An Ordinary Age

Finding Your Way in a World That Expects Exceptional

Rainesford Stauffer

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780062998989
• eBook ISBN: 9780062999023
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Best Book of 2021 —Esquire?

Featured on Good Morning America

"A meticulous cartography of how outer forces shape young people’s inner lives." —Esquire, Best Books of 2021 

In conversation with young adults and experts alike, journalist Rainesford Stauffer explores how the incessant pursuit of a “best life” has put extraordinary pressure on young adults today, across our personal and professional lives—and how ordinary, meaningful experiences may instead be the foundation of a fulfilled and contented life.

Young adulthood: the time of our lives when, theoretically, anything can happen, and the pressure is on to make sure everything does. Social media has long been the scapegoat for a generation of unhappy young people, but perhaps the forces working beneath us—wage stagnation, student debt, perfectionism, and inflated costs of living—have a larger, more detrimental impact on the world we post to our feeds. 

An Ordinary Age puts young adults at the center as Rainesford Stauffer examines our obsessive need to live and post our #bestlife, and the culture that has defined that life on narrow, and often unattainable, terms. From the now required slate of (often unpaid) internships, to the loneliness epidemic, to the stress of "finding yourself" through school, work, and hobbies—the world is demanding more of young people these days than ever before. And worse, it’s leaving little room for our generation to ask the big questions about who they want to be, and what makes a life feel meaningful.

Perhaps we’re losing sight of the things that fulfill us: strong relationships, real roots in a community, and the ability to question how we want our lives to look and feel, even when that’s different from what we see on the ‘Gram. Stauffer makes the case that many of our most formative young adult moments are the ordinary ones: finding our people and sticking with them, learning to care for ourselves on our own terms, and figuring out who we are when the other stuff—the GPAs, job titles, the filters—fall away.

1

On Being Ordinary

YOU ALWAYS THINK THE MOMENTS THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR life the most are the ones we’ve been trained to recognize: At graduation we move our tassel, we get a job we don’t mind, we label our boxes and move to new cities, we take our Polaroid camera with us when we stay out late with our best friends in a new place, meeting new people. We know it when we’re in it: These are the times of our lives, so they say.

It’s implied everywhere—and sometimes said explicitly, by well-meaning parents and mentors, popular culture that illustrates coming of age as self-exploration and adventure tidily wrapped up by the finale scene, and maybe even a fixation on youth and “being young.” These are the best years of your life. These are the times you can’t get back. This is the chance you have to make your life extraordinary. It echoed in my brain like a 2000s pop hit I didn’t remember memorizing during my own checkered collection of “milestones” in young adulthood: Dropping out of college. Returning to my hometown like life was rewinding. Searching for ways to make myself more—braver, and bolder; more fearless, less cautious; more likable—whatever that means. What should have been singsong aspiration sounded more like a threat: When anything can happen, the pressure is on to make sure everything does.

If you’re a young adult today (or even just know a young adult today), it’s a challenge not to feel as though finding yourself has been turned into a competitive sport. Now, it seems, striving to be extraordinary, being exceptional, and being special are the same as being capable, being fulfilled, and being happy. We have so-called dream jobs and side hustles just to try to pay the bills, college rankings that tell us where our formative years fall on the scale of public opinion, and which education is supposedly worth all the debt. Omnipresent illustrations of best lives, bodies, and selves constantly play out on Instagram, and the churn of perfectionism has radically amped up expectations that turn “perfect” into a theoretically meetable standard. There are new timelines for entering young adulthood, and what it means to be a fulfilled young person is being rethought in real time. But the myth of a best self, and a best life, following certain patterns and meeting certain benchmarks, remains.

Within that, there are the real-life pressures: lack of a helpful, substantial social safety net, systemic racism and discrimination, and a world literally on fire. Figuring out how to avoid getting sick so you don’t rack up medical debt. Doing math on a napkin to assess how you’ll ever be able to take care of your parents on your current salary. Pondering whether all the messy pieces of your life will eventually feel steady and cohesive. There’s lifestyle expectations that are just not a practical part of life for a lot of young adults, sprawling from saving a certain amount of money by a certain age, pressure to “make memories” before the moment has even passed, knowing what you’re good at and going after it, the right kind of social life so you never feel lonely, and above all: proceeding with total confidence that whatever you’re doing is the best thing you could be doing. There are milestones we’re supposed to be hitting—moving out and apartments that are furnished, “real” jobs, and being “prepared” enough to map out a five-year plan for our dreams, despite a world that makes thinking that far in advance all but impossible. At the same time, young adults are supposed to be having the wild-and-free adventures that supposedly define this life period. There’s a lot going on.

