twenty-something

Lately I've been reading a lot of essays, mostly on NYT, about what it's like being in your mid-twenties at this time and age. One asks what's taking us so long to grow up, while another describes the members of Generation Me as "millennials born between 1982 and 2002" who are "entitled whiners".

Born 1984, I'm turning 26 in December and I guess this is just a sort of mid-life rethinking catching up with me. According to the first NYT article, sociologists define "transition to adulthood" as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child.

Situation check: I was twenty when I graduated from college, and I've been away from home since 16 (at the start of college); have been financially independent for more or less four or five years; have been in a committed, long-term relationship for three years, though by virtue of nonexisting laws, I might never be able to marry the person I want to be with for the rest of my life. We have no plans of having children.

I wonder if we're in the minority or the norm -- these twenty-somethings living away from home to be near the workplace, working eight to nine hours for five days a week and rarely seeing our parents and families outside of weekends or important family celebrations like birthdays or Christmas.




We have fastfood dinners or something easily prepared either before going to work in the morning or after coming home from work at night (for the next day). We do our own laundry during what little spare time we have. We either aim for satisfactory careers, or at the very least, jobs that allow us to do whatever we want on the side. (My choice is the career that lets me write without having to starve while at it.) We spend on junk food we didn't have money for when we were younger. We do not overthink buying gadgets (meaning, we buy them when we can). We do not overthink spending the money we earn over fine dining and books and movies and music.

We medicate ourselves when we're sick. We're connected to the Internet 24/7. We see more of our siblings online than in person. We date and we do sleepovers and we do not think of asking permission from anyone; we move in, we move out, we move on -- we move as we let ourselves. We set up our own bank accounts. We pay our own bills.

We roll with the punches. We are not afraid to ask why or how. We are in control, and yet it seems to me that we are in constant search for something.

*

When I first moved out of our house, I was sixteen and my parents paid for my rent until I was 22. I've been paying my own way since moving out of QC in 2007. I acquired my smoking vice during freshman year, was found out by my parents when I was 18 and quit when I was 23 for a girl I wanted to keep seeing FOREVER. I've been open about liking girls since I was 18. I think my parents knew on their own. Coming out was an uneventful thing that came and went without much fanfare, in retrospect -- no violent reactions or pleadings or comments that hinted they think this is all "just a phase" -- just this quiet acceptance that I was old enough to know what I was doing.

When Andrea and I got together, I told my parents about her in the same breath that I told them we were living together. Auntie registered mild shock; Dad was sipping his wine. We spent one New Year's Eve together in my parents' house, where I introduced her to my extended family, who all looked as if they saw it coming anyway. On the other hand, I spent one Holy Week vacay with her family, and we think they've all pieced things together just fine.

And now we spend our nights in this rented studio apartment in rural Makati; we part in the morning (she leaves for work at 9, I leave around noon) and see each other again at night (she comes home around 7, I come home around 9). We cook dinner, do our chores, spend our weekends dining in malls or doing the grocery, and holidays staying in bed and reading or listening to music through shared earphones or watching downloaded episodes of foreign shows.

There used to be a time when the days I spent away from my parents' house had been my "temporary life" -- I remember being young and in college and homesick and always looking forward to taking my laundry home on weekends. But now, I really can't think of any other way this life could play out, having found comfort in this habit my girlfriend and I have established together for the last three years.

That said -- certainly, an article on NYT can't possibly be wholly truthful and applicable to however things are in this country. I'm still waiting to stumble upon something by someone like Michael Tan writing something like it, or a study by some of this country's foremost psychologists about the Filipino 20-something today. I'm sure they'd have a lot to say -- if it's true that Generation Me spans 1982-2002, then the resulting set of people will be products of the 1983 Aquino Assassination, the 1986 People Power Revolution, the 1997 Asian Crisis, 9/11, the 2001 ouster of former President Estrada and SIX PRESIDENTS IN ALL. Not to mention being in the texting capital of the world, a place also obsessed with Friendster, Multiply and Twitter all at the same time.

Also, if this is true -- it means that my siblings and I, for all our gaps in years, actually belong to the same generation of "entitled whiners". Whether this would eventually prove to be true at all, or either a blessing or a curse to our parents -- I guess the only way to find out is through waiting.