Adulthood, One Year In

W hen I moved to Washington, D.C., last year, my car had just enough room for my books, my clothes, and my mom, as we road-tripped to the city from Michigan. Senior year at Hillsdale College came and went so quickly that it wasn’t until I said goodbye to my best friend on our front porch that it sank in: We were adults. One year in, and there have been too many “adult” moments to list: the time my appendix ruptured at the White House; the time a Jewish friend and I read the news together, in horror, in the early hours of October 7; the time I drove into a curb and it took six of my friends in evening wear to change a flat tire; the time a softball broke my cheekbone at a recreational practice. And all this while my family was thousands of miles away in California. There were friends who got married and had babies and friends who drifted. There were times I needed a hug and didn’t know anyone well enough to ask for one. It was a year of tremendous happiness.

A surprising finding from a study published earlier this year is that youth no longer implies happiness. Until recently, it’s been assumed that happiness over a lifetime tends to follow a U shape: People have been generally happier in youth or old age, with a midlife slump in between. Dartmouth’s David Blanchflower, one of the leading minds behind this U-shaped happiness curve and a co-author of the recent National Bureau of Economic Research study, told Scientific American that the pattern was relatively stable “until it wasn’t.” Data collected from 2009 to 2022 suggest that the U-curve has morphed into “a graph line that reveals a consistent decrease in unhappiness with age.” What’s particularly troubling is that, as the study’s authors note, “this pattern is driven by an increase in unhappiness among young people both in absolute terms and relative to older people.” Unhappiness among young people is a global phenomenon that began, said Blanchflower, around 2014 — the same time many social scientists, such as Jean Twenge, have identified as the period in which smartphones and the rise of social media began to negatively affect children’s mental and emotional well-being. Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation of the “great rewiring” that happened to children between 2012 and 2019: “It’s not just about smartphones and social media; it’s about a historic and unprecedented transformation of human childhood.”

Younger generations might feel as though they don’t have much to look forward to, a sentiment I’m grateful that adults in my life always discredited. When students graduate from Hillsdale, they get bricks on the school’s Liberty Walk. I’d read many brick messages as I walked up that path for four years, and those expressing anticipation for the life to come were always my favorite. I couldn’t choose between two quotes for my own brick: “Love well, live fully,” or “Joyously, drunkenly, serenely, and divinely aware.” The latter won.

Because it’s best not to dwell on the past, and because life is better spent looking forward to the next moment instead of savoring the last, I didn’t reflect much on the past year of adulthood — until I moved last week from my first apartment into a charming townhouse. One year ago, my new bookshelves looked bare, and I agonized somewhat over how long it might take for them to fill up. Last week, packing up my apartment, I realized how many more novels, essays, journals, and magazines I’d acquired. If life for a writer or reader can be measured in words — how many we’ve read, reread, studied, edited, written, and published — I haven’t done a good-enough job of keeping track of life so far. To question how long it would take to fill those bookshelves, only to realize that I’d done it subconsciously, made me wonder what else I might’ve missed.

One year hasn’t given me the right to bestow life advice. But I think often about how much I’d miss out on if I were more online (I ditched most social media senior year of college). Vain and performative, young people on social media present to the world their best moments and prettiest smiles. Presentation precludes reality for those who spent their childhoods online and became addicted to the thrill of posting; we’re interested in appearing happy. When early adulthood is spent hyper-online, more time is spent cataloguing memories than having memorable experiences.

One of my neighbors at the old building used to smoke on the back porch. The cigarette fumes would enter my apartment if the windows were open. He was loud, too. He played Candy Crush on his iPhone with the volume up, and he greeted all neighbors who walked out the back door. He either knew you or he wanted to; peeved by his habits, I didn’t want him to know me. When I had to pass him, I’d sometimes look at my phone so he wouldn’t try to chat. Then I lost my smartwatch. This neighbor ­found it on a sidewalk and brought it to his tech-savvy daughter, who charged it up and found my information. He contacted me to return it. John and I got to know each other then, and I stopped hating his smoking habits because everything else about him was likeable. He’d moved to D.C. from the Pacific Northwest to be closer to his grandchildren, whom he adored and bragged about often. He loved to shut down the bar Josephine, a French joint, in Old Town, Alexandria. He rowed with a community team on the Potomac River at 5:30 a.m. and asked if I’d like to join after I got back from an overseas trip. He collected my mail while I was gone. I meant to thank him and didn’t get the chance. He had a heart attack and died, at age 69, while riding his bike in April. We talked about faith in the last conversation we had, and he said, “I should get back to church.”

John personified the quote I chose for my brick: “The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” Its author is novelist Henry Miller, who also thought men of principle boring and for whom morality was a bit of a nonstarter. His religious inclination, he said, could best be described simply as “having a reverence for life.” His novels were autobiographical, he told the Paris Review in 1962, “not because I think myself such an important person, but — this will make you laugh — because I thought when I began that I was telling the story of the most tragic suffering any man had endured.” That’s much of what young people experience — the feeling that our plight is uniquely terrible (it never is). And while the trend of unhappiness among young people may be unprecedented, unhappiness in general is not. Smartphones have made vanity and isolation easier, though neither vice nor loneliness is new.

If we’re lucky, we also know what makes us happy: other people, faith, beauty, art, nature. Some little things have kept me aware, and appreciative, of life this past year: Waking up early enough to see the sunrise, phone calls with Mom and Dad, talking to strangers in lines and on trains, asking people about their favorite books or eccentric jewelry or first loves, reading Adelaide by Genevieve Wheeler when I’m heartbroken and Rules of Civility by Amor Towles when life feels adventureless, going to book clubs at local bookstores, and participating in group fitness classes and rec sports leagues. Also this, which my mom tells me to do whenever something dramatic, sad, or ego-inflating happens: “Have your moment, then get over it.” Cry, then stop; celebrate, then achieve something else.

As the study of happiness trends suggests, greater happiness still comes with more life experience. But it isn’t always possible to make up for lost time. Another thing to remind young people of is their own mortality, not through lectures that may cause despair but through examples like John, for whom joy was a gift.