slowed to a crawl. In a TIME poll of people ages 18 to 29, only 32% of those who attended college left school by age 21. In fact, the average college student takes five years to finish. The era of the four-year college degree is all but over.

Swann graduated in 2002 as a newly minted cognitive scientist, but the job he finally got a few months later was as a waiter in Atlanta.

He waited tables for the next year and a half. It proved to be a blessing in disguise. Swann says he learned more real-world skills working in restaurants than he ever did in school. "It taught me how to deal with people. What you learn as a waiter is how to treat people fairly, especially when they're in a bad situation." That's especially valuable in his current job as an insurance-claims examiner.

There are several lessons about twixters to be learned from Swann's tale. One is that most colleges are seriously out of step with the real world in getting students ready to become workers in the postcollege world. Vocational schools like DeVry and Strayer, which focus on teaching practical skills, are seeing a mini-boom. Their enrollment grew 48% from 1996 to 2000. More traditional schools are scrambling to give their courses a practical spin. In the fall, Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., will introduce a program called the Odyssey project, which the school says will encourage students to "think outside the book" in areas like "professional and leadership development" and "service to the world." Dozens of other schools have set up similar initiatives.

As colleges struggle to get their students ready for real-world jobs, they are charging more for what they deliver. The resulting debt is a major factor in keeping twixters from moving on and growing up.

Thirty years ago, most financial aid came in the form of grants, but now the emphasis is on lending, not on giving. Recent college graduates owe 85% more in student loans than their counterparts of a decade ago, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

In TIME's poll, 66% of those surveyed owed more than $10,000 when they graduated, and 5% owed more than $100,000. (And this says nothing about the credit-card companies that bombard freshmen with offers for cards that students then cheerfully abuse. Demos, a public-policy group, says credit-card debt for Americans 18 to 24 more than doubled from 1992 to 2001.) The longer it takes to pay off those loans, the longer it takes twixters to achieve the financial independence that's crucial to attaining an adult identity, not to mention the means to get out of their parents' house.

Meanwhile, those expensive, time-sucking college diplomas have become worth less than ever. So many more people go to college now—a 53% increase since 1970—that the value of a degree on the job market has been diluted. The advantage in wages for college-degree holders hasn't risen significantly since the late 1990s, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. To compensate, a lot of twixters go back to school for graduate and professional degrees. Swann, for example, is planning to head back to business school to better his chances in the insurance game. But piling on extra degrees costs precious time and money and pushes adulthood even further into the future.

[tartytwenty]

WORK IN PROGRESS
Kate Galantha, 28, spent seven years working her way through college, transferring three times. After she finally graduated from Columbia College in Chicago (major: undeclared) in 2001, she moved to Portland, Ore., and went to work as a nanny and as an assistant to a wedding photographer. A year later she jumped back to Chicago, where she got a job in a flower shop. It was a full-time position with real benefits, but she soon burned out and headed for the territories, a.k.a. Madison, Wis. "I was really busy but not accomplishing anything," she says. "I didn't want to stay just for a job."

She had no job offers in Madison, and the only person she knew there was her older sister, but she had nothing tying her to Chicago (her boyfriend had moved to Europe) and she needed a change. The risk paid off. She got a position as an assistant at a photo studio, and she loves it. "I decided it was more important to figure out what to do and to be in a new environment," Galantha says. "It's exciting, and I'm in a place where I can accomplish everything. But starting over is the worst."

Galantha's frenetic hopping from school to school, job to job and city to city may look like aimless wandering. (She has moved six times since 1999. Her father calls her and her sister gypsies.) But Emerging Adulthood's Arnett—and Galantha—see it differently. To them, the period from 18 to 25 is a kind of sandbox, a chance to build castles and knock them down, experiment with different careers, knowing that none of it really counts. After all, this is a world of overwhelming choice: there are 40 kinds of coffee beans at Whole Foods Market, 205 channels on DirecTV, 15 million personal ads on Match.com and 800,000 jobs on Monster.com. Can you blame Galantha for wanting to try them all? She doesn't want to play just the hand she has been dealt. She wants to look through the whole deck. "My problem is I'm really overstimulated by everything," Galantha says. "I feel there's too much information out there at all times. There are too many doors, too many people, too much competition."

