Lately I keep thinking about what it means to be an adult. As a Jew who happily rang in my 13th birthday with a group of friends, a tub of popcorn and a screening of “Titanic” (my third viewing that year, perhaps?), I’m curious every time I talk to a recent bar or bat mitzvah.
I’m familiar with the ins and outs of the ceremony, even though I didn’t have one myself, but I’m still a bit incredulous that it supposedly represents a gateway to grown-up land.
“Do you feel like an adult?” I sometimes ask b’nai mitzvah celebrants. Answers vary, but the general tone is always the same. “Not really! I’m still a kid in a lot of ways!” they’ll usually say with a laugh. And then, after a pause: “I do feel different.”
For this week’s cover story, I had the opportunity to interview a couple of remarkable young people. These lone soldiers, or chayalim bodedim, are among the dozens of Bay Area–raised American Jews who choose to make aliyah — many at age 18, immediately following high school graduation — in order to serve in the Israel Defense Forces.
One of these young soldiers, who wants to be a writer, told me that, at 21, with almost three years of military service behind him, he thinks he’s probably more confident in his career goals than many of his friends who went straight to college after high school.
“You’re certainly more confident than I was at your age,” I told him.
Another soldier shared her observation that young Israeli adults begin acting like real grown-ups at a younger age than Americans, and suggested that people will behave in ways that are expected of them.
“You can do anything, go anywhere at 18,” she said. “I think Israelis rise to the challenge of that. [In America], people kind of treat you like a kid forever, and I think that definitely has an effect.”
I flashed back to Thanksgiving, when I had a horrendous head cold and spent three days cooped up at my parents’ house, happily allowing them to bring me tea and cluck their tongues in concern as I sniffled through guilty-pleasure MTV programming intended for an audience half my age.
“That sounds about right,” I told her.
In recent years, as the recession has forced so many in my generation (known as the millennials, I’m told) to move back in with their parents and take internship after unpaid internship at an age when most of our folks were getting married, if not having kids, it seems apparent that we need some new ways to mark adulthood.
If financial independence isn’t a readily achievable milestone (and for so many, it isn’t), and one doesn’t wish to get married or have kids anytime soon (I don’t … yet), how else can we define the word “grown-up”?
I’ve been thinking about this more lately as I’ve been on the hunt for new housing. Specifically, it’s become clear to me that certain living conditions I might have been OK with — or even drawn to — at 18 or 21 are simply no longer going to cut it at 27.
That’s great that you have a sweet beer-pong table, Craigslist guy, but I’m going to come home to this house every day, and I’d prefer that a folding table sticky with Bud Light not be the living room centerpiece. A place with space for dinner parties is great, but on weeknights it would be nice if they generally ended before 2 a.m. You see, I’ve begun to notice that if I don’t get eight hours of sleep for more than a few nights in a row, my body and mental processes cease to function properly.
I’m too old to be on my parents’ health insurance under President Obama’s reform bill, too old to go on a Birthright trip, too old to qualify for the Miss America pageant or “The Real World” (see: guilty-pleasure TV-watching, above).
Do these things signify being an adult? Is there some other ceremony I should be aware of?
Maybe 2012 will be the year I come to terms with the sort of pseudo-adolescence that seems, for me and for so many of my peers, to have extended well beyond our college years. I know how to take care of myself, I’m generally a responsible person, and I shouldn’t need a certificate to tell the world that I’m a grown-up.
Or maybe 2012 will be the year I finally start studying for that bat mitzvah.
Emma Silvers lives in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].