Saturday, November 24, 2007
Adultolescence
Posted by Zach in News

I’ve been reading a little about “adultolescence”. The term describes the lengthening 18-30 year old period between adolescence and adulthood. People my age are likely to think that the authentic self is found and not made, according to Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith. Young adults consequently search through multiple jobs, postpone marriage, and sit in the waiting room of higher education waiting for someone to call their name and say “your authentic self will see you now.”

Smith posits:
“Most young people today know they need to approach their careers with a variety of skills, maximal flexibility, and readiness to re tool as needed. That itself pushes youth toward extended schooling, delay of marriage, and, arguably, a general psychological orientation of maximizing options and postponing commitments.”

Smith attaches the following characteristics to this age bracket:

“(1) identity exploration, (2) instability, (3) focus on self, (4) feeling in limbo, in transition, in-between, and (5) sense of possibilities, opportunities, and unparalleled hope. These, of course, are also often accompanied by big doses of transience, confusion, anxiety, self-obsession, melodrama, conflict, and disappointment.”

If you’re like me, you’re reading this and saying “that’s me and practically everybody I know!”

Smith’s analysis is intriguing, but it conspicuously avoids laying the blame where it belongs. Pac Man. Perhaps Christian Smith is in Namco’s pocket. Maybe that’s why he ignores the obvious, but I think we can all agree that Pac Man is directly responsible for delayed adulthood. Think about it. Kids, during their most impressionable years, spent hours channeling the consumerist spirit of a chomping yellow pie. To become good at the game, you have to be able to change course quickly. If you keep your options open, you’ll end up clearing the board in no time, but if you commit too deeply to a corner of the maze, you end up becoming a ghost sandwich. Stasis is death. Transience is life.

“Transience, confusion, anxiety, self-obsession, melodrama, conflict, and disappointment.” This list of adultolescence characteristics could easily be the blurb on the back of the game!

For some reason, groups that analyze video games pour all of their contempt upon first person shooters and Pac Man escapes even a cursory criticism.

Though I am currently the Portland Studios Office Pac Man Champion, for the sake of adulthood, I will hang up the mantle. (Also, I want to retire champion, before Chris Koelle comes back from vacation).

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