Twixters expect to jump laterally from job to job and place to place until they find what they're looking for. The stable, quasi-parental bond between employer and employee is a thing of the past, and neither feels much obligation to make the relationship permanent.

"They're well aware of the fact that they will not work for the same company for the rest of their life," says Bill Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington. "They don't think long-term about health care or Social Security. They're concerned about their careers and immediate gratification."

Twixters expect a lot more from a job than a paycheck. Maybe it's a reaction to the greed-is-good 1980s or to the whatever-is-whatever apathy of the early 1990s. More likely, it's the way they were raised, by parents who came of age in the 1960s as the first generation determined to follow its bliss, who want their children to change the world the way they did. Maybe it has to do with advances in medicine. Twixters can reasonably expect to live into their 80s and beyond, so their working lives will be extended accordingly and when they choose a career, they know they'll be there for a while.

But whatever the cause, twixters are looking for a sense of purpose and importance in their work, something that will add meaning to their lives, and many don't want to rest until they find it. "They're not just looking for a job," Arnett says. "They want something that's more like a calling, that's going to be an expression of their identity." Hedonistic nomads, the twixters may seem, but there's a serious core of idealism in them.

Still, self-actualization is a luxury not everybody can afford, and looking at middle- and upper-class twixters gives only part of the picture. Twixters change jobs often, but they don't all do it for the same reasons, and one twixter's playful experimentation is another's desperate hustling. James Cote is a sociologist at the University of Western Ontario and the author of several books about twixters, including Generation on Hold and Arrested Adulthood. He believes that the economic bedrock that used to support adolescents on their journey into adulthood has shifted alarmingly. "What we're looking at really began with the collapse of the youth labor market, dating back to the late '70s and early '80s, which made it more difficult for people to get a foothold in terms of financial independence," Cote says. "You need a college degree now just to be where blue- collar people the same age were 20 or 30 years ago, and if you don't have it, then you're way behind." In other words, it's not that twixters don't want to become adults. They just can't afford to.

One way society defines an adult is as a person who is financially independent, with a family and a home. But families and homes cost money, and people in their late teens and early 20s don't make as much as they used to. The current crop of twixters grew up in the 1990s, when the dotcom boom made Internet millions seem just a business proposal away, but in reality they're worse off than the generation that preceded them. Annual earnings among men 25 to 34 with full-time jobs dropped 17% from 1971 to 2002, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Timothy Smeeding, a professor of economics at Syracuse University, found that only half of Americans in their mid-20s earn enough to support a family, and in TIME's poll only half of those ages 18 to 29 consider themselves financially independent. Michigan's Schoeni says Americans ages 25 and 26 get an average of $2,323 a year in financial support from their parents.

The transition to adulthood gets tougher the lower you go on the economic and educational ladder. Sheldon Danziger, a public-policy professor at the University of Michigan, found that for male workers ages 25 to 29 with only a high school diploma, the average wage declined 11% from 1975 to 2002. "When I graduated from high school, my classmates who didn't want to go to college could go to the Goodyear plant and buy a house and support a wife and family," says Steve Hamilton of Cornell University's Youth and Work Program. "That doesn't happen anymore." Instead, high school grads are more likely to end up in retail jobs with low pay and minimal benefits, if any.

From this end of the social pyramid, Arnett's vision of emerging adulthood as a playground of self-discovery seems a little rosy. The rules have changed, and not in the twixters' favor.

WEDDINGS CAN WAIT
With everything else that's going on—careers to be found, debts to be paid, bars to be hopped—love is somewhat secondary in the lives of the twixters. But that doesn't mean they're cynical about it. Au contraire: among our friends from Chicago—Michele, Ellen, Nathan, Corinne, Marcus and Jennie—all six say they are not ready for marriage yet but do want it someday, preferably with kids. Naturally, all that is comfortably situated in the eternally receding future.

Thirty is no longer the looming deadline it once was. In fact, five of the Chicago six see marriage as a decidedly post-30 milestone.

"It's a long way down the road," says Marcus Jones, 28, a comedian who works at Banana Republic by day. "I'm too self-involved. I don't want to bring that into a relationship now." He expects to get married in his mid- to late 30s. "My wife is currently a sophomore in high school," he jokes.