This time of life also marks a point when you’re conscious of growth occurring. It can be seen, with young adulthood being hyped as the part meant for moves for jobs or school, new circles of friends, all the big “firsts” of becoming an adult, from being able to pick your own groceries to landing a job that puts the college degree you went into debt for to use. It can be felt, too, when we start asking the big questions: What matters to me? Who am I supposed to be in the world? Is everyone else as overwhelmed as I am? Everything is just beginning, young adults are told. You can be anything. And sometimes, it feels so much effort and time are spent living up to the people we could be, it’s almost as if the people we are become an afterthought.

Every time I ventured off the prescribed path that supposedly marks how you find yourself and build your life as a young adult, I felt scatteredness and shame: When I left college after my freshman year to work even more hours than I did as a student, only to eventually return to school as an online student and full-time employee. When I moved home, a reality for lots of people for all kinds of reasons and one of the first that gets flagged as a young person having not “made it.” When I moved for jobs that never fully eliminated the need for a second job as a safety net. When I watched my hometown friends marry the loves of their lives and buy houses with fireplaces. All of this necessitates privilege that isn’t a reality for all young people. And none of it is the enduring trauma or hardship of my own life. Instead, it felt like a pattern: Life was messier than how I’d anticipated this time of life being, and the more people I spoke to, the more that feeling was echoed back to me. There’s a lot of lofty praise around being young and having it “together,” and the emphasis on having a particular kind of extraordinary adulthood felt as though it was telling in a couple ways: First, it treated young adults as a monolith, as if everyone was racing from the same starting line. Second, it also seemed to indicate that this was the time in which everything had to happen in order for your life to feel fulfilling, as if young people were in a buzzer-beater game of finding themselves and figuring out what matters to them, rather than those discoveries being lifelong. This pressure to know what your “best life” entails, and how to create it in young adulthood, felt worthy of a closer look to see where it stems from, how it shapes young people, and what systems and power structures enable it.

As I moved through my early twenties into my mid-to-late-twenties, I found myself yearning for simple things that rarely made the list of dream jobs, big moves, and adventures that have been marketed as cornerstones of young adulthood. I thought about the steadiness of a partner and community when I was supposed to feel confident and proud to go it alone. A sense of self that wasn’t tethered to what I achieved or who I pleased. Framed photos of people I love in a home and a dresser in my bedroom, signs of staying instead of looking toward the horizon of the next new place. Over and over, I realized that no amount of cautious perfectionism was going to stop truly bad stuff from happening to me, or to my loved ones, and that there wasn’t some threshold of achievement that would tidy up my messy parts, doubts, and uncertainties. It had never occurred to me that some of that, the false starts and self-doubt and everything coming with a side of chaos, was normal. And since these markers of what it means to be an extraordinary young adult were never a reality for all, anyway, I wondered why the averageness of coming of age wasn’t talked about as much as achieving your wildest dreams.

Not all young adults have the opportunity to think about this at all. Within these pages, young people describe worrying about their parents’ lack of retirement savings, experiencing housing insecurity, the stress of chronic illnesses, and the pressure of working while in school. Thousands of others are breadwinners for their families, dealing with medical debt, experiencing abuse, and grappling with economic hardship. The enduring conception of emerging adulthood—a time for wild and free exploration, identity experimentation, and creating your “best self”—isn’t separate from factors including socioeconomic status, race, gender, geographic region, and class. While there might be characteristics or milestones traditionally aligned with young adulthood, it’s far from a one-size-fits-all time of life. Though society’s fixation on youth can be seen in beauty standards, “30 Under 30” lists, and ageism rampant in the workforce, it feels like a version is illustrated in the pressure to have your life fully figured out, sense of self fully established, and achievement locked down by the time you make it to your mid-twenties. It’s not realistic. And, in a way, it’s sad: When all the pressure is on to have the time of your life during one time of life, it could make the bad things feel worse, and the good feel fleeting. The scramble for “achievement” early in life feels like yearning for any sense of security rather than craving supernatural specialness, and there’s a case to be made for a more nuanced conversation around young adulthood—one less about our best selves, and more about what it means to create who we are.

