When Do We Become Adults, Really?
In February, a pop-up science column, Annals of Inquiry, is appearing in place of Kyle Chayka’s column, Infinite Scroll. Chayka will return in March.
After my wedding, this past October, people started asking me: Do you feel different? Does life feel different? I hadn’t considered marriage the start of a new life stage, so I wasn’t sure how to respond. My husband and I had been dating seriously since soon after we met, and we already lived together. We got married, honestly, because it seemed romantic. But these questions made it sound like I had signed up for a transformation. Had I entered a new chapter without even realizing it?
People have a habit of dividing life into segments. The psychologist Jean Piaget argued that children go through four stages of cognitive development. Biologists describe turning points in the aging process as though they’re cliffs from which we’re doomed to fall; at roughly forty-four and sixty years of age, for example, distinct waves of molecular changes seem to increase our risk of many diseases. “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life,” a 1976 best-seller by Gail Sheehy, warned of restlessness and infidelity among women starting at age thirty-five—incidentally, the age when I married. Last summer, I woke up to the good news that, according to economists, the midlife crisis is vanishing. Oh, wait: apparently young people are now unhappy enough that entering middle age seems rosy by comparison.
In my so-called married life, people close to me have grappled with what it means to get older. When my sister turned twenty-five, she felt increasing pressure to settle on a career, and she jokingly repeated a dubious bit of pop science: that her frontal lobe had finally finished developing. A friend turned forty, dumped his girlfriend of six years, and told me, with tears in his eyes, “It sounds stupid, but I never thought I would get old.” I was thinking a lot about where we all stood, so I consulted “Everybody Rides the Carousel,” a carnivalesque 1976 animated film inspired by the twentieth-century psychologist Erik Erikson. (Apparently, the seventies were a turning point in the study of turning points.)
Erikson, who was influenced by Freud, conceptualized eight life stages as tugs of war between opposing forces. Infants are torn between trust and mistrust, preschoolers between initiative and guilt. To capture stage six—young adulthood, i.e. one’s twenties and thirties—the film showed a cartoon man and woman metaphorically struggling with intimacy and isolation. They spoke to each other while wearing masks; they danced while swapping body parts. Stage seven, adulthood, spans roughly forty to one’s mid-sixties, and pits generativity—making long-lasting social contributions through art, children, or work—against stagnation. Age-wise, I was somewhere in stage six, and parts of it felt relatable. But none of these stages felt like a perfect fit.
As humans, we want our lives to be like building blocks that make sense when put together, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a research scholar at Clark University, told me. In 2000, Arnett coined a new life stage—emerging adulthood—to reflect life-style changes he had observed in people between eighteen and twenty-nine. He told me that another stage was proposed even more recently, in 2020: established adulthood. It is said to fall between thirty and forty-five, so I was smack in the middle of it. I wondered whether this stage would suit me better—and whether I needed one at all. Does it matter how we carve up a life?
Life stages are loosely based on undeniable transitions, for example, from childhood to puberty, and from puberty to adulthood. But the variation in nature has a way of defying categories. Last summer, in Glasgow, I saw a performance of “Caledonia” by the Changed Voices choir, a group of adolescents who had aged out of the youth chorus of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. They were all teen-agers going through puberty, but were they really in the same life stage? Some of the singers still looked like baby-faced boys, whereas others were tall, with facial hair and defined jawlines.
The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates divided the lives of men into only four stages, a number that mirrored the four humors and the four elements. Solon, an Athenian statesman and philosopher, believed there were seven, most of which lasted seven years each, in keeping with the number of known planetary bodies in the solar system. (Adulthood, which started at forty-two, comprised fourteen years.) Arnett’s research also considers the life stages of Hindu men, which have historically been characterized by a shift in one’s roles, rather than by one’s age. The second stage begins when a man takes on household responsibilities in marriage, and the third—vanaprastha, which means “forest dweller”—begins when a man’s first grandson is born. “The ideal for this stage is to leave the bustle and distractions of daily life and enter the quiet and contemplation of the forest, at least in a spiritual sense,” Arnett wrote in 2017. In the Talmud, however, life after age twenty is carved up into decade-long intervals. Arnett, who is now in his sixties, told me that he’s drawn to the Talmudic view that a “special strength” emerges around eighty. This is more appealing than Solon’s model, which says that from sixty-three to seventy, a man will “depart on the ebb tide of death.”
Life stages became more standardized in the late nineteenth century, as mandatory schooling spread, and legal thresholds of adulthood were set in the twentieth century. In 1971, the Twenty-sixth Amendment instituted eighteen as the voting age in America, and, in 1989, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child promised protections for people under eighteen. Meanwhile, retirement ages and pensions set parameters for the beginning of old age. Arnett developed the category of “emerging adult” after many twentysomethings told him, in the nineteen-nineties, that they didn’t identify as adults—they felt “off time,” he told me. Arnett thought that age-based life stages seemed increasingly outdated, given that people were, on average, getting married later, leaving school later, finding jobs later. The novel stage of emerging adulthood reflected modern life. “Some people, when I proposed it, said, ‘You can’t just invent a new life stage,’ ” Arnett said. “There was this assumption that they’re universal and they’re fixed. I didn’t see them that way.”
Neither does Clare Mehta, a psychologist at Emmanuel College who works with Arnett, and who came up with the term established adulthood. Mehta argued that psychologists had neglected this busy period when they had consolidated adulthood into a monolith. She saw people between thirty and forty-five trying to balance careers, marriages, and children for the first time. Established adults hadn’t yet reached the apex of their careers; some had young children at home, and, for most in this life stage, neither major health issues nor menopause had typically set in.
