The spirit of adolescence bleeds into a lot of topics, but we're going to start first at a 13-year-old's birthday almost a century ago. From a family of farmers, Albert's birthday brought him a new life in the city, where both he and his father were about to begin work on a construction site. But just as Albert arrives, so do new laws in his area, mandating that he remains in school until his late teens.
So on his 14th year of life, instead of a wage, Albert gets an allowance. And when the school year begins, he looks around his classroom of working age kids. And not him, not even the teacher quite grasps where all this is heading.
Because Albert and his classmates sit at the forefront of an entirely new rupture in culture. A term for this stage wouldn't even emerge until decades later. Teenagers.
It's a real life risky business. A teenager holds an alcohol fueled party for hundreds of Youth crime again in the spotlight. Turns to 17year-olds now make up 13% of all criminals.
Please mean to be Ryan. It means to be [ __ ] me, [ __ ] Do whatever the [ __ ] you want all day until you die, [ __ ] I don't give a [ __ ] What is worth more, art or life? Is it worth more than food?
Take your take off your glasses and apologize to us. I'll say sorry, but I'm not taking off my glasses. Now, teenagers of course always existed.
The puberty was always a thing. Even Shakespeare made references to the stormy nature of the youth. But it was really the industrial revolution that crystallized the stage of life before society's eyes.
A live stage during which a cohort of same-aged peers are gathered daily in an institutional setting like a school over the course of a key developmental period. This became a formula for adolescence and one you ought to remember for later. A global experiment was soon underway with psychologists and sociologists swarming in to understand the phenomena.
This is where adolescence became synonymous with the storm and stress. A time marked by mood swings, risktaking, and conflict. In the late 1930s, the word teenager began to appear in the cultural lexicon.
A network of fluid brains with disposable income that was founded in the schoolyard had spilled over into the streets. And of course, who was there to pick up the fluid brains and disposable income? Your boy capitalism, the machine that directs attention, fixed its gaze.
By the 1940s, marketers had fully coined and capitalized on the term hawking lipstick, records, and cars to what had already become a multi-billion dollar right of passage market. A profound cultural twist was brewing both in film and more notably in literature, featuring who a few regard as the first prototypical teenager, Holden Corfield. After getting expelled from his fancy school, Holden wanders the streets of New York, trying to make sense of a world that keeps pushing him towards adulthood.
But before leaving Pensy Prep, his school, he reaches out to an old history teacher he likes. But he finds himself wrapped up in a lecture about buckling down and planning for college. Later, he seeks solace in the company of his former English teacher, who also urges Holden to apply himself and maybe even look into works of literature.
Holden feels that all this advice and direction only really serves the people giving it. Like if I do what they say just justifies the decisions they've already made. Building an idea for Holden that even the kindest of adults have agendas.
Now these interactions set the theme for the rest of the book. Every attempt at a connection Holden makes with teachers, dates, strangers all crumble under the weight of their greater plans for how he should orient himself. He goes on a date with a girl at a skating rink, but can't escape slipping into conversations about careers and his capacity as a wage earner and husband.
Later, a heartfelt conversation with a few nuns he meets keeps him slipping into worry because as a non-atholic, perhaps he is somehow offending them. Society's obsession with becoming, social labels, and expectations all corrupt Holden's desire for genuine connection, which makes everyone else seem so fake. Now, a lot of the adults in The Catcher in the Rye were from the silent generation, growing up during difficult times like the Great Depression and World War II.
They reached adulthood when the dust began to settle. And whilst still facing wars to come, they actually maintained the best mental health into adulthood compared to any generation before or after. They married and had kids in their very early 20s, younger than any other generation.
Their mental health, even the ones alive during CO, was seen as the most resilient. These were a generation that grew up quick, and that was especially distasteful for Holden, who spends 3 days rogue in New York, drinking, smoking, all in an odyssey to find meaning. Becoming a husband, father, and an employee, all at age 22.
You see, what Holden preferred to do was a bit different. He longed to sit all day watching kids run and play along in a field of rye. And every time one of them would fall over the edge off the cliff, he would be there to catch them.