"I want to get married but not soon," says Jennie Jiang, 26, a sixth-grade teacher. "I'm enjoying myself. There's a lot I want to do by myself still."

"I have my career, and I'm too young," says Michele Steele, 26, a TV producer. "It's commitment and sacrifice, and I think it's a hindrance. Lo and behold, people have come to the conclusion that it's not much fun to get married and have kids right out of college."

That attitude is new, but it didn't come out of nowhere. Certainly, the spectacle of the previous generation's mass divorces has something to do with the healthy skepticism shown by the twixters.

They will spend a few years looking before they leap, thank you very much. "I fantasize more about sharing a place with someone than about my wedding day," says Galantha, whose parents split when she was 18. "I haven't seen a lot of good marriages."

But if twixters are getting married later, they are missing out on some of the social-support networks that come with having families of their own. To make up for it, they have a special gift for friendship, documented in books like Sasha Cagen's Quirkyalone and Ethan Watters' Urban Tribes, which asks the not entirely rhetorical question Are friends the new family? They throw cocktail parties and dinner parties. They hold poker nights. They form book groups. They stay in touch constantly and in real time, through social-networking technologies like cell phones, instant messaging, text messaging and online communities like Friendster. They're also close to their parents. TIME's poll showed that almost half of Americans ages 18 to 29 talk to their parents every day.

[tartytwenty]

Marrying late also means that twixters tend to have more sexual partners than previous generations. The situation is analogous to their promiscuous job-hopping behavior—like Goldilocks, they want to find the one that's just right—but it can give them a cynical, promiscuous vibe too. Arnett is worried that if anything, twixters are too romantic. In their universe, romance is totally detached from pragmatic concerns and societal pressures, so when twixters finally do marry, they're going to do it for Love with a capital L and no other reason. "Everybody wants to find their soul mate now," Arnett says, "whereas I think, for my parents' generation—I'm 47—they looked at it much more practically. I think a lot of people are going to end up being disappointed with the person that's snoring next to them by the time they've been married for a few years and they realize it doesn't work that way."

TWIXTER CULTURE
When it comes to social change, pop culture is the most sensitive of seismometers, and it was faster to pick up on the twixters than the cloistered social scientists. Look at the Broadway musical Avenue Q, in which puppets dramatize the vagaries of life after graduation. ("I wish I could go back to college," a character sings. "Life was so simple back then.") Look at that little TV show called Friends, about six people who put off marriage well into their 30s. Even twice-married Britney Spears fits the profile. For a succinct, albeit cheesy summation of the twixter predicament, you couldn't do much better than her 2001 hit I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.

The producing duo Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, who created the legendarily zeitgeisty TV series thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, now have a pilot with ABC called 1/4life, about a houseful of people in their mid-20s who can't seem to settle down. "When you talk about this period of transition being extended, it's not what people intended to do," Herskovitz says, "but 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."

As for movies, a lot of twixters cite Garden State as one that really nails their predicament. "I feel like my generation is waiting longer and longer to get married," says Zach Braff, 29, who wrote, directed and starred in the film about a twentysomething actor who comes home for the first time in nine years. "In the past, people got married and got a job and had kids, but now there's a new 10 years that people are using to try and find out what kind of life they want to lead. For a lot of people, the weight of all the possibility is overwhelming."

Pop culture may reflect the changes in our lives, but it also plays its part in shaping them. Marketers have picked up on the fact that twixters on their personal voyages of discovery tend to buy lots of stuff along the way. "They are the optimum market to be going after for consumer electronics, Game Boys, flat-screen TVs, iPods, couture fashion, exotic vacations and so forth," says David Morrison, president of Twentysomething Inc., a marketing consultancy based in Philadelphia. "Most of their needs are taken care of by Mom and Dad, so their income is largely discretionary. [Many twentysomethings] are living at home, but if you look, you'll see flat-screen TVs in their bedrooms and brand-new cars in the driveway." Some twixters may want to grow up, but corporations and advertisers have a real stake in keeping them in a tractable, exploitable, pre-adult state—living at home, spending their money on toys.

