by Micah E. Weiss
The Catcher in the Rye is a book most often relegated to high school curricula. Or at least it used to be. For a time it certainly was, and the name Holden Caulfield was one synonymous with arrested development, a youth who believed that growing up was the problem. Thrust into an adolescent landscape rife with meanness and sex-obsession, Holden has come to symbolize the tragedies of being a teen. He stands as precursor to today’s youth in many ways: he is lost, yet lacks freedom to choose a path; innocent, yet exposed to horrors that would shake many jaded adults; educated, but only superficially, lacking wisdom to navigate the real world. It’s almost too easy to describe him as suffering from depression; he suffers from a great deal more in a cold world he’s unable to navigate.
A frame novel, starting and ending with Holden narrating his troubles from the comforts of the 50s era psych ward in California, he isn’t really being “treated” as far as we can tell. His first person narration shows little self-awareness, as Holden is still obfuscating the truth, and clinging to his self-soothing notion of saving children from growing up. One wonders which tender mercy of that era’s treatments will come his way. It was, of course, at this time that the now infamous Dr. Walter Freeman was continuing his campaign to popularize his trans-orbital lobotomy procedure (one he would eventually turn on several dozen adolescent boys whose only diagnosis appears to have been that they were unruly).
But Holden isn’t merely a forerunner of the troubles, that in the interim years since the book's publication have become a public health emergency amongst adolescents, an emergency that no one in public life seems to have a solution for. Holden is also representative of an invention our society of unprecedented plenty has birthed since the end of World War II: the adolescent as a distinct cultural category. Adolescence was always a biological category, one that roughly described the human body’s physical and cognitive alterations around puberty. However, culturally, adolescence pre-WWII was simply considered the early years of adulthood, not a separate stage of life between childhood and adulthood. The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, and it was in that decade that the word “teenager” was coined, and a new type of human never before seen in history was born: the adult without adult responsibility.
There’s a complicated history here, but by and large, before the 1950s, when childhood ended, adulthood began. However, the birth of the teenager fundamentally altered, and continues to alter, the way our society functions relative to nearly every other civilization up to 1945. The creation of the adolescent wasn’t all bad: a new tech-driven economy demanded more skilled workers, and a high school education, once thought optional, was soon a general expectation of all American young adults. It enabled universities to expand the skill base of a pretty robust and highly complex economy. The prosperity born of the war exploded for decades; in some ways we are still living off the surplus created in the second half of the 20th century. The new, highly diversified labor market churned and bubbled, and soon the attitude that one could have a good life without a college degree, let alone a high school diploma, became a defining feature of our middle class.
The trade-off that no one saw coming, and that for generations now has masqueraded as a feature rather than as a bug of the system, was all those expendable years teens and late adolescents would spend with little to do but be consumers. Youth culture was born. Soon Catcher in the Rye was joined by a myriad of cultural expressions of the teen years, and what they were about–both as a reflection and driver of cultural norms. Rebel Without a Cause soon appeared–another warning–though b-movies were the real draw for teens on dates, most especially in the horror genre. Rock ‘n Roll music catered almost exclusively to the young. Subgenres of Rock ‘n Roll like car songs and splatter platters hit the airwaves, and by the 60s, a huge portion of popular music was targeted at adolescent Americans. Television programs followed, such as Gidget and Dobie Gillis. Then locations designed for teens like the drive-in and drive-through establishments popped up all over the American landscape, and fashion trends, once the markers of class, started to differentiate by age.
This shift in culture continued gradually for some time until the 1980s, generally with MTV and cable television. This experiment wasn’t fully targeted at adolescence at first–new cable networks still tried to hit multiple demographics (even Nickelodeon had Nick at Night for grownups), but when they added programming to supplement their Music Video content on MTV, the separation was complete. For the first time, an entire Network ceased to cater to a wider adult demographic. The best thing about being a teen and an adolescent, the lack of responsibility for others, was what made MTV and the youth culture that grew out of it into the present so profitable. The behavior patterns of young adults (or overgrown children, depending on your perspective), mainly hedonistic and self-gratifying, make for outstanding consumers.
