When a young adult is thrust into the real world, the transition can be hard and the milestones that need to be accomplished, can be incredibly stressful. In Robin Henig’s article, What Is It About 20-Somethings’s, she brings up all the things that young adults are expected to accomplish like, “finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire.” But not before they continue to pass this awful “script” down to their own children. There have been stories and tales told to those about to enter the real world about how hard it is to meet all the expectations that are put in front of them and that it seems like everyone only cares about living their life in the footsteps of everyone before. These expectations seemed to be forced on all 20-something’s because they have been thrown into a category with steps and rules that they should follow. If they do not happen to accomplish what is put in front of them, then they are judged, questioned, and shamed. So why does the idea that putting them into a new category or life stage, seem to be the best option. The group that they were already put in is causing them stress and shame in the first place, so why give them more by making new rules and steps they must accomplish? What happened to humans at this age should be adventuring and enjoying their life? They should be able to travel and experience everything that the world is offering them. There should be a sort of trial period where these young adults have the opportunity to try different things to find out what they are passionate about and what interests them the most. By adding the new life stage, “emerging adulthood,” you are giving them this ability but putting a time limit on it. This adds more social pressures, because 20-year-olds do not already have enough, that they have to deal with pushing them to hit all the milestones quickly after adventuring. This gives them no time to figure out the adult world and how they can fit into it. Is this the best way to help young adults become adults?

Emerging adulthood is a self-explanatory term. It’s that time in a young adult’s life when they must start thinking about becoming more responsible and taking a role in the real adult world. 20-something are urged to go live their lives before they are forced into being a cookie cutter version of an adult. There are so many options and things that everyone can and should try out, but they are not getting enough time to do so. Some people move at a slower rate than others, while some move at a much faster rate. As Henig also states, “Kids don’t shuffle along in unison on the road to maturity. They slouch toward adulthood at an uneven, highly individual pace.” The entire reason behind a life stage is have boundaries and rules for that specific age group to follow, so when it is time to move on to the next stage, they are ready. This forces these impressionable young adults to entirely skip the adventuring and learning that they should be doing in exchange for something that has no interest for them and makes life meaningless. Why are we trying to force all sorts of different people into one group, when the only thing they have in common is their age?

It seems like a good idea to label this time as a period when someone can adventure and learn about themselves. But instead, it is secluding a group of people who have the opportunity to go adventure and find themselves, from the people who do not have the ability to go do so. They might not have the money or time to go to college and travel. Instead, they are forced to grow up and start being an adult early. There are a few in these situations that have just enough to push through and succeed like Nicole from Henig’s article. She managed to pull through all the hardships in her life but, “Nicole’s case is not a representation of society of a whole.” Just because there happened to be one success story from people with less options as everyone else, does not mean that is valid for everyone. This new life stage would completely exile them and would only count the people in developed countries. Not only this, but it forces the people who can experience this, to do so in a shorter amount of time. Instead of being able to take as long as needed to find yourself, you have a certain time frame in which you can adventure. So why add this new life stage when it is doing more harm then good? It will only include a portion of the 20-something population and it limits their time before they are forced into the real world.

Becoming an adult is already a stressful process as it is. It is that scary time when the comforts of high school and completely relying on parents or guardians, is no longer an option. Decisions about direction and future need to be made by the 20-something and they cannot just ask their parents to help them make their decisions for them. They are their own legal guardian at this point and they must start making their own choices too. No longer is it the time to make Mom call and schedule a doctor’s appointment or to advise them what things they need to buy when going grocery shopping. Responsibilities and expectations start to hit at this point. Look at the psychiatric patients that Henig mentions going to Yellowbrook. When it comes time for these people to move out and be their own person, “The demands of imminent independence can worsen mental-health problems or can create new ones for people who have managed up to that point to perform all expected roles, but get lost when schooling ends and expected roles disappear.” If these are the drastic results for when independence and adulthood is shoved on to these people, then what are the problems “normal” people are dealing with? There has to be some emotion and mental trouble caused by this in everyone who isn’t ready to deal with these responsibilities. Yet we are ignoring this and trying to force more stress on these young adults.

