The Twixters, and Fandom

[nemorathwald]

TIME Magazine's January 2005 cover story is on The Twixters, a new life-phase that's emerging between teenager and adult. Modern educations have ceased to be worth much in the job market, so they can't afford a home, a marriage, or kids. They're renowned as Secret Masters Of Friendship, the "New Tribes."

I don't live with my parents, which would be wrong to them, but as long as I don't have kids or get married, I have no one to be irresponsible to. Why does the transition to so-called "adulthood" create more neediness in this world just in order to level it back out to zero in their lifetimes? If you're worried about being selfish, there's plenty enough pre-existing need to be met without having more kids.

And don't get me started on permanent, institutionalized romantic commitment as a pointless anachronism and "The One and Only True Forever Love" as a hormonally-deluded illusion.

And career? Anything worth loving is worth doing as a labor of love, for free, like open source software. People pay someone else to do the rest, which is called a job.

The article talks about "settling down" as if its value needed no defense whatsoever. What's that, a real-estate ad? The best they could do was question-begging, vague moral tut-tutting and undefined fear. We are expected to follow the railroad tracks of normality "because... uh... hmm... um... Peter Pan!" It should have asked, "why shouldn't everyone be a Twixter?"

Has this resulted in an influx into Fandom, which seems tailor-made for the tribalizing Twixters? Even though I'm 30 and therefore outside the high end of the age range, I am a Twixter and so are my friends. It occurred to me while reading the article that I don't spend time with anyone who has children. At M.O.F.O., I can only think of three couples, and none of them have kids. Is it just me, or do there exist two distinct hermetically-sealed contingents of Fen? I speak of those who have a house, a spouse, a career, and children; and those who have one of the above at most. Never the twain shall meet except at Concom meetings?

Comments

[rmeidaking.livejournal.com]

You're missing a core issue: The fact that the Twixter doesn't want to drop to the lower economic strata that actually having to pay rent and utilities would cause. If one lives with one's parents, one can spend that first $1500 of every month's wages on the clubs, music, eating out and clothes, rather than on boring stuff like rent and basic survival. My niece is having this problem right now; moving out means her boyfriend can stay overnight, but it also means they don't have money to play anymore. The adult child has to choose where their priorities lie. Personally, I think the parents made the mistake when the kid asked to come home. They should have either said No right up front, or set up guidelines such that it was clear that it was a temporary arrangement. Certain other of my cousins are caught because their child doesn't want just *any* job....so the child is unemployed and living at home, when the parents should have said they couldn't move back; get a job at Mickey D's and a roommate, and cope. If people over the age of 25 are still living with their parents, there's a certain level of spinelessness on both sides of the equation. (Check back in ten years to find out where my son, now age 12, is living....we'll see how my views have changed.... or not.)

On the fandom question, having a child means that if one is going to go hang at Mofo or Tio's, one must also have a babysitter. This costs $4 an hour in the Ann Arbor area in general; local mileage may vary (ie. you may have a swap arrangement with another family, or your mom may live nearby, etc.). In any case, add some inconvenience and about $20 to the cost of the evening. It makes it non-trivial to stop by.

There is an entire spectrum in fandom, from folks who are kid-phobic (there's just no other word for it; they get nervous and shaky when a small child enters the room) to folks with several kids, and everything in between. It does form a commonality - you have something to talk about. Oddly, people without kids tend to get bored hearing about my kids...hmmm....it's one of my favorite topics.... :-)

So clumps of 'With kids' tend to form, and also other clumps of 'Kid free' tend to form. The 'Kid free' can take off and go places on random weekends with minimal planning; the 'With kids' tend to have the next three months planned out like a military expedition. That's just how it winds up going.

Few are doing this intentionally; it happens because of economics and individual interest level.

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

I should have stated my view more explicitly, that I regard living with one's parents or grandparents as a bad and undesirable thing. I've done it while between jobs, and I would know. It's a separate issue from spouse/house/career. What I was talking about in my article is the difference between 1. childhood (being taken care of by others) and 2. adulthood (taking care of one's self) and 3. parenthood (having dependents rely on you). I believe strongly in acheiving adulthood. I also am against thoughtlessly entering parenthood just because it's the thing to do, which seems to be everybody's reason at a young age. But that doesn't mean I encourage living with one's parents. The article conflated that.

[bjorng.livejournal.com]

Seems like the living-at-home thing is different for everyone.

My youngest brother, who just turned 29, lived with my parents pretty much non-stop until he started grad school last fall. I don't think that my parents regretted having him home for one minute. My mom says she misses him now, and my dad now has nobody to boss around on his home improvement projects. I know that my brother also benefited greatly from living rent-free, so for them it was largely a win-win situation. My other brother had largely the same experience, and moved out at about the same age (though he spent several years away at school in between).

By contrast I have really only visited my parents since I started college at 17, and I've been financially independent from them since age 20. I'm pretty happy with the hand I got dealt as well.

[elizilla]

Interesting article.

You ask, "Why shouldn't everyone be a Twixter?"

I read a book where the narrator postulated that the most important thing you could do between the ages of 18 and 40, was find something that will give you purpose during your 40s, 50s, and beyond.

I think the authors of this article are expressing the same thing, and worrying that the twixters aren't finding that thing.

