By Sianna Zewdie (Y13)
This piece is scheduled to be published on Monday, the 21st of September. By this point, I will be eighteen years and two days old.
I have been told for some time that this is supposed to matter. That on Friday night, in those last minutes before my parents’ obnoxiously loud cuckoo clock ticks ever closer to the harsh clang of twelve, I will be teetering on the brink: not just of a new day, or of a new age, but of some grander transition: I will be suspended for moments in a strange limbo between the sweet nonsense of childhood whimsy and adulthood tedium. But then the moment will pass. I will be eighteen years old, with all the liberties and consequences it offers me. I will be an adult. Apparently.
And yet, I still somehow find it hard to comprehend the gravity of this particular birthday. The way I see it, there are two possible reasons for this. The first is that eighteen is simply an experience I cannot yet imagine; I can understand it in terms of logic, but I cannot feel it the way I do seventeen, sixteen, fifteen. It will remain abstraction for me until I live it.
The other is that my struggle to feel the significance of this birthday is maybe because it doesn’t have any. Somewhere in that final tick of the clock, apparently, a distinction will have been made, though there will be no corresponding distinction within me. And when I get up the next morning, I will not wake up wiser, steadier, or possessing of some innate understanding of how to be an adult – I will wake up with the same unfinished IAs on my laptop, the same pile of half-read books on my bedside table, the same shirt I tossed carelessly on the floor the night before. In short, I will still be me.
And yet, we have always been rather fond of making ceremonies out of time. We take a number, perfectly indifferent in itself, and hang things from it: permission, expectation, consequence. We decide that one number means childhood and another means adulthood, that one birthday should bring with it a new set of freedoms, while another marks the point at which certain freedoms are withdrawn. We judge that there are things a person may be trusted with at eighteen which they could not be trusted with at seventeen, as though the accumulation of that final year were capable of supplying, invisibly, and all at once, the judgment which the preceding seventeen had failed to produce. It is a strange amount of faith, I think, to put in a single birthday.
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November is approaching. In America, this means the familiar machinery of democracy will start turning again. Millions of hands will reach for millions of ballots, producing millions of little marks next to millions of little names. Papers upon papers: collected, transported, sorted, scanned, counted, recounted, until finally, finally they become winners and losers. The occasion is, of course, the midterm elections.
For Americans living abroad, however, November begins rather earlier. Their ballots must cross borders and oceans weeks before the rest of the country goes to the polls. A week ago, the clerks of Bergen County, New Jersey shipped one such ballot across the Atlantic – or, more accurately, sent it through the internet, compressed into an attachment and delivered to an inbox thousands of miles away, ready for me to open.
Anyone who knows me will know that politics is hardly a new interest: I have acquired opinions about it with considerably more ease than I have acquired the wisdom to hold them. But until now, those opinions have been mostly harmless. I could have as many of them as I liked – could read in the news about an election and complain about it, debate about it, write about it, bore someone about it, and then go to bed with the comforting knowledge that none of it had actually been entrusted to me. And yet, for the first time, with this ballot, an opinion I had spent years developing has somewhere to go.
The United States once set the voting age at twenty-one; in 1971, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment lowered it by three years, guaranteeing citizens of eighteen and older the right to vote on the basis of age. It was given after years of sending boys of eighteen to Vietnam to be shot at in the name of a government, to kill and die for a state, only to come home and be told that they were too young to have a say in the laws they had bled for. The amendment does not testify to a discovery about the maturity of the young, but rather to an instance of how rights have most often arrived in this country – not as gifts from the powerful but as debts they could no longer avoid paying – and I do not think it is a coincidence that the birthday I have been told to treasure has a war at the bottom of it.
