Adult crisis

The adult is going through critical moments, through an evolutionary crisis that can be equated to the adolescent crisis. You cannot think of adulthood as before, it is transforming . We call this evolutionary process an adult crisis.

Changes in adulthood

The subject who is beginning to age may see this stage as something chaotic and distressing. As we enter adulthood we can see that we are aging rapidly. We can see it on our face, and feel it in our muscles and joints, those joints that we didn’t even know existed a few years ago.

Our bodies and minds begin to take their toll on us and we begin to wonder why we didn’t do so many things that we would have liked to do as “young people.” Even if we feel that our life is headed the wrong way and that we have been left with several unresolved things, we must relax, because nothing is lost yet, we are only halfway there.

Before, adulthood held that the years bring wisdom that should be taught. Today that idea has been blurred. This intergenerational social task of transmitting ideas and values ​​- religious, philosophical, cultural, aesthetic, political, etc. – is broken. While the adult is in crisis because the mandate he held no longer exists. In this stage of adulthood, some people may begin a depressive picture , feel fearful, distressed and may even begin to have anxiety disorders , phobias and different behaviors. This occurs because of the crisis they go through in adulthood.

Erik Erikson  (German psychoanalyst), in his theory of psychosocial development, postulated that personality is influenced by society. And as we well know,  the culture of each society and the environment that surrounds us are the basis of people’s behavior and personality  , for this reason the subject tends to vary his behavior over the years.

Adulthood is divided into three stages:

1. young adult (approximately 28 to 35 years old).
2. average adult (35 to 50 years approximately).
3. late or mature adult. (from 50 to 65 years old approximately)

It should be noted that the evolutionary categories are focused on economic conditions. In this sense, the end of adulthood enters the legal parameters, when one goes from activity to passivity in labor matters.

Adulthood according to Barry Schwartz

The American psychologist Barry Schwartz did extensive research on adulthood and came to the conclusion that what happens in the so-called “adult crisis” is actually a paradox of choice. The paradox is that in an age when we are presented with many more options than previous generations (from consumer goods, geographic residence, career options, etc.), this set of possibilities leaves many people unable to make a lasting decision. and satisfactory.

Like Schwartz, other researchers have identified a threshold at which “decision fatigue” emerges, a point in a series of choices in which a person’s energy and enthusiasm for evaluating concessions drop precipitously. Bottom line: we get tired of making decisions.

The socio-cultural incidence in the adult crisis

There is talk of the slowing down of adulthood, that is, the existence of cultural ideals that become a kind of mandate and make the adult have to resemble the adolescent, which is helped by the media. This phenomenon generates a generational overlap, the adolescent seeks to know who he is and for that he knows who he is not -an adult-, but if the adult world experiences a slowdown, who is the adolescent different from?

There is a token debt reversal, which generates guilt. Parents are emotionally dependent on their children, so they are frustrated in their narcissism. The child teaches the father, whom he does not want to resemble . The young person does not want to resemble the adult, but vice versa. Authority no longer holds , adults are no longer ideal, and reaching the adult world is unwanted. There is a transformation of paternal and maternal roles and functions and of social representations about parenting, a loss of gender ideals.

The revolution of the 20th century, as many authors agree, is the transformation of women , aided by the contraceptive pill, managing to separate sexuality from reproduction, transforming the maternal role in this sense.

Another aspect that makes up the crisis of adulthood is the world of work that is no longer organized as firmly as before. At the same time, the failure of the married couple , because if love is the most irrational feeling, how are we going to be able to sustain something rational, such as the formation of the couple, into something irrational? Before, couples were not configured by love but by agreement, that’s why they lasted. There is also confluent love, two people who meet to feel pleasure, to accompany each other, until it ends, without mediating anything political and less religious. There is the lack of fulfillment of the expectations regarding the other, the failures in embodying the aspects of the ideal of the self or ideal self deposited in the other.

The games of power and  possession have also changed . Before, it was the man over the woman and the role of the provider and protector father, although it is a very strong mandate, it is also becoming blurred.