LIVING WITH PETER PAN
Maybe the twixters are in denial about growing up, but the rest of society is equally in denial about the twixters. Nobody wants to admit they're here to stay, but that's where all the evidence points.

Tom Smith, director of the General Social Survey, a large sociological data-gathering project run by the National Opinion Research Center, found that most people believe that the transition to adulthood should be completed by the age of 26, on average, and he thinks that number is only going up. "In another 10 or 20 years, we're not going to be talking about this as a delay. We're going to be talking about this as a normal trajectory," Smith says. "And we're going to think about those people getting married at 18 and forming families at 19 or 20 as an odd historical pattern."

There may even be a biological basis to all this. The human brain continues to grow and change into the early 20s, according to Abigail Baird, who runs the Laboratory for Adolescent Studies at Dartmouth.

"We as a society deem an individual at the age of 18 ready for adult responsibility," Baird points out. "Yet recent evidence suggests that our neuropsychological development is many years from being complete.

There's no reason to think 18 is a magic number." How can the twixters be expected to settle down when their gray matter hasn't?

A new life stage is a major change, and the rest of society will have to change to make room for it. One response to this very new phenomenon is extremely old-fashioned: medieval-style apprenticeship programs that give high school graduates a cheaper and more practical alternative to college. In 1996 Jack Smith, then CEO of General Motors, started Automotive Youth Educational Systems (AYES), a program that puts high school kids in shops alongside seasoned car mechanics. More than 7,800 students have tried it, and 98% of them have ended up working at the business where they apprenticed. "I knew this was my best way to get into a dealership," says Chris Rolando, 20, an AYES graduate who works at one in Detroit. "My friends are still at pizza-place jobs and have no idea what to do for a living. I just bought my own house and have a career."

But success stories like Rolando's are rare. Child welfare, the juvenile-justice system, special-education and support programs for young mothers usually cut off at age 18, and most kids in foster care get kicked out at 18 with virtually no safety net. "Age limits are like the time limits for welfare recipients," says Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist who heads a research consortium called the MacArthur Network on Transitions to Adulthood. "They're pushing people off the rolls, but they're not necessarily able to transition into supportive services or connections to other systems." And programs for the poor aren't the only ones that need to grow up with the times. Only 54% of respondents in the TIME poll were insured through their employers.

That's a reality that affects all levels of society, and policymakers need to strengthen that safety net.

Most of the problems that twixters face are hard to see, and that makes it harder to help them. Twixters may look as if they have been overindulged, but they could use some judicious support. Apter's research at Cambridge suggests that the more parents sympathize with their twixter children, the more parents take time to discuss their twixters' life goals, the more aid and shelter they offer them, the easier the transition becomes. "Young people know that their material life will not be better than their parents'," Apter says. "They don't expect a safer life than their parents had. They don't expect more secure employment or finances. They have to put in a lot of work just to remain O.K." Tough love may look like the answer, but it's not what twixters need.

The real heavy lifting may ultimately have to happen on the level of the culture itself. There was a time when people looked forward to taking on the mantle of adulthood. That time is past. Now our culture trains young people to fear it. "I don't ever want a lawn," says Swann. "I don't ever want to drive two hours to get to work. I do not want to be a parent. I mean, hell, why would I? There's so much fun to be had while you're young." He does have a point. Twixters have all the privileges of grownups now but only some of the responsibilities. From the point of view of the twixters, upstairs in their childhood bedrooms, snuggled up under their Star Wars comforters, it can look all downhill.

If twixters are ever going to grow up, they need the means to do it—and they will have to want to. There are joys and satisfactions that come with assuming adult responsibility, though you won't see them on The Real World. To go to the movies or turn on the TV is to see a world where life ends at 30; these days, every movie is Logan's Run. There are few road maps in the popular culture—and to most twixters, this is the only culture—to get twixters where they need to go. If those who are 30 and older want the rest of the world to grow up, they'll have to show the twixters that it's worth their while. "I went to a Poster Children concert, and there were 40-year-olds still rocking," says Jennie Jiang. "It gave me hope."