In truth, the ballot is less a certificate of maturity than a declaration of membership, a statement by the state that whoever holds it belongs in the count, whatever else may be said of them. To grant membership is to draw a line around the political community, deciding where authority begins and ends. But where that line falls is entirely a matter of historical precedent and state convenience. There is nothing inherently sacred about eighteen: since 2007, Austria has allowed sixteen-year-olds to vote, while post-revolutionary France set the minimum voting age at 25. The alternative to an arbitrary line, however, is a test of readiness, and we do not have to imagine what becomes of such tests, because the United States has kindly already run the experiment for us. In the Jim Crow South, the examination was called a literacy test, and registrars who had decided in advance who would pass it asked Black applicants – some of them teachers and college graduates – to interpret obscure clauses of the state constitution while white men who could barely read were waved through. Whoever is given the power to decide when a person is ready is, in the same stroke, given the power to decide that certain people never will be. This is why the state cannot wait until you are ‘ready’: it is the party with the greatest interest in the answer, and so the last one that should be trusted to give it. An arbitrary line, at least, applies to everyone alike, and – at least, supposedly – is immune to the shifting criteria determined by whoever happens to hold power at a given time.
There is something profoundly egalitarian about that, and something profoundly absurd. The ballot makes no distinction between the person who has spent twenty years studying politics and the person who has decided how to vote five minutes before entering the booth. The historian, the fanatic, the apathetic, the genius – whatever gulf of knowledge, wealth, or experience may separate them, the ballot insists that there is one respect in which we stand on the same ground.
That is a fundamentally liberal-democratic idea: that political equality can be created, or at least approximated in defiance of every visible inequality between us, and it works only because of what it is for. A government derives its legitimacy from the people; the people, in turn, are granted a mechanism by which their judgement may enter the machinery of government, and a mechanism reserved for those who know best would very quickly cease to belong to the people at all.
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So perhaps we have been asking the question backwards: if eighteen does not make a person an adult, then what, exactly, does? When the law is removed from the equation, adulthood seems to have rather less to do with birthdays than with a collection of circumstances: you leave home, you earn your own money, you pay your own bills, you make your own decisions without asking your parents whether you are allowed to make them. Essentially, we equate adulthood with independence.
But independence is not merely a quality of character – it requires a certain arrangement of the world. It requires money, somewhere to live, and work that pays enough to keep you there; it sometimes requires parents who can afford to let you leave them without asking you to come back. And these things do not begin at eighteen, any more than they begin at sixteen, or twenty-one. They arrive when they can, and sometimes they do not arrive at all.
We like to imagine that independence is something a person acquires through courage or discipline, but there are some forms of independence that cannot be willed into existence: you cannot pay rent with maturity, or feed yourself with good intentions, or build a life without first having the means to sustain one.
There is something almost comic, then, in the way we speak of adulthood as though it were a door through which everyone is expected to walk on the same birthday. One eighteen-year-old may already be working, paying rent, contributing to a household. Another may have parents who can afford to keep them suspended in a kind of artificial infancy – sheltered, fed, and kept warm in an incubator paid for by money they did not earn. The difference between them is not an internal calculation of fortitude; it is simply that wealth allows a person to remain a child long after their body has grown up.
I know this because I am that child in the nursery. At this school, many of us are. We sit in the cafeteria, arguing over minor grievances, complaining about course workloads, gossiping about teachers, making plans for universities and careers and lives that stretch far beyond anything we can yet see – and all the while, beneath the seriousness with which we discuss our futures, there is the silent fact that most of the practical machinery of our present has already been taken care of. We are permitted – encouraged, even – to soar, to project our ambitions into the sky, precisely because the floor beneath us has been so thoroughly cushioned by our parents’ money. It is an extraordinary gift to have: this freedom to spend our adolescence imagining what we might become because somebody else has made sure that, for the moment, we are safe enough not to have to become it yet. And so, when our conversation in the cafeteria turns to how little like adults we feel, I wonder if we are confessing to the ultimate luxury: that we can grieve the loss of a childhood we have not yet been required to leave behind.
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Go into my Google Drive, and you will see what school has spent over a decade preparing us for. Alongside the ordinary schoolwork are slideshows about climate change, reflections on required community service, plans for projects built around the Sustainable Development Goals. Document after document tells me to think critically, serve my community, engage with the world, solve problems, collaborate, innovate, take initiative. All that time we are given before adulthood has to go towards something, I suppose. Somewhere among the hundreds of files is an ideal version of me, a model built from everything I could become: responsible, informed, and never, never, late. She would be an impressive person. I have spent years being educated to become her.