So I return to Madonna one last time:
Some of you may remember the long-ago myspace joke video about The Angles. It’s not for the faint-hearted, and gets quite vulgar after the second minute, but I’ll link it anyway (also, googling this video only brought a tiktok, which marks the first time I’ve ever seen a tiktok–there’s something poetic about digging into the internet for a long lost myspace joke, and finding it only on tiktok). Certainly it's a walk down the social media memory lane for those of us who still remember what Friendster was. The point is that poor old Madonna had to resort to some serious angles plus, no doubt, filters, silicon, botox, stretched skin, plucked hairs, packed fillers, chemical dyes and peels, and make-up spackle to get this shot. Goodness knows how much it all cost her, not just in terms of money, but psychologically.
There are many examples across Hollywood and the music industry of celebrities trying, desperately, to look 20-40 years younger than they are. It isn’t just women, who obviously pay a steeper price for aging than men do. However, some examples of men as horrifying as Madonna can be found here–scroll down to see what a 74-year-old Barry Manilow looks like, if you dare. It is almost banal at this point to point out this obvious trend. Of course actors and celebrities are going to try and look younger as they age to maintain their career, or at least their celebrity. The narcotic of fame has yet to find a more compelling competitor. In a visual culture like ours, looking In Estrus is the same as looking young is the same as maintaining a career.
If it were only celebrities, I expect I would have very little to say. But observe this:
At a diner last week, I observed a man dressed almost exactly like this–just that understated–sitting down with his child to brunch. Only, most of the hair of this gentleman’s goatee was grey–from the skin and face weathering, I’d have to guess he was over 40. It occurred to me that I see guys like this all the time when I travel into urban areas, of all ages and ethnicities. Last year, I watched a man I’d have to guess was in his early thirties, dressed in an ostentatiously colorful version of the above outfit roar into a convenient-store parking lot in a $150,000 Corvette. I teach at a high school, and I expect this kind of classy athleisure wear from idiot teenagers who are chasing trends, but I am somewhat shocked at how many grown men I’ve seen and met who chase it as well.
However, this has been brewing for a while. Around 2012, two years after Viva la Vida by Coldplay had hit #1 on the charts, I had the following exchange with a dad in his forties who had recently dyed his hair reddish:
Me, offhanded: I don’t really like Coldplay that much. I don’t think they are that relevant.
Pathetic Dad with a tone of mockery: You wouldn’t think so if you were young.
So much to unpack there. I can still see that recently divorced dad’s face and empathize with the fact that his young teen daughter, whose affections he was suddenly in competition to earn, was neck deep in the mediocre soft-rock of another in a series of heartthrob British bands. Ultimately, however, the sentiment that a young person's preferences should be a guide to my own still strikes me as shocking, even though it appears to be a driving force in the new America.
This inversion may or may not be an inevitability borne from our wealth and mass media. The scale of our economy and wealth as a society is very difficult for me to fathom. Real GDP per Capita is a cold term, as are other “measures” of wealth. I prefer more off-beat indicators. My favorite representation of our wealth is the fact that after World War II, the United States Government stopped keeping statistics on how many Americans starve year on year, mainly because they couldn’t find any starving people. I often couple this statistic in my mind with the more bleak fact that now our poor are suffering from high levels of obesity and diet-related diabetes. Another strange indicator is the banana slicer; a plastic banana shaped tool with evenly spaced plastic blades. I can’t imagine that taking a knife to a banana would lose so much of someone’s precious time that they considered this device in any way a necessity; maybe, just maybe, you might gain a second or two. Perhaps just the availability of the Banana, year round, in all the supermarkets of the country is a dead giveaway of our wealth? I’ve never lived closer than a thousand miles to where the Banana can be cultivated, yet I’ve always been able to get one within a few minutes from my home, for less than a dollar. Incredible.
As these examples imply, much of our wealth, in strictly need-based terms, is surplus. No one needs to get a banana at almost any hour of any day. Not that we don’t have poverty and homelessness, etc., but by and large, most of us are living a life of excess when compared to a subsistence existence (™). Our wealth level has even created new terminologies for understanding relative poverty like “Food Insecurity” and “Extreme Poverty,” the former condition in place of US domestic starvation–because again, that doesn’t happen anymore; while the latter condition to describe what happens only in other parts of the world where people are actually starving.
In this rather strange era since WWII, our material surplus has been leveraged by Americans to help create many new markets: media, computers, weapons, energy technologies, the internet. The surplus has also allowed us to expand existing markets with new infrastructure–does anyone realize that as late as the 1960s the US government was finishing off the push to electrify the rural hinterlands?
