Will Teenagers Disappear?

By Walter Kirn

Of all the great postwar inventions--television, rock 'n' roll, the Internet--the greatest and most influential is, perhaps, the American teenager. Think about it. While the country has always had adolescents (human beings between the ages of 12 and 18, that is), it was only in the past 50 or 60 years that it had tens of millions of semi-grownups living in a developmental buffer zone somewhere between childish innocence and adult experience.

This teenage culture of pop songs, cars and acne ointments, of proms, allowances and slumber parties is still unknown in less developed countries. And until the reform of child-labor laws in the 1930s, the spread of suburbia in the 1940s and the rise of targeted youth marketing in the '50s, it was unknown here as well. Early 20th century adolescents were farmers, apprentices, students and soldiers--perhaps even wives and husbands--but not teenagers.

Spawned by a mix of prosperity and politics, teenagers are a modern luxury good. The question for the new century is, How much longer will teenagers exist, at least in the form that James Dean made famous? Twenty years, tops, is my guess. Teenagers, as classically defined, are already dying out, or at least changing into something different. The buffer zone they once inhabited is being squeezed out of existence for two reasons: children are growing up faster than ever before, and adults are growing up more slowly.

A few random facts. In the 1800s, social historians tell us, the average girl began to menstruate at 15; now the average age is 12. According to a recent national survey, 63% of teens reported using a computer in the 30 days previous to being polled. (For adults 50 and older, by the way, the figure was a mere 20%.) Not long ago, I, a 37-year-old, suffered a lapse of Internet access that was repaired by a 16-year-old who charges $50 an hour for his expert labor and trades stocks over the Web in his spare time. By comparison, when I was 16, I worked in a gas station for pocket change and thought that all stockbrokers lived in New York City.

An adolescent with his or her own money--real money, not parental charity--is not, in any meaningful sense, a teenager, but a capitalist early bird out to get the worm. This truth informs those ads for Internet stockbrokers in which young punks with goatees and ponytails give investment advice to balding bosses or land private helicopters in their parents' backyard. Exaggerations? Forty-year-olds wish. Not when silicon billionaires like Jerry Yang of Yahoo (31 and worth more than $3 billion) have proved that the traditional interval between a boy's first shave and his first million need not be much of an interval at all. All over the nation's high-tech landscape, people are retiring within years of taking their first legal sip of alcohol. Soon they'll be retiring before driving age. This won't be a problem for them, however, because they'll be able to afford chauffeurs.

The right to be economically unproductive until the day after college graduation--amendment one to the teenage constitution--will seem incredibly quaint if not downright crazy in a few years. Fourteen-year-olds in 1950 were not expected to know how to use metal lathes even if one day they might end up working for General Motors. But nowadays 14 is rather late to get in the cyberharness for a position somewhere down the road at Oracle. This trend will only continue and even speed up as parents and children alike see the advantages in mastering change at an early age, when human beings are most adaptable, instead of in their 20s, when there's a risk that they'll be behind the curve. And it's in the national interest to encourage this, since one solution to supporting a populace top-heavy with retirees is putting the young to work as soon as possible.

The next distinction to vanish will be social. One thing that used to make teenagers teenagers was the postponement of family responsibilities, but these days even 30- and 40-year-olds are postponing family responsibilities, often permanently. Coming of age is becoming a lifelong process--it's not just for Holden Caulfield anymore. Teenagerhood as preparation for life makes no sense when the life being prepared for resembles the one you've been living all along. Meanwhile, teenagers are discovering that there are medical ways to escape the angst part of growing up. Why have an existential crisis if you can be on Prozac? If current trends in psychiatry keep up, there won't be a drug or a diagnosis that kids and their parents won't be able to share. But a teenager on Prozac is not a teenager; he's a depressive studying for a driver's license. (And when Viagra starts being prescribed for shy 16-year-olds, we can be sure that teenagerhood has passed.) Personally, I foresee a time when people will enter "recovery" at 13 and pen best-selling memoirs on their struggles before they've even taken their SATs. Expect a crop of precocious old souls filling the talk shows with painful reminiscences of their abrupt descent into addiction after, in the months preceding their Bar Mitzvah, their Internet start-up lost half its market cap because of an unforeseen jump in interest rates.

The teenage years, as formerly defined, were a time for people to get away with things, to make mistakes and not really have to pay for them. The legal system has changed all that by trying kids as adults for serious crimes. And teenagers have contributed to this shift by committing so many of them--or at least so many horrific ones. In the future, however, even minor infractions once considered normal high jinks will draw severe reactions from the authorities. In 1999, brawling at a football game could get a kid expelled from school for years; in 2025, a spitball may get him life. As the penitentiary replaces detention, expect a generation of Goody-Two-Shoes too frightened to chew gum. Indeed, statistics tell us that youthful crime is decreasing already, and it's no wonder.

What will a world without teenagers look like? Like the adult world does now. Adolescents will feel the same pressures as their parents do: to succeed financially, to maintain their health, to stay on society's good side. What's more, adolescents will field these pressures using their elders' traditional techniques: spending money, taking medication, contracting for professional advice. The carefree years will become the prudent years, and the prudent years will continue throughout life. That's how it used to be, in the 19th century, and that's how it will be again in the 21st. The age of James Dean, the Ford Mustang and making out will seem, in retrospect, like what it was: a summer vacation from larger human history.

Walter Kirn's most recent book is Thumbsucker: A Novel