Okay, I think that there was a time when adults knew what it meant to be an adult and they had an easily identifiable pattern for what their life was supposed to be like.

The options that they had growing up were so limited that it would have taken a radical amount of effort to step outside of the pattern.

Specifically, someone like a serf or a peasant in the 1400s pretty much had the option of growing up to be a serf or a peasant.

They would reach the age of majority and then take up the profession that had been handed to them since birth.

If they really reached, they might have tried to switch from growing up as a farmer to being a priest or a carpenter or a blacksmith or a stone mason. But even so, the options were so limited that it constrained your future potential.

That constraint is a good thing in many ways. It helps you find purpose and meaning and balance in your life because you know there is no opportunity for you to become a king if you weren't born into it.

So, following that thread, I believe that the people that grew up in those constraints were generally happier because they knew that they had achieved the maximum of their potential just by sticking on the path that was available to them.

In contrast, there's so many options available to every single person born in the Western world that, now, we don't really have a clearly defined way of identifying with what it means to be an adult.

Which leads to this feeling of just being a child in a big body.

And, I'm not saying we should go back. I'm just saying that the issue is not with us feeling lost and marooned in a comparatively infinite expanse of life options.

It's just more that age itself is no longer a defining characteristic of what qualifies you to be an adult.