If a higher education is the direction that a young adult wants to go for, then it is now time to find out how to pay for and get into college/university. Even if there were no plans to go to college, it is something highly suggested that everyone does. Then once that is done, a job is required, even if its meaningless and its something that has no enjoyment or fulfillment. Everything must be done in order, once you get a “good” job, find someone to marry, then have children. In his TEDx talk, Adults, We Need to Have a Talk, Thomas King talks about common milestones, “which are based on the 20th century.” Not the current generation, or even the one before, but from way long before. This is when half the technology and advancements that we currently have now, did not even exist in the inventor’s mind. There are so many new advancements happening every day and yet, they are not considered when it comes time for these young adults to advance into the adult world. Learning things becomes easier because there are more sources for learning, research, and practice. It is no longer required to sit in a classroom to learn a specific topic. Now it can be done online and through different computer programs. A lot of jobs have different requirements that are not necessarily surrounded by academics but more so around extracurricular activities. With such a huge push toward a fantastic education, the opportunity to do some of these other activities is a lot less and can hurt a person in the end. There is also the fact that in a few years, a lot of the jobs that existed and seemed to be doing well, may no longer be there to go towards. So why is it that we are asking children, when they are young and naïve, what they plan to do in the future? Its not even promised that the jobs they might choose will be there when they get to that point when they must make the final decision. So why are all these steps and milestones being forced upon these new adults? The 20-something’s are allowed only a certain amount of time to find themselves before this seemingly inevitable doom is pushed onto them. Instead of just putting 20-year old’s into a new category with new narratives they have to follow, why not just take away titles and allow these newly “free” people find themselves?

People in their 20s are constantly told that they should do as much as they can and experience as much as they can find, but at the same time, they are constantly questioned about their future and their goals. How are young adults supposed to find themselves when they are constantly being pushed into the single file line leading to boring adulthood where they will never get any enjoyment in life? When there is so much pressure to succeed and to know exactly where you need to go in life, its hard to enjoy yourself and to adventure as your own person. This is supposed to be when a person is able to learn how to make their own decisions and to reach out to figure out what they like and what they might want to do with their life. By traveling, they are able to see what is out there that their own home might not provide. By taking classes that they find interesting or want to see if they have an interest in, there is the possibility of it leading to something amazing. By allowing people of this age group to find themselves on their own, without requiring them to hit certain steps along the way that might impede their process, they are given the opportunity to shape the future and where the world might be heading. Instead of just filling jobs that needs to be filled because everyone in that field got promoted, they can find better and more meaningful jobs that might not have existed before they found them. This opens all new opportunities for everyone and encourages more 20-something’s to try to accomplish their own future too. None of this is possible is young adults are too busy scrambling to find a place in society. They are more focused on fitting the perfect mold that everyone else has met, instead of breaking outside of that and molding themselves. While they are trying to find jobs and start families, they should be learning about different cultures and the amazing background of astrology. There are people out there who want to accomplish these milestones in their 20’s, and that is entirely up to them. But to force the whole population of young adults into a new category which is just limiting their abilities to do what they should be doing, is counterproductive.

Stop with putting people in to categories and life stages, just allow them to progress at their own rate and figure out who they are. When you try to force a label on someone, you are giving them an image that they are most likely going to try to change themselves to fit. By making “emerging adulthood” a real-life stage, the same thing is happening. Young adults are incredibly impressionable and unsure of what they are actually doing, at least that is true for me. By giving this time to find themselves, and then immediately throwing them into the adult world, this whole process becomes so much more stressful and complicated. The transition is much harder and sometimes goes wrong. This age area should be just a free time for the young adults to find themselves and to figure out, with some help, how to ease themselves into being an adult. That is the point of growing up, right?

It is time that expectations of what a young adult needs to do, go away. All the rules and structure that is expected to be followed is doing much more harm than good. It is a hundred-year-old narrative that was put out for a baseline of what 20-something’s should accomplish. But instead of it ending when times and society started to change, it just seems to get forced harder on the population and used to judge people. It is a list of milestones that came from a time when women were thought to be dumb and only useful for having children. Men were intelligent but the only thing that they should be focusing on is getting a job and subconsciously competing with everyone around him. That is not at all how times are now. Everything has changed, depending on the opinion, for the better. Now women are valuable in the work force and people are encouraged to college and learn as much as they can, but there is still that voice inside telling them to get a job, get married, have a family, and then retire. That is because each generation before the new young adults, force this thought process down on them. The reason is because it was forced on the older ones, when they were in their 20’s. It seems to be a never-ending cycle that just harms more people than it helps. By adding a new group, which is updated with more current times, there is still going to be some sort of structure that “emerging adults” will have to deal with. When these adults have passed through “emerging adulthood” and get a good job, adventure a little, finally get married, and have kids, then they are going to pass down the narrative that they had to experience, because they do not understand what their children will be living through. It is going to be a never-ending cycle unless we just stop it now. There should be no categories, no milestones, no steps, or life stages. The end goal should be that, looking back, there is nothing that was missed or unaccomplished, because there was a force pushing everyone to hurry up and to hit goals that were no longer relevant.