The Quickening: The age of adolescence · 2:58pm Aug 9th, 2017
This topic has been in my mind for the last weeks, to the point that I'm having an existencial crisis and most of the time I look like this:
I've been thinking about if so often, that the conclusions are existentialist-like. Join me in this trip throughout the age of adolescence.
When I was eleven years old, it was still well seen to see cartoons that could be considered "childish", and the priorities were still playing video games, hockey or things seen little "little mature", but on reaching twelve, overnight, took a 180-degree turn: the programs that everyone saw and commented on were youth dramas, as well as movies of the type (my first PG-13 movie was the first Pirates of the Caribbean film). The taste for pop idols became a priority, and sentimental affairs such as dating, first kissing, dating, and dating occupied a predominant role in our minds.
Things have not changed much since then, with the small difference that if I had to see the twelve, now seems to start at ten, if not before.
The children nowadays seem to have become more precocious, some of them pray: they carry a mobile phone all day, worry about who is with whom and enjoy series of themes that may seem to be inappropriate for their age, although the reality is that they may know more than people twice their age.
Adolescence seems to extend its kingdom, entering earlier and earlier, but let's go back a bit and put things in context.
When I was studying biology, my classmates told me that the state of "adolescence" doesn't exist in the animal world: you are an adult specimen or not, period. Whatever the adolescence (not from the physical point of view, but from the point of view of subculture) is certainly a human invention, but the interesting thing is that it is a more recent invention than we believe.
Like animals, humans live without complications for most of our existence: we were adults to work in the field (or in factories after the Industrial Revolution) or we were not. But everything was transformed in the twentieth century: Hunger, although it still existed, was no longer the great constant threat on the heads of many developed nations, and children could stop working, could go to school more, or could just play .
This new free time is vital to understand the existence of adolescence, since leisure provided the first stone for the creation of this cultural state: with more leisure, there is consumption, and soon began to appear products aimed at these children without need work: new clothes, new films, and above all, new music. Ladies and gentlemen, with the Rock N'Roll and the films gave birth to a new paradigm of youth cultures: the mere existence of these.
All these new elements forged a culture different from those of adults and infants: adolescents had different interests and more or less defined.
The original emo
But at what age does it really start? Well, in a physical or biological sense, we enter it around the age of eleven to fifteen, with variations depending on personal development, BUT seeing it as a culture, the "youthful" culture, one entered it around 13 or 14 years, at least that seemed to be originally, but modern culture, so adoring of youth and its virtues, extolling and idealizing this phase, seems to press more and more infants to enter into adolescence at an earlier age, regardless if this is or not accompanied by an equal physical and/or psychological development.
On one occasion, a great-aunt mentioned (I don't know how the subject would have arisen) that for her, one was not a teenager until fifteen. I was fourteen at the time, and that idea was very shocking to my immature mind: the idea that at my age was still considered a "child" was, to put it briefly, to me, erroneous.
But without realizing it, and in less time, I fell into the same thing: an ideal age as I mentioned before to be considered "teenager" was the twelve, but the new reality left me over.
I am often surprised to see certain products aimed at children, animated series such as "Total Drama" or "Stoked", which in the past would have targeted an audience of thirteen up, seem to seek out audiences in boys as young as ten years or less, which is not surprising then for when they grow a little more they see shows of styles a little more mature...
Shows like "Skins" pose some questions: Is this an exaggeration and idealization of adolescence? Or is it a more honest and realistic look at what many boys of those ages really do? Or is it a cause or an effect in a nutshell?
There is no doubt that the boys of our day seem to face issues that perhaps many adults their own age couldn't have faced, or who go, would not even dream of seeing from afar.
Adolescence is seen as a golden age with leisure, relationships, friendships and promiscuity. Of course, anyone who lives it can say the opposite with certainty, but those who don't yet enter it can't wait to do so, and those who have left this one will remain the rest of their lives wishing to return to those times, and that longing and nostalgia, fueled by the consumer culture that teaches us that youth is the most desirable virtue for the human being, lead us to an interesting opposite case: we're not only enter adolescence earlier, but we seem to leave it later.
Adolescence extends its years not only at dawn, but by staying longer than in other generations, in a nutshell: it seems that we are no longer teenagers later.
Of course, in Latin cultures, unlike say, Saxon cultures, there doesn't seem to be as strong a stigma of being in your twenties and even depending on one or the other of your parents, more with a broader purchasing power of the middle classes and educated Latin Americans, it seems that we have no excuse: before it was a matter of not having money to be autonomous, and to a large extent, we still aren't all well, but for many of us that have access to the Internet, a guaranteed food and basic services that for our parents and grandparents were luxuries, the excuse seems to be another.
We live in an age of hedonism.
Leisure and entertainment went to the clouds in the last decades: in other eras, they consisted of cinema, theater and literature, and little by little they were added more things: television, first of free, and then with video systems, video games, the Internet, and endless gadgets (mp3 players, digital tablets, laptops, portable consoles, etc...) that seem to be more basic to my generation than the first payment of a house.
To listen to our favorite music or to see that show that we like is as easy as having a connection to the web and a terminal, which leaves us with this question: Does leisure take away time that we should use in other matters more priority?
It seems to be that we have no qualms about sacrificing the good in the long run for a couple of momentary luxuries a day, and I do not criticize it: God knows I couldn't live without the Internet, without my portable music and my special DVD series editions canceled after a season that only I seem to know...
And then we have the nostalgia factor: for all generations, remembering certain things from their childhood is comforting, and beautiful, to deny it, but we have a HUGE advantage: Do we want to remember such a cartoon series? Look for it on Google, and at our disposal are fan sites, digital downloads, videos uploaded to Youtube, episode guides, fanarts, fanfics, collectibles and other frenzy: we can remember more... and we do.
What for other generations was an occasional and sporadic memory, for us, can become an obsession: I have been searching and searching in mp3 sites and old cartoons the song "Running in the 90's", the theme of the Canadian caricature "The Racoons"... I lost time with the tune of a children's animated series about raccoons... twenty years ago, it would have happened to something else after two minutes of memories of childhood...
...but is this a sign of immaturity? Not really, at least not for now.
Our life is guaranteed in many aspects of the day to day: the roof, food and education; It isn't perfect, damn it, AWAY FROM IT, but in the context of human history, we are in an age of gold: we live more than ever, and despite the health problems that come with age, we live and will continue to live best.
In other times, expecting a young woman to be married at 14 and with children at 15 was normal because, in fact, how much life was left after it? Few reached 40, and sometimes, NOT THAT, so the expectations of what was to mature at certain ages were different, but today we can reach 70, 80, or more: it's as if the 25 became the new 15, and if we live longer, we can postpone certain things, among them, independence, and give ourselves to passions and tastes a little childish for some, but that give us a smile on the face, even for a short time.
Adolescence doesn't leave us, or perhaps, we don't leave adolescence, because we can't live under expectations that are out of touch with reality: getting married at 20 seems laughable to many because we would undoubtedly reach a premature divorce, and having children at 25 is also very important, because for many it is just beginning to earn money that we could call "considerable", and it's sought to spend it on material things that we did not have in other moments of life.
And we can not pretend that it's a fashion, because let's face it: time for leisure will only increase, just like our lives. How much longer will the teenage fashions and attitudes? Are the 30 the new 18 ever? And most important of all... Would it be so bad?
Nowadays I'm trying to do what one of my favorite characters did not so long ago thanks to this, to the point that I'm also believing that we're enter mid-life crisis earlier. But let me know what you think about in the comments. And if you're wondering which character I'm talking about, here are his two speeches.