Holden wanted to be the ultimate Peter Pan, which I think is a good comparison made by our boy JP in catching the kids at their most potential and saving them from the freef fall to come that will land them all in the certainty off the ground, the fast approaching becoming of adulthood. Now, for the young boomers seeing this on their high school reading list in the '60s, there was something attractive about Holden's thinking towards the world. Why are we barreling towards becoming in a world we had no choice in making?
Now, this way of thinking helped orient greater society towards the birth of the trademark classic teenage move, the counterculture movements, protests, civil rights marches, women's rights, LGBT activism, Woodstock 69, boomers showed up in bulk. philosophy that expanded your mind beyond traditional values and chemicals and compounds that made doing so a whole lot easier. Youth transformed into a political identity.
Don't trust anyone over 30 wasn't a joke. It was philosophy. A philosophy without much foresight, though, because the oldest boomers will soon be 80.
And that makes this era the first time in history where all living generations have shared the same cultural phase of life, teenagehood. Now, of course, boomers weren't the first to go through puberty and teen angst, but they were the first to grow up in a world where being a teenager was a recognized social identity. A time to grapple with becoming and whatever the hell that actually means.
Backed by dedicated schooling, youth targeted media, allowances instead of wages, music, fashion, slang, and eventually mean girls. And now, because every generation after could point back to their own turbulent teen years, societies began standardizing milestones. The driver's licenses, proms, the phone, and now the social media account, reinforcing adolescence as a global expectation.
And so, the first generation to publicly rage against becoming adults did eventually become adults. Suck. They grew up, got jobs, bought homes at [ __ ] attractive prices.
Some went from marching in the street to trading on the street. Others went from psychedelic anti-establishment hype to becoming CEOs of multinational corporations. But like all things in nature, counterculture eventually evolves, dissolves or gets subsumed into culture, thereby creating a void, one that calls for a new systems of thought to correct and counter the old.
So while the boomers rallied to take over the institutions, Gen X were a little more skeptical of institutions themselves. They saw that like nature, the economy was always prone to storm. Living through the worst one since the Great Depression, they learned that political institutions can't always be trusted.
Media was often sensationalized and even marriage as an institution began its ongoing crumble. For a young Gen X, becoming had an aura of betrayal. So they refined apathy and irony and brewed those into grunge music, MTV, Rat Tale, and The Simpsons.
A show which at its core became the first prime time series to openly mock the institutions upholding the Western American dream. Gen X pioneered doing things yourself, startup culture, and carved out identity in a new emerging institution, the internet. At this point, it's interesting to note that as the pendulum swings between culture and counterculture, the sentiments of each new generation seem, oddly enough, to be influenced by the ones two generations before.
And it makes sense. Boomers largely raised millennials and Gen X's are largely parenting Gen Z's. So, the boomer optimism, the belief that you could bend the world to your will, perhaps passed down to young millennials because this is where we saw a real hike in individualism.
Phrases like you are special, you're a go-getter, and you should go and get were common for millennials who were raised under the banner of hard work securing prosperity. And hard work they did. Millennials achieved higher education rates, higher median incomes, and fewer of them were below the poverty line compared to earlier generations.
But many reaching adulthood felt a lost piece of that promise. Because whilst non-essentials were getting cheaper, essentials like housing, child care, and leisure were ballooning. With both partners' income now required to just sustain a household, millennials found that while they had been promised the ability to have time, a career, and a family, they were often forced to pick just two.
Now, this is very relevant to the backdrop Gen Z's are becoming adolescence in. Like Gen X's, many Gen Z's also experienced existential threat, a recession, and a tech burst. The older Gen Z's were taught early in primary school about the oncoming climate catastrophe and grew up around anxious parents and job losses during the financial crash.
Not to mention something else beginning to shift around 2008 with its full implications becoming clearer by 2012, right when the first wave of Gen Z were hitting adolescence. Remember our formula from the start of the video? Well, a new institution had begun to throw its full weight.
Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat untethered social media from the family computer into becoming extensions of the self. For the first time, an entirely new institution began to shape youth over their developmental years. And unlike family, religion, school, or government, this institution had its own ideas of what was valuable.