Perhaps the greatest new market pioneered by American culture to feed the consumerist economy with our surplus of wealth has been the young. Children and adolescents spending money has been a cornerstone of our economy for a while now. Gen Z, whatever that even means beyond an age range, makes up 5% of our consumer spending. That may not seem like a lot, but if you add in the spending of their parents on simply the business of raising kids, that number rises significantly. Childcare, college educations, toys and extra electronic devices, larger cars and housing for families, food costs, etc. Kids are notoriously expensive; some people consider them a luxury good. But it's the money that kids spend that I’m more concerned with. If we raise the definition of adolescence to include the Millennials, 5% of consumer spending becomes 25%.
Go back a hundred years ago, and the idea that a quarter of the consumer economy would be dependent on the spending habits of children and a mostly childless population of adults 18-35 would be inconceivable. Kids running to a soda-shop to buy wizbangs and wax lips on a given Saturday in 1910, or a movie theater to pay a quarter for a double feature in 1930, wasn’t exactly fueling the economy (that’s even if you know what the heck a wizbang is, which I don’t). The average age of first time mothers was close to 21, and median marriage age was 23-ish, and divorce was rare. In 1928, Al Smith, the progressive icon and governor of New York, ran not only as an Irish Catholic (the first viable candidate from that demographic to do so), but also as a self-taught politician without even an 8th grade education, a fact that did not bar him from qualifying for the Presidency. He and millions of Americans like him had no adolescence. Regardless of how much the modern media wants to run down Horatio Alger and the American Dream, Al Smith was Ragged Dick, and the cultural trope of bootstrapping helped contribute to the US becoming the powerhouse economy and culture that it has remained since the 19th century. Before World War II, even as child labor laws put down appropriate and moral limits on the workforce, if a child in the family had a job, it was usually in service of the family. Autobiographical works from the pre-war era from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, to Brighton Beach Memoirs, by Neil Simon, depict working “minors” who need to contribute their pay to the larger family. After the war, starting with paper routes and babysitting, children and adolescent incomes no longer went to the family, and summer jobs for the new American “teenager” might be used towards purchase or maintenance of a car. A car that might take said teen and friends to the movies and burgers and shopping and dances–money spent at each location. Money that is suddenly disposable income for a new kind of person.
Enter the 1980s, Madonna, and the growth of conspicuous consumption for an increasing number of Americans in an adolescence that started expanding into a young person’s 20s, and in the 1990s, into their 30s. What it all amounted to was a confluence of perverse incentives. Initially, the advertisers hired by industry slowly but surely identified the growing market of young people, and began pandering to them, filling the market with more and more products and content that were targeted at that demographic. Then, as advertising aligned with the entertainment products, those same advertisements started to help define the entertainments themselves. The invention of the PG-13 rating in 1984 enabled the new grey area of adolescence to have its own media milieu, and the fart-joke soon entered children’s and adolescent targeted films and television shows (Blazing Saddles, rated R, was a pioneer in that regard, but stands alone for over two decades as far as mainstream entertainments go).
By the late 1990s, the feedback loop of advertiser-entertainment-product-consumer had pushed the top-end age of adolescence past 30, and had helped to create a strange group of twenty-somethings who spend much of their time spending much of their surplus income on pleasures. In this cyclical way, the demographic first discovered, then pandered to, slowly expanded as older and older people were pulled into the allures of adolescent behavior, and now dominates culture as proved by poor Madonna, because youthfulness rules in all things (save politics, it seems, but that’s another essay). In this period the average age for marriage went from roughly 22 to 30, and first-time motherhood went from 22 to 27 (and rising).
In 2001, Frontline had a report called The Merchants of Cool, wherein Douglas Rushkoff follows the cutting edge world of adolescent marketing. In that still relevant (at least as much as Coldplay) report, Rushkoff describes two new archetypes that had appeared in recent years in media to target a newly debased form of adolescence: The Mook, and The Midriff. I’ve always been impressed by these terms, and as far as I can see, they are still with us. According to Rushkoff The Mook is: “Crude, loud, obnoxious, and in your face. . .arrested in adolescence,” listing as examples such cultural relics as Tom Green, Jackass, Howard Stern, and The Man Show.
Parenthetically, it’s been a matter of deep ironic humor watching Howard Stern and Jimmy Kimmel turn into Kamala Harris shills in the name of decency after debasing the culture for most of their careers–it was particularly delightful watching Kimmel the day after the election choke down tears on national television in the middle of a lecture to Trump voters about how it was a bad night “for you too, you just don’t realize it yet.” Now, he may be right, time will tell. It’s a hell of a toboggan ride and Trump is always steering awfully close to the cliff, but the grotesque display of condescension from Kimmel, the guy who became famous announcing “girls on trampolines” to accompany the credits of The Man Show, was almost too much to bear. I would suggest that Kimmel never express an opinion, right or wrong, ever again after that absurd display. There are worse clips of Kimmel from The Man Show era, but I decided not to include them, as they are still distasteful. I found that show barbaric when I was of the age to be the target demo (#notallmen).
