Ten years ago, Robin Marantz Henig published an article in The New York Times Magazine whose opening header read, “Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up?” The question referred to those who had entered adulthood in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and failed to meet the societal milestones of a generation prior. In 2010, the question echoed the vocal concerns of a nation of worried parents inasmuch as it commented on and empathized with the realities of a new cohort of emerging adults—informally called the boomerang generation.
While this moniker may have fallen out of fashion in the decade since Marantz Henig’s article (and with it, its implicit air of contempt), the harsh realities of adulthood that plague millennials and older Gen Zers have nevertheless persisted. In Canada, fewer young people are getting married than baby boomers did in the 1980s, with Quebec’s rates being the lowest in the country. Likewise, there is a widening age-range for those completing university degrees and more students are extending their studies with graduate work rather than launching into careers straightaway. It is clear that millennials are intensely reluctant to commit to lifelong jobs as their parents and grandparents once did.
Although they help to capture current trends, a statistics-based focus privileges those normative milestones as the constants against which such young people are “deviating.” In the public-private divide, the expectations of the whole are the default; they override the desires of the individual and take for granted such reasons behind developmental difference as a rebellion against or disillusionment with “the system.” But the blind spot in that logic lies in its holistic top-down rhetoric—if the actions of millenials are automatically tied to their context and judged by it, then an investigation into the crucially personal nature of goals and choice-making falls to the wayside.