Arrested Development

Since moving to DC, I've had the curious lifestyle experience of nearly all of my good friends being younger than I am. This has its advantages -- for one thing, I have a great social life and I know so much about cool music and television that I may well be the hippest guy from my 1987 high school class. On the other hand, I am 35, with a mortgage, a decent-paying day job and a husband. So it's a little heady to find myself constantly surrounded by "twixters."

Profiled by Time magazine last week, these folk are the successors to the Generation X slackers of my post-college years. They're roughly 24-28 and are referred to less-than-charitably as "full-grown men and women ... who dress and talk and party as they did in their teens, hopping from job to job and date to date, having fun but seemingly going nowhere." According to social scientists, they are the wave of the future -- a new stage of development between adolescence and adulthood (i.e. marriage/parenthood) that is the natural product of affluence and social tolerance in First World cultures. (Not to mention easy credit.) And like so many trends, this too was pioneered by the Gays, many of whom haven't discovered any outside boundary of the phase.

While some do-good educators and conservative pundits see twixterism as the problematic outgrowth of indulgent child-raising and the instant gratification society, The Head Kid thinks the kids are alright.

But if twixters are getting married later, they are missing out on some of the social-support networks that come with having families of their own. To make up for it, they have a special gift for friendship...They throw cocktail parties and dinner parties. They hold poker nights. They form book groups. They stay in touch constantly and in real time, through social-networking technologies like cell phones, instant messaging, text messaging and online communities like Friendster...

Now those are the kind of redeeming qualities I can support.

P.S. The Head Kid links to an interesting service (of highly questionable legality) that delivers registration IDs and passwords for a variety of online sites so you can access subscription-only content. You didn't hear about it from us.