Sarci-Sense: The Adult Adolescence — Growing Older Without Growing Up

There was a time when adulthood meant something solid. It meant restraint, responsibility and the dull, unglamorous skill of staying in one’s own life even when it disappointed you.

Somewhere along the way, adulthood seems to have slipped out of fashion. In its place arrived a restless generation of middle-aged people who possess all the privileges of grown-ups and none of the nerve. They have jobs, mortgages and opinions, but emotionally, many seem trapped in a prolonged adolescence. Older bodies, teenage minds. Money instead of maturity.

The new middle age looks nothing like our parents’. Our fathers aged with salaries. Our mothers aged with sacrifices. Their lives were difficult but directional. Ours are comfortable but confused. We have options instead of obligations and alarms instead of conscience. We are freer than any previous generation and more frightened than all of them combined.

Many of our modern middle-aged friends live like an anxious teenager who happens to own a car. Validation matters deeply. Discomfort feels intolerable. Authority is resented. Responsibility is postponed. Life energy is spent on being perceived rather than being anything in particular. Where previous generations grew older and grew quieter, this one has grown louder and more petulant. We protest age with gym routines, filters and spiritual tourism. We deny time with productivity apps and imported perspectives. And yet, the unease keeps pacing inside.

Relationships offer little relief. Friendship after forty looks like a subscription service that everyone forgets to renew. People cancel plans as easily as they cancel streaming services. Emotional availability has been replaced by availability to be entertained. Everyone complains about loneliness, but few are willing to do the difficult adult work of maintaining closeness when it becomes inconvenient, unattractive or routine. We treat people the way we treat phones by replacing them rather than repairing.

Marriage too has become its own adolescent experiment. We want intimacy without sacrifice, companionship without monotony, and passion without patience. Many relationships now resemble polite cohabitation agreements, negotiated rather than lived. We call it maturity when we avoid arguments. We call it stability when we avoid honesty. Over time, silence becomes kindness and distance begins to feel like respect. It is in these quiet houses that adulthood should have arrived, but forgot the address.

The workplace has mastered this infantilism. Grown people behave like obedient students for salaries and rebellious teenagers in meetings. They resent authority, but worship promotions. Work replaces introspection, productivity replaces purpose. Being busy feels safer than asking, “Is this it?” The calendar fills up not with ambition, but with avoidance. Career has evolved from meaning to medicine — something to numb existential discomfort.

Technology has made everything worse with perfect efficiency. It rewards impulsivity and punishes patience. It manufactures urgency and eliminates reflection. The phone is now the universal pacifier. Every difficult feeling is scrolled away. Every dull moment is escaped. Emotional processing has become unnecessary when distraction is available within thumb’s reach. The adult today doesn’t work through problems. He refreshes his feed until they seem smaller.

The language we use gives away the secret. Grown adults talk endlessly about “healing,” “boundaries,” “finding themselves.” Useful words, once. Now they are used the way teenagers once used “like” — to fill awkward pauses where honesty should be. The vocabulary of therapy has become a toolkit for avoidance. Growth is announced but rarely undertaken.

Gender plays its quiet role here too. Middle-aged men confuse entitlement with confidence and avoidance with strength. They have not unlearned the habit of emotional laziness. Women, meanwhile, do the difficult emotional work — holding families together, managing conversations, carrying disappointments — and still feel guilty for wanting less responsibility. One group escapes adulthood. The other is buried under it.

Economics supplies the stage. Capitalism thrives on adolescence, because adolescents are ideal consumers. They are insecure, impulsive and endlessly dissatisfied. The middle-aged today do not grow up, they upgrade. New homes, new hobbies, new philosophies, new identities. But not new self-knowledge. We purchase novelty to distract ourselves from the uncomfortable truth that growth still hurts and no product removes regret.

The cruelest irony lies in parenting. Adults complain that children are irresponsible, addicted to screens and emotionally fragile. But those children are watching something instructive. They see a generation frightened by silence, terrified of boredom, and desperate for distraction. They will inherit not solutions, but software updates.

We tell ourselves this is evolution. Rather, it’s fear disguised as freedom.

We do not refuse adulthood because it is difficult. We refuse it because it is quiet. It is taking responsibility not for appearances, but for one’s inner life. It is knowing when to quit, when to stay and when to sit inside discomfort without lighting it on fire with entertainment.

Perhaps we are not ageing too fast. We are growing too little.
Middle age was once about settling into your life.
Now it is about escaping it stylishly.
We no longer want to grow up.
We want to be distracted until we die. 

That may be the saddest upgrade we ever accepted.