Yet I find myself, in my mid-forties, growing and changing into an entirely new version of me, long after the world has stopped expecting me to develop further. I’ve experienced a significant growth spurt in the past couple of years (not in height, sadly), which has led me to wonder if we’re short-changing ourselves in setting our expectations so low.

I’ve noticed two equally destructive tendencies at play around this topic (three if you count a general fear of aging or displaying physical signs thereof). One is around the (utterly abhorrent) neologism ‘adulting’, meaning ‘behaving like an adult’. It is the resistance towards moving out of the young, free, single party animal phase and into adulthood. We have glorified youth so much that we’ve bred a generation of Lost Boys (and Girls) who are terrified of growing up.

The second is the ‘Is this all there is?’ syndrome, characterised by the mid-life, or nowadays quarter-life, crisis.

How have we so misrepresented life as to cause people to resist adulthood and then have a crisis thinking their best years are behind them before they’ve reached their thirties?! Is this all there is? By no means!

There are many contributing factors to this problem: the natural desire of parents to want more and better for their children than they had, resulting in children and young adults being encouraged and urged up the educational and career ladders. Our increasing prosperity meaning it is possible, then normal, then vital for each adult generation of a family to have its own home, so children only grow up in close, daily contact with one other generation, making age a mysterious and fearful thing. The idolisation of independence meaning we keep ourselves apart from one another and making it seem a shameful failure to ask for help, even from one’s own children.

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