My quarter-life crisis

Teenage angst is so 15 years ago – Dan Rookwood gets to the hurt of turning 30

By the time this magazine finds its way into your hands, I will have crossed over into a whole new tick-box on the questionnaires. I’ll be [cough] 30. It’s become as unmentionable chez moi as ‘the Scottish play’ for superstitious thespians. I’m convinced my pacifistic fear of hitting the big three-oh is making me fall apart: mentally, physically, literally.

Nearly 30 = getting old. It means that my chances of playing professional sport have well and truly receded with my hairline. And it means that I finally need to start facing up to my responsibilities. Turning 30 is a life landmark that demands you check your personal compass and look at the direction you’re heading. As such, it’s a right royal pain in the arse.

The age seesaw is virtually impossible to balance. You spend the first 21 years of your life wishing you looked older and the subsequent however-many wishing you looked younger. No sooner have you come of age than it’s gone again.

One of the bittersweet by-products of getting older is a tendency towards a fond-but-false recollection of one’s own halcyon days. “When I were a lad…” I had a golden age of invincibility from the years of 23 to 26 – after the awkward skin and skinniness stage, but before the inevitable onset of baldness and paunch – when I could eat and drink and spend and sow wild oats with impunity born of a liberating disregard for consequences. It was bloody great. I now appreciate that it’s exactly this kind of rosy-specs revisionism (and the panic it elicits) that causes middle-aged men to spunk their load on a new Ferrari and/or their secretary.

I’m tearing my hair out with worry that I’m going bald. When I brush my hair in the morning, it is off the pillow and into the bin. And I recently published a second edition of my chin. In fact, I feel like my face is on one of those time-lapse cameras they have in nature docos, ageing me before my very eyes like the Picture of Dorian Gray while David Attenborough whispers earnestly in the background.

It’s not solely about superficial vanity, of course; it’s also about a deeper, more insidious and corrosive bacterium of modern day life: status. My hang-ups about age are weighed down by a heavy, gnawing, ever-present ache that maybe I’ve not quite achieved what I ought to by this age, and that if I’m not careful, life will pass me by. Good grief, I’m nearly 30 and yet I am still fumbling through each day like a blind man patting the walls for an exit he can't find. By the time my dad was 30, he had a house and car, a wife and two kids, and an idea of what he was doing. I have none of those things.

But I do draw a modicum of comfort from the knowledge that I am far from alone. There are significant declines in the milestones today’s typical 20-somethings have reached. The often traumatic transition to adulthood is taking longer than ever before because of job-hopping, delayed marriage and a increasing tendency towards indecision – technically known as General Fuckwittery. According to census data, the average Australian aged 18-30 has had seven different jobs.

What constitutes adulthood? The significant shift from dependence to independence has not been closely studied in Australia so indulge me while I extrapolate from the American Sociological Association’s findings. Using benchmarks such as graduating; leaving mum and dad; finding a full-time job; getting hitched; having a kid; and attaining financial independence, the ASA found new trends. In 2000, 46 per cent of women and 31 percent of men had reached those markers by age 30. In 1960, 77 per cent of women and 65 per cent of men had reached those same markers by age 30. Among 25-year-old women, 70 per cent in 1960 had attained traditional adult status, as defined by reaching those benchmarks, whereas in 2000 only 25 per cent had done so.

Why? We have grown sick with affluenza. Each generation has a higher ‘life expectancy’ than the last. But the truth is, despite these great expectations, today's 20-somethings will be the first kids who won't do better than their parents. The cost and competition of living has never been higher. A university education doesn't deliver the same promises that it once did – with a 53 per cent increase in enrollment since 1970, the qualified competition for a job has intensified. Our grasping greed for instant gratification means that we are not as financially or emotionally secure and mature as mum and dad. With a record $42 billion-worth of crippling debt racked up in 2007, us Australians are living dangerously on credit – averaging $3,000 per person. Just last year, I had to ask my retired mother if she could pay off my Visa bill and I’d pay her back interest-free. I did the same thing the year I left university. So that’s nine years and no discernable financial progress. It’s embarrassing, but increasingly common. Nearly two-thirds of people in their early 20s are financially supported by their parents, while 40 per cent still receive assistance in their late 20s, according to the ASA.

One of the greatest things about being a man as opposed to a woman is that there is no alarm on our ticking biological clocks. So to a certain extent, we can take our time over getting our act together. But perhaps the absence of a natural deadline is unhelpful and unproductive. As the ASA’s stats would suggest, it is producing a Peter Pandemic, a generation of socially immature adultolescent males.

I began my 20s as a straggle-bearded idealistic revolutionary who thought he could change the world. I’m ending them as a realist who knows he can’t. But that doesn’t mean that I am powerless to get my house in order, both literally and metaphorically. To that end, I have a means: I’m finally paying off my debts and have even managed to save some money for the first time since I was about ten. My girlfriend and I will soon have enough in our joint savings account for a deposit. Oh yeah, it’s pretty rock ‘n’ roll round here, I can tell you.

Despite the onset of scintillating conversations about tracker mortgages and of increasingly painful hangovers, I’m finding that taking responsibility and control of my life at long last is making me feel better about getting older. Maybe turning 30 isn’t so bad after all. At least that’s what mummy said when I went over to pick up my washing last week.