With reporting by Nadia Mustafa and Deirdre van Dyk/ New York, Kristin Kloberdanz/ Chicago and Marc Schultz/ Atlanta




Copyright © 2005 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Privacy Policy

[cheshrcarol]

Thanks Tarty, that excerpt was really interesting. I'll have to buy the magazine and read the whole thing.

[hopeless]

Thanks for that article tarttwenty. Like cheschrcarol I'll have to buy the magazine as soon as I can.

[tartytwenty]

Originally posted by cheshrcarol
Thanks Tarty, that excerpt was really interesting. I'll have to buy the magazine and read the whole thing.

I think it's the whole thing (minus some side articles/numbers)...um...now I wonder if I'm violating some plagirism laws or something.....

[GetMeOuttaDC]

Originally posted by tartytwenty


I think it's the whole thing (minus some side articles/numbers)...um...now I wonder if I'm violating some plagirism laws or something.....

we won't tell if you won't. :)

plus, I think you'd have to make money off bogarting the text, or pass the work off as your own, to violate the laws. :)

[yankeeyosh]

i don't think it's plagarism since you cited it....some people are kinda anal about posting stuff for free from "pay" websites, but until a couple of years ago, TIME and other magazines allowed you to view their stuff for free, even archives. I say, screw the corporate world and their money making schemes!

[shimmer728]

Very insightful, in-depth article. Definitely one of the better ones I've read on the subject.

[Benwa]

I know they talked to twixters to get a perspective. But I think they left out some crucial aspects of what its like to be a twixter. Especially how you "feel". about your situation. They seemed to portray a happy go lucky selfish attitude. But for me and most others, our lives aren't very jolly. My main outlook on my prospect is one of desperation and the feeling of being incompaciated. I agree there's an overwhelming of options, but the anxiety and frustration comes from my inablity to get there. Or more so, no one willing to allow me the chance to get there.

I think we are a group of people very much aware of the carrot on the stick. The carrot being the american dream, obeying societal norms, financial gain and similar things. Others and myself differ in realising that it is indeed just a carrot and it is taunting us. We are wise to the mechanism of the carrot and the stick. And once you become wise to it, it very much loses its degree of effectiveness. Before in other generations there was the motivation of getting te carrot, striving, strivinig, striving. Now we don't strive that hard for it because its so far out of our grasp.

And I can tell you why we don't want the carrot as much. It's because the stick is way too long. The shorter the stick, the more franticly you strive to get the carrot. But our stick is extremely long. We come out of school already in debt. Americans work more hours than any other country and have personally relatively little to show for it. We've reached a tipping point where we consume so much that most of us are fully aware we consume too much. Not only that but we understand the dangers of consuming too much and would like to change that. Therefore the motivation of materialism and consumption and keeping up with the joneses is less and growing smaller. You see... very long stick. So theres partly a loss of interest in the carrot and some people are even starting to resent the carrot. But more you start to resent that the stick is so much longer for you than others. Just as you become more franticly striving when the stick is shorter. You ebcome more apethetic and resentful when the stick is longer. Especially when you listen to the shortstick people and followed their advice on how to make your stick shorter.

And because of this I really think we are on the crest of a major social change in America and other westernised cultures who have the twixters. The main reason I think this... there is an abundance of frustrated intellectuals. and every single social movement, every one almost without exception was started and spawn by extremely frustrated intellectuals. Non Intellectual/Action based people usually end up leading it. But the intellectual always starts it. The twixters being college graduates ensures a larger proportion of intellectuals (not all grads are intellectuals though).

America tends to be anti-intellectual and pro-action person. And even pro-masses. But there are time where its been more anti-intellectual than others. And we're in one of those times. Ideology is trumping science, gym trumps art, war trumps peace talks, busy-bodieness trumps quiet reflection, TV trumps reading.

The coming social change could be prevented by one simple thing. simply make our stick shorter! But I don't see that happening and not sure if it should. Maybe we need some change or reform. Hopefully the change is exciting and not chaotic.

