On the death of adulthood
by Chris Kamalski
“NOBODY KNOWS HOW TO BE A GROWN-UP ANYMORE. ADULTHOOD AS WE HAVE KNOWN IT HAS BECOME COMPLETELY UNTENABLE. It isn’t only that patriarchy in the strict, old-school Don Draper sense has fallen apart. It’s that it may never really have existed in the first place, at least in the way its avatars imagined. Which raises the question: Should we mourn the departed or dance on its grace?” (AO Scott, film critic for the New York Times, in his brilliant essay ‘The Death of Adulthood’)
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It’s not often in these technologically-laden days that an idea raises above the endless swirl of information accessible at the scroll of a thumb and then remains fixed within one’s mind, as a stick lodged in a stream meandering aimlessly towards the sea. Or, perhaps I should qualify that claim to say that the endless swirl of information accessible often creates the logjam of our mind, our internal hard drives tirelessly working overtime yet continually slipping into the fog of information overload. For an idea to have weight in these days, it must be substantial, as if marinated as a choice cut of filet, aged to perfection without haste.
Albeit still forming within my soul, the confluence of becoming a father earlier this year, mixed with the realization that I am soon 35 and quickly sliding downhill towards 40, plus the gradual awakening and growing acceptance of my possible true vocation as a professor/chaplain of formative development in the university environment, have all combined to soften my heart to the reality that I am still painfully immature and childish in so many ways. These divergent strands of thought were recently crystallized in a surprisingly unexpected manner when I read AO Scott’s thoughtfully brilliant essay, “The Death of Adulthood,” in the New York Times a few weeks ago. Scott notes that “In my main line of work as a film critic, I have watched over the past 15 years as the studios have committed their vast financial and imaginative resources to the cultivation of franchises that advance an essentially juvenile vision of the world. Comic-book movies, family-friendly animated adventures, tales of adolescent heroism and comedies of arrested development do not only make up the commercial center of 21st-century Hollywood. They are its artistic heart.”
This past month, I found myself reflecting on the dominance of the Superhero myth within popular culture, and how that has deeply defined the manner by which the church and its pastors strive to form those within their communities. Concluding tentatively that we must embrace a humanity of vulnerability and weakness in fresh ways, I am now left pondering a related strain of thought: Are we actually more like Peter Pan, growing in our refusal to mature?