Everyone has different versions of ordinary, too. Some pinpointed a basic level of respect too many people still do not receive, like having their name pronounced correctly or being referred to by the right pronouns. Others articulated it as finding somewhere that feels like a place you can stay, or the ability to buy groceries without worrying your card will get declined. In conversations I’ve had with young adults from all different locations and backgrounds, “a sense of home,” “community,” “having time to do my laundry,” “work that feels fulfilling,” “not living for social media,” “getting to slow down,” and “having my best be enough” all popped up. Lingering about all of this was the pervasive sense that so many of us are looking for a permission slip to opt out of hustling to live our best lives, and instead embrace our ordinary ones.

For years, I lived my life in afters. After I moved away from my hometown, my real life would begin. After I finally finished my hodgepodge college degree, I’d find the right job. After I made myself into a perfect person—no insecurities or hang-ups—I’d be worthy of love. After I proved I could do it—whatever it was—I’d be fulfilled. It’s not hard to see how slippery this could get, the sensation that once you’ve found the perfect home, secured the perfect job, locked down the perfect and unshakable sense of security, and found the perfect circle of friends, “real life” will begin. Life will start once we become the extraordinary people we’re destined to be, and then we can relax a bit and enjoy it.

But what if we’re missing it? I wondered. What if—by waiting until we have it all figured out to care for ourselves or notice our needs, or what we actually want as opposed to what we’re supposed to—we’re late to the party? What if some of the most enlightening and important and meaningful parts of young adulthood are actually the ordinary ones?

Mid-conversation with young adults describing this pressure “to be special,” “to be the best,” “to make sure I’m making the most of life,” “to live up to what my parents/my mentors/my friends believe I can do,” “to do the right things,” I realized it felt as though we were all asking different versions of the same questions: How can I ensure I have worth in the world; how can I guarantee I have meaning? How we ask that—and who is asking it—deserves attention. Young people have complex identities, lives, and experiences, and when we talk about growing up, what’s important to note is that isn’t going to feel, let alone look, the same for everyone. If you’re constantly trying to change or better yourself, it leaves little room to actually get to know yourself at all—to recognize that goodness and worthiness don’t find you after you’ve fixed yourself first. “At this time, I was supposed to have more things figured out than I do right now,” Lexi, twenty-one, said. She graduated with a job lined up that was canceled as a result of COVID-19. Her mom is an immigrant, and her dad grew up poor, and she described education as something viewed, especially in immigrant communities, as “your ticket to the world,” a means of life being good from there on out that she’s been working toward her whole life. “I think a lot of things I worry about are so interconnected,” she said. “In terms of social issues, you really can’t extract any single one without touching anything else.” Young adults get this on a profound level. Her fear of being unable to get a job and pay off student loans is inherently connected to the fact that the job market is dismal, and she pointed out that her generation has grown up with a particularly heavy backdrop: Her college years were bookended by the election of Donald Trump and the COVID-19 crisis; she was a young teenager when the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting happened, and described the general sentiment as “something’s going to boil over eventually.” Then, she added, there’s the social pressure—“to move out of your parents’ home and have a beautiful apartment, and live in a glamorous city with your friends, and go to expensive dinners every night.” If that sounds like fantasy, not reality, it’s one reason to look twice at the stories we tell young adults about timelines, what adulthood feels like, and what they ought to be doing. And the stereotype of young people craving being special? “I think that’s also part of us, like, clinging on to those last remaining strands of the American Dream,” Lexi said. “That if we can just be special or be different, that dream will be ours in some way, but we need to stand out in the crowd to make that happen.”

Laney, a twenty-two-year-old first-generation college graduate who was working full-time out of her childhood bedroom when we spoke, likened the urge to always keep moving forward, to pursue novelty or adventure, to getting knocked over by a wave—the momentum feels good; it doesn’t matter where it’s taking her, the fact that she’s moving is enough. It felt like an apt metaphor for trying to make it in the world right now. “And for a lot of people, including me, that movement has been a marker of I’m doing something, therefore I’m doing something right,” she said, noting that, for a lot of young adults, there is increased autonomy over what you find meaningful and how you spend your time for the first point in your life. It echoed conversations of every extraordinary thing young adults explained they pursued just because they believed it was the thing they should be doing. For one of the first times, Laney said, it feels like, “Oh, how do I actually spend my time? Yes, I’m doing something, but am I doing something that I believe in?” Rarely is time for that consideration built into the framework of young adulthood, and it gets overshadowed by the pervading sense that we should’ve had that figured out already, regardless of circumstances.