[GetMeOuttaDC]

you impress me with your insight, Benwa, but I think that the carrot's existence is questionable... there is a very long stick, so long that we can't see the carrot, we have to trust that it is there. people WANT us to believe it is there so we "do the right things", but we have a much higher chance of getting to the end of the stick and finding no carrot. or only peices of the carrot.

and people telling us we are wrong to want the carrot.:cry:

[Benwa]

I also feel the article didn't touch to well on the despair and fear we tend to feel. It was written from an outsiders perspective and seems more concerned with our lack of productivity. "Why aren't these kids pulling their weight?" Another "what are we gonna do with these damn kids" piece. I must say its one of the better pieces though.

I don't think those interviewed expressed (or at least it wasn't written) how scary it all is. It seemed to them that its just hop around, go to clubs, have some sex, carefree, no worries existance. Like the aim of us twixters (I'm starting to hate that word) is to wander aimlessly. Wandering is a result, not our goal. If we wanted to be wanderers there'd be sort of revival of the beatniks and hobos. And there doesn't seem to be. Our goal is to be found, not to get lost. And our efforts are seeming to be in vain. And that anxiety and frustration wasn't expressed.

[tartytwenty]

Originally posted by Benwa
I also feel the article didn't touch to well on the despair and fear we tend to feel. It was written from an outsiders perspective and seems more concerned with our lack of productivity. "Why aren't these kids pulling their weight?" Another "what are we gonna do with these damn kids" piece. I must say its one of the better pieces though.

I didn't see it too much that way. It's 1/2 explaining how it happened, lack of jobs, debt, etc. It's 1/2 of us being liberated and "irresponsible." I dare say there's some truth to that, because a majority of 20 somethings I'm around(we are a different breed on the boards)live for the next party, the next movie, a new video game, a better guy to date, etc. We post about parties, travels, movies, new dates, new jobs, all the time! Some of those (us) who feel pressured by society to "succeed", house, family, baby, end up in "crisis" mode because we don't fit the ideal of succeeding that was thrown on us. To be selfish, I do enjoy that I don't have to marry early and pop out kids. I do enjoy having the liberation to travel, party, live it up without worrying about being a good parent. I enjoy being able find (or try too) a better job if I so chose too. I do enjoy buying a DVD and not worrying about diaper money instead. There are the 20's somethings that get depressed/conflicted over all the new choices and struggles, and others that are thriving on it. I'm a bit both.

[abby]

want to write a joint qlc response?

[MetFanL]

Abby, what's the deal with that TV show 1/4life? Please tell me you're getting some kind of consulting credit or something...

(you don't actually have to tell me. But, h*ll, you've published a book under that title, you should be getting something from that)

[abby]

you would think so, wouldn't you?

[MetFanL]

Guess I have my answer. ;)

Did you trademark quarterlife? If so, you should contact them, if you haven't already. Just b/c they spelled it differently?? Not exactly a stellar cover-up.

Again, no need to answer if you don't want to (or can't).

[WeirdBrake]

Kelly and Yankeeyosh are right; it's not plagiarism. Plagiarism is if you told us YOU wrote the article. :p

Personally, I found the article to be rather condescending in its language and tone.

[Starfish81]

I bought the magazine last week, read the article, and was not impressed. Luckily I wasn't pissed off, like I thought I was going to be, with a cover saying "They Just Won't Grow Up."

I think the term Twixters is stupid, but besides that, I'd appreciate Time magazine not looking at a whole generation of people and making broad generalizations about them so they can have cover story in a neat and tidy package. Yes, there is a trend among current 20-somethings living at home, paying off loans, and taking longer to become independent than their predecessors did, but an article about this trend would sound more valid to me written by young journalists who actually experienced it, than coming from some old guy looking at us like some weird science experiment, and acting like we're all sublimely happy about our situations.

[tartytwenty]

One bad thing about a week's worth of posts being washed...

All my arguments/dicussions are gone, and I'm too exhausted to go through it again, LOL!

Then again, the drunk post is gone too! WHEEEEEEEEEEE

[wordsmith]

One bad thing about a week's worth of posts being washed...

All my arguments/dicussions are gone, and I'm too exhausted to go through it again, LOL!