Anyways. There is a direct line of Mooks from that era of the late nineties to the distorted pseudo-masculinity of Andrew Tate and his ilk of today, be they work-out bros and alt-right manosphere conspiracy theorists. Also, increasingly depraved pornographic entertainments are mostly driven by male consumers, as are the majority of the highest grossing video game offerings–most notably Grand Theft Auto V, a game that features plenty of violent Mook behavior. That game series, not coincidentally, perhaps, was born in the late 90s, around the time the Mook was born.
A similar function can be run on the girl’s side of youth consumer culture with the Midriff. Rushkoff says she is “prematurely adult. . .consumed by appearances. . .a new kind of female empowerment. . .[she says] ‘I am a sexual object, but I’m proud of it.’” Tragically, the Midriff was what replaced Punk Feminism in the mid 1990s. The Midriff aspired to the hyper-sexuality of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and slipped into a pretty little nothing she was almost wearing, strutting around with a belly-button ring and tramp-stamp. Ah, the 90s.
This kind of identity has also persisted, so much so that it was considered empowering for Beyoncé to writhe suggestively and mostly nude in front of a giant sign that said FEMINISM. It’s what allowed the Sex and the City women to enact consequence-free, suspiciously adolescent-male-like promiscuity for six seasons, two films, and a practically unwatchable denouement season of fifty-somethings acting like thirty-somethings acting like college undergrads. And then Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion, with their “song” WAP, gained praise and adulation from an American public with 25 years of acculturation to the idea that girls’ and women’s self-objectification was empowering. “You go, girl!”
And Parenthetically!?! Ms. Harris actually actively and enthusiastically pursued and accepted the endorsement of Ms. Thee Stallion? Are you kidding me? What the hell was wrong with the clowns running that campaign?
Anyways. . . The Mook and The Midriff are still with us, and I’d argue they have metastasized, spread, and overtaken much of the social identities of those we now consider adolescent–an age range that appears to encompass nearly two decades. The apotheosis of these archetypes’ ascendancy is the Whatever Podcast, where Midriff so-called sex-workers, mostly women aged 18-35 who make a living of some sort on Only Fans, meet, if not the kings, at least the lesser dukes of Mook-town, for vapid “conversations” about what else: sex and relationships–but mostly sex.
There are many other markers of the Mook and Midriff in society. The man-cave concept filled with sports-team logo-emblazoned paraphernalia is more reminiscent of a child’s behavior than a grown man’s. Toy collecting is almost entirely an adult pursuit. Cosplaying–or as it used to be called, “playing dress up”–is now considered a “profession,” that, as far as I can see, involves dressing like a slutty version of a superhero in a costume adorned with LED lights.
Perhaps the strangest phenomena of this change is how it aligned so elegantly with the apparent victories of Second Wave Feminism in increasing women in the workforce. This, too, is an old and not controversial assertion, but it’s worth mentioning that in the last 30 years women have increasingly engaged in mostly corporate professional careerism. Good or ill, this essay isn’t about the relative value of this trend, but that the trend is real is undeniable, as is the tradeoff of women choosing to have fewer children later in life, ostensibly to pursue careers. I contend, however, that it isn’t careerism at all that became the object, but lifestyle–an adolescent pursuit of sex, meals, and entertainments that teens find irresistible. The expansion of adolescence into the thirties for the sake of, of what, exactly?
I’m sure it has helped the economy to some extent. Hobbies have become big business: everything from rock climbing to boardgames to mountain biking to recreational therapy have become booming industries to serve the boredom of the late adolescent, wherein once adults were too busy with work and family to concern themselves with such things. The micro-brewery as a concept is entirely dependent on the moneyed 24-35 year-old demographic, making up over a third of Craft Beer consumers.
