18 August 2010: "NYTimes writes article abt how worthless 20-somethings can’t get jobs & try 2 stay young 4evr"

This post is about eschatology. In honor of late literary critic Frank Kermode, whose influence on Carles's own praxis is subtle but pervasive, let us begin by considering the sense of an ending. Not merely the ending of this particular analysis by Carles, which is characteristically enigmatic and provocative, but what constitutes that experience of finality that signals the completion of the passage to adulthood, which, as the lives of the young people who are the subject of the New York Times article Carles examines can testify to, is often subjectively experienced as apocalyptic.

In many respects, all narratives of the passage to adulthood are at their essential core, fictions. Necessary fictions, yes, it's true, but fictions nonetheless whose structures and motifs and conventions are shaped ideologically by the society in which they are nestled. In truth the concept of adulthood is always a socioculutral concept superimposed on the biological life cycle of humans. As Carles points out, the confusion of the biological with the sociopolitical creates ambivalence: "So confused. Wish u were just considered an adult right after the first time u grew a nice bush of pubes / share an intense orgasm with a a member of the opposite sex." But rites of passage are no longer anchored to the reproductive imperatives of the species, and the categories of the life cycle now serve the larger purpose of mystifying the only incontestable transition that we all go through: death. Carles wryly acknowledges this with a question, "Does n e 1 know if it is true that every human on Earth will die one day?" The fantasies of postponing adulthood, naturally, are fantasies of postponing or even preventing death, which is spuriously associated with the corrosive effects of the reality principle -- or as Carles puts it, with having "to ‘take care of kids + a naggy, annoying life partner’".

As Carles sagely recognizes, it "seems like we are all trying to deal with ‘getting old’ or something". One method of coping is through aggrandizing our individual mortality by conflating it with the destiny of the cosmos. Another is to absorb oneself in work, though this is proving less plausible for the generation now entering the labor market confront dire conditions there. "Should we all just continue trying to be bloggers/social media gurus/buzzband members, instead of getting jobs as teachers/insurance agents/bank tellers?" Carles asks, situating the dilemma in a resolutely post-Fordist context of immaterial labor. In other words, Carles notes that the coming-of-age narrative resists turning on domestic issues and instead pivots on employment categories and one's emplacement in the sociocultural field. Cultural work and informational processing remain lifestyle proclivities rather than labor and seem to exempt subjects from the burden of labor, which they experience phenomenologically as leisure. But this only serves to expedite their expropriation, of course.

But this fretting merely invites a minor existential crisis that masks the larger one: "Are yall glad that ur not like ur parents, and u haven’t felt pressure to start a career that would probably ‘peak’ with a job in middle management? Is ur life meant for ’so much more’ than such inhumane desk work?" From the perspective of our inevitable death, this question can seem somewhat trivial, though. When Carles asks, "Should I get my life together before it is too late?" the implication is that it is always already too late.