Then again, the drunk post is gone too! WHEEEEEEEEEEE


Woooooord, tarty. My soapbox is gonna need steel reinforcements before too long. Hopefully, Abby can recover the lost posts in general...I was milking the warm fuzzy of my happy birthday thread for as long as I possibly could!
:D

[cornflakegirl]

i was away last weekend & have been pretty exhausted recently so i haven't been able to check out all the new threads & now they are gone. there were a few threads i meant to reply to, including happy belated birthday, wordsmith. :exclaim:

[wordsmith]

i was away last weekend & have been pretty exhausted recently so i haven't been able to check out all the new threads & now they are gone. there were a few threads i meant to reply to, including happy belated birthday, wordsmith. :exclaim:

Thank you.

[Starfish81]

One bad thing about a week's worth of posts being washed...

All my arguments/dicussions are gone, and I'm too exhausted to go through it again, LOL!

Then again, the drunk post is gone too! WHEEEEEEEEEEE

I was gone for about a week, and I thought it was weird that not much was discussed in my absence. Like no one could think of anything to talk about without me here.

Yeah, apparently not. So what if the world doesn't revolve around me. Oh well. I still missed you guys.

[celtic19]

I checked TIME's website this morning to see if my Letter to the Editor made it in (sadly no).

The letters they did publish are kind of nasty. There's several basically saying we should all join the Marines and stop being a bunch of wimps.

[tartytwenty]

Meet the Twixters

"Every mama bird knows to do what my parents did: kick young adults out of the comfy nest and make them learn to fly on their own."

JOANNE BOYD

Albany, N.Y.

As A 24-year old, I want to thank you for your fair and accurate portrayal of young adults in the U.S. [Jan. 24]. I graduated from college with honors in three years but could not find a job that allowed me to become financially independent. So I moved back home to save money. I was surprised to find that the majority of my high school class had done the same thing. Living at home has enabled me to save for law school. (I start in the fall.) I realize that some people might view my generation as spoiled by our parents. I am glad TIME showed that we are not lazy. We want to work and make our way in the world. I believe our parents deserve a lot of credit for being so supportive. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

TRICIA ENGELHARDT

Northborough, Mass.

I suppose I can make room in my heart for another "downtrodden" minority, the twixters. Poor babies. If only their parents had cut the golden apron strings and left them to their own devices, they would have learned to be more independent. I will immediately write to Congress and demand that these pitiful innocents obtain protection under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In the meantime, I'm launching a support group for these WIMPS (whining immature professional slackers).

BRIAN O'NEIL

Alameda, Calif.

As somewhat of a twixter myself, I assure you that our situation is hardly grave. In fact, our parents could perhaps look to us for guidance. Half our parents are divorced, have financial problems or are stuck in jobs they loathe. Instead of making it seem as if we twixters are spoiled brats, why not praise us as a generation that refuses to fall into the same archaic conventions that have led to so many dysfunctional families? My contemporaries and I don't feel compelled to marry by age 25 and bear children by 27, and we shouldn't have to.

HALEY RUBINSON

New York City

Why do we need to come up with a new label for kids who stay at home with their parents while figuring out what they want to do? We've had a name for that for years: moocher.

JOSEPH MARSHALL

Honolulu

Here's some advice to the twixters from a geezer who joined the military at 17, was raising a family at 21, worked hard days, studied hard nights and built a gratifying life: self-absorption keeps one a child, and commitment to something greater than oneself leads to adulthood. A person has too many choices only if they become excuses for failing to choose, commit and grow. Select a path, and follow it diligently. Then you won't have to seek fulfillment; it will find you.

JOHN J. MOLLICK

Fayetteville, Pa.

There's not a single thing wrong with the young adults who live off their parents that a stint in the U.S. Marine Corps couldn't fix.

JIMMY VERNER

DeSoto, Texas

I have a first-class college degree, lots of internships and job experience on my résumé, but at 23 I am back home with my parents, living rent free. I'm sleeping in my old bed with my favorite stuffed animal. I spend my days running errands, doing laundry and making dinner. I have become my parents' "desperate housewife." Young adults my age are overwhelmed by indecision. We have the necessary tools, but we have too many options and not enough options at the same time. We are stuck.

ASHLEY RICHARD

Mequon, Wis.

[tartytwenty]

I don't give credit to those who think we're spoiled. They are just jealous, because they totally thought they had to have babies right away and just accept whatever job paid for said baby.

Ha!