“When I would hear my peers talking about how when they reached their twenties they’d start having children and moving into their own houses and collecting all these other milestones that to them signified adulthood, it was hard for me to see that for myself,” Brie, twenty-four, told me. She recalled hearing that, being from the South Side of Chicago, she wasn’t necessarily expected to “make it out,” and realized in her early teens that’s because the city’s systemic problems became her community’s problems, which, in turn, fell to individual people. “Imagine trying to live your very best life in a place that is telling you that your life does not have value,” Brie said. Because of the pain, suffering, and generational trauma Black people, and in particular Black women and Black trans women, have had to endure, Brie said, of course that pressure carries on. “It’s, well, how are we supposed to live our very best life when you’re constantly trying to take our lives away?” Young adulthood doesn’t exist in a vacuum: Systemic problems do impact how, or whether, young people meet the so-called milestones of young adulthood. Brie cites her driver’s license, or lack thereof, as one example: She knows how to drive, but doesn’t have a license or car, and gets pressured by people who say she’s not an adult until she accomplishes those so-called adult markers. “That marker is really only buried in, like, ‘you should be able to afford a car,’” she said, and added that the moments where she truly feels most “adult” are subtler. “Even just the idea that I could trust my instincts,” she explained. “That’s the coolest—that sometimes I can just figure something out on my own.” It never appears on the “external markers of successful young adulthood” list, and yet, being able to renegotiate what matters to you, solve problems, and learn to trust yourself are ordinary things with remarkable power for young people.

The concept of the “best life” serves as a social script: Do these things, in this order, and you’ll end up happy, or fulfilled, or, at the very least, on par with the same kind of lives your peers are leading. This is not realistic. We’re never without the next best thing we should be doing, on the path to growing into our next best selves. It’s worth looking closer at what a “best life” means, and remembering that it’s going to look different for everyone. One of the high points of young adulthood is getting to define yourself and your life on your terms.

While these moments of reflection, of “finding yourself,” aren’t necessarily unique to any particular generation of young adults, the parameters in which one does so have shifted greatly. Decades ago, there was a pattern of fairly universal milestones, allowing you to hopscotch from step to step with a clear-cut trajectory. Some research¹ points to the process of becoming an adult as one associated with the “acquisition of social roles and responsibilities,” or “traditional social markers of adulthood” including finishing school, finding a job, leaving home, getting married, and having children (obviously, not everyone followed this social script). With increased independence and opportunity came more variance in the patterns our lives follow—like periods of living out of your parents’ house and also not living with a significant other, or choosing not to get married at all, or it often taking longer to find a job post-college, if you went to college. And, as research on becoming an adult and markers of adulthood points out,² young people have dramatically different opportunities or experiences depending on their family, socioeconomic factors, or background. Now, the goal posts have moved and shifted some of those priorities: Other research³ shows the highest-ranked milestones of adulthood for individuals aged eighteen to thirty-four are finishing school or education achievement, and economic security, indicating that priorities have shifted: According to this research, published in 2017,⁴ over half of Americans say getting married and having kids aren’t important to becoming an adult, with about a third saying they’re somewhat important, and only a quarter of Americans think moving out of your parents’ home is a very important part of adulthood. Meanwhile, it says that finishing school and economic security rank high. All this doesn’t even account for cultural shifts, like social media enabling both a constant prying eye and opportunity for connection, the ability to curate yourself, and, of course most insidious, the ability to track everyone else’s milestones and successes. Meanwhile, the workforce remains in chaos as we bounce from economic crisis to economic crisis, vast inequities in higher education persist, and it feels like being perfect is the only option if we want any sho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1: On Being Ordinary
• 2: “For the Experience”: On work identities, dream jobs, and doing it “for the experience”
• 3: A Waiting Room: On home, and how we build it
• 4: Finding Your$elf, Commodified: On hobbies, experiences, and what creates identity
• 5: Cracks: On perfectionism and being enough
• 6: Good Little Catholic Girl: On asking big questions: Do I have meaning?
• 7: Online in Real Life: On being—and broadcasting—yourself online
• 8: Heartsick: On dating, choosing, and love
• 9: When Self-Care Doesn’t Care About Us: On self-care as self-reliance, and what it means to take care of yourself
• 10: Who Answers When You Call: On being part of the “loneliest generation” and building our communities
• 11: “The Best Four Years of Your Life”: On how college sets us up for young adulthood
• 12: A Note on Growing Up
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• Praise
• Copyright
• About the Publisher