And in hindsight, it becomes obvious. The data is also quite clear that around 2012 was when we started seeing a dramatic unequivocal spike in adolescent anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues. For Gen Z, it wasn't just about puberty or rebellion anymore.
It was the collision of mixed messages about value, a crumbling trust in institutions and economic prospects that couldn't guarantee their fundamental needs. Meaning gets man through, writes Victor Frankle. But in a world drowning in information, meaning became diluted.
There was no clear guide in where to find it. It was proven one day in one corner of one institution than disproven the next in another corner. Nile began to bloom at rates higher than any prior generation.
The angst for Gen Z was concerned more with scrambling for belief structures that may perhaps lead them through to securing the more fundamental aspects of their needs hierarchy like safety and belonging for their future. Where are they to look to find the certainty they so desire? With no god and no clear economic narrative to secure these needs, the angst of becoming for the current adolescence going into Gen Alpha is the angst surrounding the often subconscious search for what to believe.
People see rock and roll as as youth culture. And when youth culture becomes monopolized by big business, what are the youth to do? Do you do you have any idea?
I think we should destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture by mass marketing and commercial paranoia behavior control. And the first step to do is to destroy the record companies. Do you not agree?
Up until now, it seems every generation of adolescence inherits this double bind. Admire the adults and institutions that can guide you while distrusting the ones that feel corrupted. Gen Alpha barely remembers a time before co.
Their early years were steeped in screens, iPads, Zoom, FaceTime. So they step into adolescence a little differently with the oldest now around Holden's age at 16. And whilst this happens, the institution of social media also matures, becoming a more curated and personalized experience, sorting the feed into a marketplace of thought with leaders clased into different corners.
Place your thumb on the oracle and it will read into your soul. For a young alpha or Z, it can sense and answer a question before they even know how to phrase it themselves. And because it's built to keep you there, it serves a comforting digestible truth, a breadcrumb trail that pulls you forward.
For Holden, phoniness was a teacher with an agenda when all he wanted was just to be heard out. Today, the system does something subtler. It explains you back to yourself, often better than you could.
And with the sense of being listened to, you become the one doing the listening. And whilst what's in front of them feels all the more obvious, the desire for alternative viewpoints simultaneously shrinks. Hypnotized by the hum of the oracle, they're groomed towards subscribing to a preloaded way of seeing, ready assembled by a crowd that they may never meet that's splintered across the cloud.
This pattern of behavior is reflected in the work of philosopher Simone Whale, who wrote about what she termed the uprooted state. Simone observed that people often tend to be quite willing to trade in their autonomy to think in exchange for the thoughts of the collective which satisfies within them a more fundamental desire to belong. So in this way the childlike wonder of an adolescent becomes currency at its purest form for a growing arm of capitalism that's racing to solidify a fixed landscape of thought.
Perhaps this is why we feel as though Gen Z is so internally divided in their camps of belief compared to other generations before. There is just too many ways to package an idea. Holden Corfield may be rolling in his grave.
Because honestly, all Holden ever wanted was someone to just hear him out. And he screams on behalf of every kid who still needs the same. The teenage brain is built to push radical ideas around like clothes in a change room.
And that malleability in thinking is exactly what makes teens best adaptable to securing their feet in their 20s and 30s. The Oracle, however, slick enough to fool an adult, can make any young person feel they've cracked it all far too soon. The more certainty they pour into that comforting worldview, the harder the rug gets yanked from under their feet later, as the real world with real dilemas, people, groups drawn in all shades of gray passes them through.
And it's not just the alluring sense of certainty from these algorithms that trips them up. It's also the reaction from outsiders. When your half-formed idea meets any strong judgment, it's quite common for you to back yourself even harder.
Winnott and Votssky would argue that teens instead need a space to safely risk being wrong. A holding environment, as Winnott would say, scaffolded just enough to keep growth within reach. This is where ideas remain drafts and not verdicts.
Without this place, teens will search elsewhere, more likely slipping off the Ryfield altogether and into the arms of the oracle that awaits them. Catch yourself, says Holden, who might also agree that the strongest antidote to the angst of what to believe, especially for adolescence swimming through today's information age, is to catch and guard their childlike curiosity. Just as the capitalist system insists that you sort out your employment destination, the algorithm of belief is equally eager to sort you into an ideological box.