[abby]

how annoying. guess they didn't care to hear what i had to say either! seems to be a rather biased selection of letters.

[pisces2473]

I was shocked that Abby's letter was not included.

Fuckers. Everyone boycott Time.

[abby]

man! yeah, you tell 'em jen! actually i shouldn't be shocked - i wrote a similar response to newsweek's piece on "adultolescents" when that ran a couple years ago, but the truth is these publications don't want to give me credit for identifying this phenomenon.

[pisces2473]

Abby, they didn't even MENTION your book, so it's not shocking that they don't want to print your letter!

Seriously though, don't rely on glossy magazines for your news, people. Just like you shouldn't let magazines dictate your fashion or your self-image.

[shimmer728]

how annoying. guess they didn't care to hear what i had to say either! seems to be a rather biased selection of letters.

Extremely biased.

[tartytwenty]

I was very surprised they didn't include Abby's letter too. I kept looking for it, **shrug**.

This article will NOT cause me to boycott Time. It's just a sad realization that most of the people out there do think we are spoiled little brats. Media in any shape or form is going to be biased... oh well. This time, it wasn't biased in our favor.

[yankeeyosh]

It's been this way with our gen for years. When we posted the higher SAT scores in decades, they said, yeah, but they're not as high as they were back when the Boomers went to school (when there were far fewer people who took the SAT)...when we signed up for more AP and honors courses, they still criticized us for not knowing the five Great Lakes or some Civil War battle (like they know)...when we got our first jobs, they criticized us for being too brash and "pollyanna" like (OK...so we're ambitious...what's wrong with that?) They just want a good story so they twist and turn things like this and it won't end....until we're in control! Then we can fret about our own kids.

[WeirdBrake]

Unfortunately, it sounds like our detractors simply need someone to make fun of, to express contempt for, to direct nastiness at (excuse all these blatant prepositional endings ;) ). There will always be individuals like that. Pick any group of people, and there will always be those who feel some compelling need to be hateful toward that group.

Just remember that opinions really are like a$$holes. Everybody's got one.

[wordsmith]

There have always been people saying that the next generation "has it good." You know what? We'll say the same thing about our kids' generation, I have no doubt. But the people who are so contemptuous of this phenomenon are, by and large, people who are resentful/bitter of the successes that are within our reach. I thought this was an important point:

I assure you that our situation is hardly grave. In fact, our parents could perhaps look to us for guidance. Half our parents are divorced, have financial problems or are stuck in jobs they loathe. Instead of making it seem as if we twixters are spoiled brats, why not praise us as a generation that refuses to fall into the same archaic conventions that have led to so many dysfunctional families? My contemporaries and I don't feel compelled to marry by age 25 and bear children by 27, and we shouldn't have to.

I do think this is true. The people who say that people my age and in my position are a bunch of whining babies are the people who either have the sort of life I don't want for myself, or people who are headed toward that kind of life. I have no desire to have joined the military at 17, started a family at 21. I have other choices. And I still somehow miraculously have worked hard days and studied hard nights to make something out of my life. Accusing us of failing to choose, commit, and grow is an outsider perspective that smacks of nothing but the accuser's own desire to build him or herself up as not having done so badly for him or herself.

[paiger81]

So, I've been thinking about this, and here is what I've come to:

When folks go through Mid-life Crisis', the general consensus jokes about it and usually say/think the MLCer is full of crap, trying to recapture youth.

So why are we surprised that these people see QLC as something that is full of crap?

[tartytwenty]

When folks go through Mid-life Crisis', the general consensus jokes about it and usually say/think the MLCer is full of crap, trying to recapture youth.


You know...that's right! Some people just think...awww...they are going through a mid-life crisis...isn't that cute, and roll their eyes.

[Arcite]

Who you callin' "we"? :D

Seriously, I don't think the QLC phenomenon and the twixter phenomenon are one and the same, though there is some overlap. I may be having a QLC, but I don't live with my parents. And I'm not "not growing up," at least in the way these "twixters" aren't: the article seems to imply that instead of marrying and having families, we're all desperately trying to prolong our adolescence by living some kind of swingin' single lifestyle going to nightclubs every night after work. I was never a partier in adolescence, let alone now.