As noted in a previous essay, the persistence of low-birth rate, the lopsided nature of where childless people fall on the political divide, and the odd conservative future that may already be here begs the question, what’s your long term plan, progressives? The answer may be to drink the latest IPA while resting from a long bike-ride through the Green Mountains as my wife partner sets up Wingspan while I text my therapist. In that essay I argued that the new Anti-natalism movement was largely a progressive one, and that in place of a meaningful life building a family, and a future for that family, the empty lifestyle of the endless party was being sold in its place. How is that working out for Americans? Not so great. 30 years of extended adolescence and all of its attendant lifestyle consequences has resulted in record rates of mental illness, depression, psychoactive medications, and therapists, with no end in sight. It’s worse for women, and worse for progressive women, and worst of all for the single, progressive women entering their late thirties. Not that men are faring much better, though the worst of the Mooks thrive in such an environment. “Let me get this straight?” Mook asks. “As long as I am physically attractive, I get to have as many women as I want into my late 30s, most of whom are desperately trying to look like they are 18 years old, without commitment, and they will tell themselves that it's not only the lifestyle they are choosing, but also that it’s empowering? Hilarious! I’m in!”
Perhaps, you could argue, that this isn’t a causal relationship. When the entire culture shifts in its values regarding when someone becomes an adult, and how that someone should behave, I’d have to say it encompasses myriad enough causes to make the correlations sing with some concordance. However, it is a fairly obvious upheaval to go from a society that was far more happy, and expected young adults to act like adults by building families and futures, to move to a society that is increasingly miserable, but tells young adults that “adulting” is an optional activity, and that they should party all the time. This shift has had consequences, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone at all concerned about this.
There are many solutions to this cultural problem of extended adolescence, and not all of them involve having a family. Behavioral expectations in educational institutions, of men and women, of what it means to be a grownup, all are socially negotiated, and need not remain as they are. Holden Caulfield is instructive, if not for what he was, than for what he would be now. When reading Catcher in the Rye, I often have had the sad thought as I cringe at his immaturity: “Just grow up, already.” It’s a terrifying thought to realize that today our society wouldn’t encourage that message. In fact it might not want him to grow up at all, or at best send mixed signals. The eternal adolescent is living in a war zone that screams “hurry up and wait.” This collective arrested development first hit when some of my generation (that’s X, baby!) reached adulthood, but the millennials were the first young people to really have the lifestyle completely sold to them as normal. There are, apparently, growing pains. Will they be allowed to become adults at all, as a population? Can our economy afford to reverse the trend by encouraging young adults to act like adults, and stop wasting their surplus wealth on hedonistic frivolities? Will there be a regressive backlash to the anti-natalist progressive hedonism as the next generation reaches adulthood and looks with disdain on its immediate elders?
The treatment of one’s elders, just as the treatment of the prescriptions of the past, has long been in decline. To expect whatever generations that come next to reject what came before is the new norm. Since the boomers–the prototype generation of prolonged adolescence–declared that it was uncool to trust anyone under 30, we’ve been struggling through the upheaval of norms some call progress. Whether the progress was positive or negative is a subject of another essay, and perhaps the subject of study for the next 50 years for any thoughtful person. But, good or bad, right or wrong, the fall of norms has been celebrated as a good in and of itself, as if having norms at all was the problem. Here I will disagree; norms become a problem only when tyrannically imposed. When the cost the non-conforming individual bears is true legal or physical oppression, then the enforcement of norms becomes the problem, not the having of norms. Furthermore, its clear that once old norms are overthrown, they do not leave a norm-free environment where everyone is happily norm-free, they leave a vaccuum that is filled with new norms. Endless adolescence is the new norm.
So, I propose, instead of teaching young people that they should remain adolescents as long as possible, we rediscover some old truths that worked for most people in most times and places, and helped build the civilization that I believe is a net positive for humanity. Take responsibility for yourself, be beholden to yourself, then look for someone else to serve. Put others you love ahead of yourself; first a spouse, then children, then parents, friends, town, state, then, maybe, your country. Move outward from yourself in service to those closest first. Do not confuse and conflate your political opinions with morality; your selfishness with “self-care;” your commerce for virtue; gentle parenting for parenting; your flame-war for activism; your solipsism and narcissism for self-fulfilment; your political and identity labels as community. Your community is right in front of you when the laptop closes, when the phone returns to the pocket, when the TV turns off, and the radio in the car goes static. Adults knew this for many years–but they weren’t distracted by all those things the way we are. For us it will be harder. But adults accept challenges like that, and move on. This is how adults used to behave, and still do if you observe them. Our children need us to show them this way, because these new norms are not doing anyone any good at all–that way madness lies, as we have daily proof in our mad times. Our children need to grow up for their own wellbeing, and it is our responsibility to make sure they do.