Perhaps this is what schools mean when they tell us that young people are the future. It is always delivered as a compliment, spoken with a beaming, benevolent expression that suggests they are doing us the great favor of believing in us before we have quite earned it. It is the sort of thing adults say when they want to reassure themselves that all this effort is going somewhere, that the hours spent teaching us about government and climate change and inequality and civic responsibility will eventually produce people capable of doing something with what they have been taught. We are the future, apparently. We will be the voters, the workers, the parents, the leaders; we will inherit the institutions and problems and unfinished business of the people who came before us, and one day, when we are sufficiently qualified to do so, we will take over the world. And, in almost the same breath, we are told that these are supposed to be the best years of our lives.
There is something strange about being told this while you are still living them. We are asked to treat youth as both a preparation for life and the part of life we will spend the rest of our lives missing. We are supposed to be becoming someone while simultaneously appreciating who we are before we become them, to enjoy our freedom while also using it responsibly, to look forward without rushing and look back without regret. The demands are not individually unreasonable; it is their coexistence that begins to feel impossible.
Youth therefore acquires the strange quality of something already lost. We are seventeen and already nostalgic for it; eighteen for me will arrive carrying, somehow, the knowledge that it will one day be gone too. The years are supposed to be golden, but we are constantly being shown their future value as though we are meant to experience them twice: once while living them, and again years later when we look back and decide we failed to understand how beautiful they were.
To feel nostalgia in advance is to live in anticipation of your own regret. It leaves very little room for these years to be ordinary. We are allowed to be unhappy, but not for too long; confused, but not without eventually finding the lesson; bored, but somehow expected to look back and discover that even that was beautiful. We are taught to measure our lives against the grand myth of The Teenage Experience™, as if these years were a performance we are required to stage, complete with crucial rites, legendary evenings, and dramatic heartbreaks, before the curtain falls on our youth.
And yet this convoluted, idealized script is made harder to follow by the fact that real life keeps breaking through the set. When I turn eighteen on Saturday, I will not be a hypothetical citizen twenty years from now, waiting somewhere in the distance to become relevant. I am already living inside the consequences of decisions made long before I had any say in them. Climate change does not have the courtesy to wait until I am old enough to feel properly prepared for it. Rising housing costs will not wait until I have finished university and acquired a respectable salary. Political instability, economic uncertainty, technological upheaval – none of these belong exclusively to the future. They are already part of the world in which we are growing up.
In January, Meagan Fallone came to school as a guest speaker on artificial intelligence. Midway through her talk, she offered a casual observation that was meant, I think, to sound invigorating, but was in fact quite terrifying: because technology is now accelerating exponentially, most of us in the room would not have a single stable career, but would instead be forced to acquire dozens of new job titles and skill sets across our lifetimes solely to remain employable. To sit there at seventeen and be told that we would spend our lives continually reinventing ourselves under the threat of obsolescence, that even the traditional reward for entering adulthood – a modest measure of stability – has been revoked before we have even arrived is to realize how hollow the promise of “inheriting the future” really is.
To inherit a world that is burning, inflated, and politically fractured is not a gift; it is an unpaid invoice. The slogan of “youth as the future” allows the present custodians of power to perform a slick rhetorical trick: their failures are transformed into our responsibilities, and our forced lifetimes of perpetual economic adaptation are reframed as an exciting adventure. They praise our resilience so they do not have to apologize for making us need it.
But perhaps this is what coming of age has always meant. No one inherits a finished world. Every generation arrives in the middle of something: wars already underway, economies already changing, political arguments already decades old, institutions built by people no longer around to explain their design. And yet, we seem to have always believed that we were born too late. I think of Friedrich Schiller, writing Die Götter Griechenlandes in the eighteenth century, mourning a world in which the gods still walked among men, and W.B. Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium written centuries later, longing to escape a world of youth and decay for one in which beauty might escape the indignities of time. They were separated by generations, by history, by entirely different worlds; and still they looked backwards, or elsewhere, towards some imagined place in which things had once been more whole simply because it was gone.