Mehta’s research, which is ongoing, includes interviews with people my age. During a two-hour Zoom call, she asked about my life. I didn’t want to define my stage in terms of discrete events such as buying property or exchanging vows, although I had recently done both of those things; after all, I could imagine doing those same activities in my twenties, just in a very chaotic and non-adult sort of way. Other ways I’ve grown seemed more important. These days, I better understand and manage my emotions. My interactions with other people seem less mysterious to me; I’m more patient and empathetic. In my family, I’ve adopted a more live-and-let-live attitude. I’m proud of progress in my career, even if I am far from settled.
It turns out that other established adults feel the same way. In 2024, Megan Wright, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of York, worked with several colleagues to assess how more than seventeen thousand people defined adulthood. Across a variety of ages and countries of origin, only a quarter cited marriage and having children. A similar fraction mentioned turning eighteen. But a majority of people said that taking responsibility for their actions, paying for living expenses, and having stable careers made them feel grownup. In another study of roughly seven hundred U.K. residents, most participants defined adulthood with psychological milestones, such as “accepting responsibility for the consequences of my actions.”
Historically, life stages have been aspirational—they’ve been defined by societal expectations—which also made them limiting. “There’s just something about them that’s too set in stone,” Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern who directs the Study of Lives Research Group, told me. “They’re élitist. They’re too prescriptive. Modern and postmodern life is too variegated. People follow so many different paths now.” What if you don’t want to get married and have children? What if you can’t afford to buy property? What if you aren’t a man?
In some ways, Arnett and Mehta’s newer stages of life are more reflective of these realities. Mehta said that one feature of established adulthood is deliberation over whether to have children; there are many good reasons that the answer might be no, including economics, preference, fertility challenges, and the demands of a person’s career. But it’s still easy to chafe against these categories. When Mehta’s husband was in his mid-forties, she asked him if he felt like an adult. No, he said, even though he owned a house and two cars and had started a company. Why not? “He said that he’d played pinball for eight hours the day before,” Mehta recalled. “Do adults play pinball?”
I related to the idea of established adults more than any other life stage. Even so, the divisions seemed arbitrary and subjective. I was surprised to find that Mehta and Arnett agreed; they know that stages don’t apply to every person. McAdams prefers to think of life as a story that we tell ourselves, with a protagonist, a plot, and a cast of characters.
When historians divide up the past to tell a story of what has happened, they call the process periodization. Intentionally focussing on different dates, trends, or milestones can help us see history in a new way. Ada Palmer, a scholar of early modern European history at the University of Chicago, remembered watching a documentary in which Eugen Weber, a pipe-smoking historian of Western civilization, referred to the First and Second World Wars as the “second Thirty Years’ War.” (The Thirty Years’ War, which killed millions of people in the seventeenth century, was not a single continuous conflict, but a period of European civil war interspersed with truces and shifting alliances.) Another historian, Eric Hobsbawm, popularized the idea of the “long nineteenth century,” which began with the French Revolution and ended with the outbreak of the First World War.
Palmer has played with periodization by writing science-fiction novels set in the twenty-fifth century. Characters look back at the “exponential age,” an era that started with the Black Death and lasted until a Third World War. In history, as in a person’s life, concrete events do take place: the Roman Empire fell in 476 A.D. and the French Revolution began in 1789. “Everyone agrees, a major change happened,” Palmer told me. “There’s a clear basis for drawing the line there.” But other transitions are fuzzier. When exactly did the medieval period give way to the Renaissance? When exactly is emerging adulthood overtaken by established adulthood?
“Our traditional lines are political and military ones,” Palmer said. “They are the beginning or end of a dynasty, the rise or fall of an empire.” But one of the reasons that history is fascinating is that we can reconsider it from so many points of view. Novel divisions reveal hidden factors, such as technological and demographic shifts that precede major milestones. The Haber-Bosch process, which enabled the mass production of both fertilizer and explosives, was invented in 1909, five years before war shattered Europe. Palmer asked me which was more important: the political transition from the Plantagenets to the Tudors in England, in the fifteenth century, or the agricultural transition from the stick plow to the moldboard plow, hundreds of years earlier? The Tudors strengthened the English monarchy, but the plow helped England’s population triple, making the country dramatically more populous and prosperous.
I’m no historian of Europe, but I liked the thought experiment of redefining the beginnings and endings in my life. On a rainy evening last week, my husband and I went to a local bar and talked about when our current stage actually began: when we met? When we started dating? When we got engaged? He quickly complicated the issue by bringing up a day in Toronto, in 2023, when we were both reading and he fell asleep with his head in my lap. “I’d never done that before,” he told me. “There was deep trust.” Later that year, we took a tilemaking class on Catalina Island, in California, and he said that he liked feeling as if he was on a honeymoon. I asked him what makes him feel married now. He thought for a while and said, “My art and your art hanging together on the walls.” Also: having moved our furniture around together. The fact that I do the cooking and he does our laundry.
I was thinking about “The End of Vandalism,” a novel we both love in which a character is “pearled”—or “engaged to be engaged”—to her boyfriend. In the summer of 2024, while visiting my grandmother in China, my husband gave me a pearl ring and asked if we could be pearled. We laughed at the niche reference, but his gesture carried deep meaning for me. The regime hadn’t changed yet. We wouldn’t get married for another year. But I understood that a new chapter had begun. ♦