But as Lavos Zizek puts it, real freedom in these systems begins the moment you realize that you have the liberty to prefer not to decide so soon. Simone Whale approaches the same idea from another angle. People who feel uprooted in meaning often grab at the nearest ready-made collective.
But a person rooted in themselves can pause, look around, and choose where to grow next. Intrinsic value and worth should be inherent to being human, not attached to wherever your beliefs or employment lands you. And history shows us clearly that assigning value to a person based on their masks is a deadly game that rarely ends well.
As much as adults love introducing themselves by their job title or belief structures, the self and its work is inherently separate from both. You have the freedom to visit but not be fully absorbed by any one camp. Free to consider every magnetic pull, every seductive answer, every ideological rabbit hole, and calmly say, "Thank you.
That was an interesting perspective, and I'd prefer to keep looking. " The idea that there's always one correct answer is something that we model to kids in primary school, but it really should stay there. You know, if every time someone asks you a question, you try to say the right answer, your entire life is a test.
You can choose not to hold a rigid opinion on something that doesn't warrant one. Because when a moment does come, when you do need to decide, you'll be more attentive to the shades of gray within the cracks of the data alive in front of you, rather than relying on some preloaded, decontextualized schematic inherited from elsewhere. Towards the end of the book, Holden looks down lovingly at his younger sister, a ball of potential, the only one in the story who accepts him exactly as he stands in front of her.
She too will one day need to trade in this lens. Holton stands for the quiet collective wish to protect our childhood potential. The sire every teenager lets out as they peer over the cliff and realize that much like the electron, they too must sacrifice all those parallel timelines of potentiality for a single concrete path forward.
It hurts to give up everything you could have been before you've even figured out who you are. What am I supposed to become in a world I can't predict 6 months from now? And what if I become the wrong thing?
I remember similar thoughts standing in a hotel room after a night of getting marinated, staring out at the skyline of office buildings, thinking that's soon to be my destination. I wasn't quite sure about falling over just yet, becoming something before I even knew who I was. I could have done with a catcher in this concrete rye or a Peter Pan or maybe another shot.
Kids see adulthood as a destination because we all talk about it like some finish line or a place to arrive. But honestly, does any adult ever feel like they've arrived? That feeling quickly slips away.
Even those in the steadiest professions have to deal with the ground constantly shifting under them and the same old question of where to next. And when elderly adults look back on their lives, gerontology researcher Dan McAdams finds they often structure their experiences into distinct chapters or phases rather than as one straight narrative arc like I was first this then I became that. So when the panic finally settles and you look back over the decades, perhaps Victor Frankle gets closest to the mark when he says, "What we're really becoming here is simply more responsible.
" responsible for finding meaning wherever we are placed. Responsibility is like the only reliable metric that widens with age out in the world and inside our heads where the prefrontal cortex continues wiring deep into our 20s. To be certain about what to believe or become is an unnecessary burden on any tiny plastic brain, especially when life always has the upper hand in where you end up.
What actually carries you forward then is attention to what's real right in front of you and what needs it the most. Simone Whale calls this attention the rarest and purest form of generosity and treats it as a moral act rooted in your commitment to the faces around you, not distant ideas or big picture labels. I really recommend you check her out.
The more of this attention you invest, the more the world opens up to you. The angst around careers, phases, passions, people, beliefs, and jobs all become costumes you wear as the world nudges you onward. So, the only reliable basket for your eggs surround that of responsibility for the organ that shapes your reality, for the body that moves you through it, for loving your friends, your family, and eventually your community.
And simply showing up wherever you are needed. Everything else from people to cities is mostly circumstance. attention rather than controlling the ship you're on helps it steady.
A steady ship can sample every port without the rush to dock anywhere too soon. And when the vessel finally sinks, as every ship does, you'll realize there was never really a cliff to tumble over. Only an ever widening sea of responsibility.
And with nowhere to arrive, eventually you merge with the water and continue in the entropy of becoming.