Over the summer, I watched Midnight in Paris. Gil spends his nights transported back to Paris of the 1920s, convinced that he has been born into the wrong age. But the people he finds here are looking backward too, toward an earlier Paris, an earlier beauty, an earlier world. It is a joke, but a rather melancholy one: the golden age keeps moving backwards. The seduction of the past runs through literature and art with the persistence of a recurring dream, the belief that somewhere behind us there was a time of uncorrupted grace, or stillness and order that the present has managed to ruin. This pattern says something about the societies from which it emerges; we like to imagine that we are living through the great exception, that our particular moment in history is somehow uniquely fractured, uniquely difficult, uniquely unlike what came before. Perhaps this is one of the small vanities of youth: to mistake the discovery of the world’s difficulty for its creation.
And yet, acknowledging that every generation feels this way does not mean our present predicament is an illusion. Something is distinctly different about the environment in which we are coming of age – not because the world’s crises are fundamentally unprecedented, but because our relationship to them has been radically transformed.
The internet did not invent global calamity – there were wars before there were live streams of them, economic crises before there were Instagram infographics, political corruption before there were endless threads on Twitter. What has changed is not the existence of catastrophe but its immediate, unmediated proximity. If adulthood was once imagined as the moment when the door was finally opened, and the child was permitted to look out upon the world, ours has been a rather different initiation. The world came rushing in first. It arrived through the screen in our hands, uninvited and without much regard for whether we were prepared to receive it: wars, elections, fires, people our own age living through things we could barely comprehend.
Knowledge creates its own peculiar burden: we can know what is happening without being able to stop it. We can understand the consequences of decisions without having had any part in making them. We can be old enough to care deeply about the world and still young enough to be told that we have not lived in it long enough to know what we are talking about. This is the contradiction at the heart of being young today. We are not protected from the world so much as introduced to it before we have been given any real power within it.
But I do not think this is entirely a tragedy. There is something morally important about knowing. It matters that we learn which wars are being fought, which governments are making decisions, which people are being displaced, which futures are being decided. To remain innocent of these things is not necessarily to remain innocent in any deeper sense; sometimes it is simply to have been spared the knowledge that other people are paying the price for the world in which you are comfortable.
And so the very screen that brought the world to us early prevents us from looking away. It strips us of the luxury of ignorance before the state grants us the authority of age, forcing us into an intellectual adulthood long before the legal one arrives. Turning eighteen, therefore, is less about a sudden intellectual awakening than a shift in public standing. It is the point at which awareness is no longer merely something we possess, but something we are formally permitted to act upon – the moment the state finally hands over the mechanism of accountability and demands that the witness become a participant. It matters, then, what we do with what we have been given – and perhaps that is where we find adulthood: somewhere in that gap between knowing what is happening and deciding what, however imperfectly, to do about it.
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I printed out my ballot yesterday and filled it in. I deliberated for thirty minutes over my choice for senator, torn between Veronica Fernandez and Joanne Kuniansky, even though my vote feels mostly symbolic, given that Cory Booker is a shoo-in for the seat anyway. I will mail my vote in as soon as I have a chance to bike down to the Coppet post office. For now, it sits there on my desk waiting, much like the birthday itself: something whose consequences have arrived before the moment that is supposed to make them possible.
There is nothing to do but wait. On Saturday, the clock will tick, a number will change, and I will remain the same person I was at seventeen years and three hundred and sixty-four days old – sheltered by privilege, burdened by information, and wary of the mythologies built around my own youth. But if adulthood cannot be granted by a birth certificate or willed into existence by maturity, it can at least be practiced. It is partly a matter of what the state permits you to do, but also what you choose to do once you have been given that permission. Perhaps that is all I can ask of eighteen: to begin doing something with what I have spent these years learning, and to let that knowledge follow me into the small decisions of an ordinary afternoon – putting the ballot in its envelope, getting on my bicycle, and heading down to the lake while the light is still good.