I'm 38, and I haven't found anything like that myself. And I do worry about it. Why am I here on this earth? Surely there's something else besides the accumulation of ever more stuff. Religion's a crock. I am not a parent and I don't really want to be. What should I do with myself?

One big advantage that people who reproduce have, is that they don't have to wonder what their purpose is. They're parents; their job is to do their best for their children. They can just defer all that meaning of life stuff onto their kids. It may not be very fair to the kids to lay all that weight on them, but it's probably better to do that to your kids, than it is to decide that you DO know what it all means, and inflict fundamentalist christianity or some such thing on them.

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

I like what Eliezer Yudkowski said in The Meaning of Life FAQ. He shows in a logic chart that there must be a potential meaning or meanings to any given life if we will make it, and that each individual's interim meaning of life is to find it. I'll tell you why I like that.

The modern world makes possible a bewildering level of freedom. But many modern people don't have the imagination or drive to do much with that, and spend it watching TV. Some long for the 30-year lifespan of a medieval serf where choices are made for you. They regard options as a temporary journey to a "settled" destination. Options are not a means by which I fence off and eliminate my options, I would like to try as many as possible. I hear others say, "I must choose one love for my whole lifetime, one job to repeat endlessly, one area to live, it must all be perfect because I will never change." Isn't that like limiting one's life to one meaning? Then they lock themselves in a white picket cage. It's feudal thinking. What's their hurry? In an age of multiple lifespans in which I change so much that I'm not even the same person I used to be, why not multiple interim meanings of life?

There are similar complaints about the overwhelming torrent of information. It's an innately good thing; on the same vein as meaning, I wonder if those who complain about it seek information only long enough to come to the first conclusion, then cut off all contradictory information?

[elizilla]

I've had a lot of different jobs, and been involved with a lot of different organizations. The more different things I do, the more they are all the same. I'm so comfortable with doing something different, that novelty is no longer novel.

There are so many things to learn in every direction, that a dilettante such as myself will never be an expert in anything. You don't see any PhDs after my name. I'm not a ballerina or an olympic athlete and my name isn't listed in the Guinness Book. I never even picked an undergrad major. The people who go on ever deeper into a specialty push up against boundaries I will never see.

I've had eight or nine different lovers in my lifetime. The most painful love to lose was the first one. More recent loves have left my life with a lot less ill will and misery. But is it a good thing to have lost a lover so many times that I've learned to move on so calmly? What kind of skill is that to have? What would it have been like to have loved the same person my whole life?

People who do one thing are not like people who do many things. Not to choose, is also a choice. I'm not making a value judgement here, just noting something curious. Singleness of focus might feel better or worse than casting my net widely, but how would I know? I don't even wish it had been different. I just wonder what it would have been like to be different.

[bjorng.livejournal.com]

I would say that "casting your net widely" is in itself a "singleness of focus", just an unusual one. You're focusing on novelty, as it were. Sounds like you've been pretty successful.

Do you have an urgent need to "do something with yourself"? Or even a latent desire? Personally, I *have* been doing something with myself, though it's never been terribly urgent. And never much the same thing, except broadly (reading, meeting people, working, watching movies, learning new things, etc.).

This past summer I went from being a twenty-year veteran Twixter (minus the debt, and minus the living-with-parents) to being a full-time parent of three young kids. It's quite a change. Yet the only really meaningful difference for me is that I have less free time to do my own things.

Given that my previous eight or more hours of free time on weekdays and 40+ waking hours every weekend over two decades wasn't enough for me to get bored even once, I don't see how this is an advantage.

I like my new family, but it doesn't fulfill a specific need for me. It's just the way things are. I still do things that are just for me, just not as many things. I'm neither more nor less happy now than I was before. (I am more *tired* than before, but that's a transient problem.)

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

I must hasten to add: In explaining why I reject certain life choices, I do not criticize or ridicule those who have made them, or their cherubic offspring. I know many of them in my life who have not caged themselves. I posted this for two reasons.

Nomadic tribes of single childfree room-mate apartment dwellers (I am not talking about people who live with their parents) is a life that needs defending, and is not a pitiable accident, it's often a conscious choice. Frankly, you need no such help if you have the support of the monolithic "home and family" status quo. Dr. James Dobson's Focus on the Family program and all it stands for can use a bit of healthy opposition in our country's conservative backlash.

Second, I've lost close friends to weddings and childbirth. I pointed out the Twixters just to make people aware that there exists more than one kind of family. If you're in a nomadic urban tribe, you may not realize when you are breaking up with it, but the tribe can still feel kind of... well, divorced. "Well, this just happens in life, people just naturally sort themselves into family and non-family" is not true in an age of effective birth control. It doesn't just happen.

[elizilla]

I'm not sure how old you are, or whether you've spent enough time in a single such "tribe" to see this in action, but I can tell you this: People come back. They may wander off for five or ten years while they have children who are young enough to need a lot of care. But eventually the kids get old enough, and many of the people who dropped out of sight so they could be parents do return to the tribe.

I prefer to see their disappearances as temporary, and I will patiently wait for them here.

This is good stuff.

[(Anonymous)]

I may join livejournal just to chat with you guy.

Re: This is good stuff.

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Anonymous! Livejournal is great, but if you don't want to do that, my e-mail address is on my profile, and my instant message handle on all clients is nemorathwald.