Adulthood as tragedy

While reading the novel The Catcher in the Rye I thought a lot of times of my younger self, maybe because I used to hate adults and movies. I still don’t like movies though, they are too long for my attention span.

14-year-old Fernanda shared Holden’s opinions on adults. For me, adults were fake and superficial, and I especially hated when they had to go against their own code just to fit another person’s standards. As Holden would say, adults are the biggest phonies, and younger me would have agreed with him. But what about present-time me?

Well, I still believe that adults are phonies and as a consequence of that, I consider myself one of them too. Without realizing it, Holden is a phony too and when I realized that, I went ‘that was so me!’ while reading the book and laughing at this teenager who thinks that he’s better than anyone else; pretty much what we all thought at a certain age. But why do we become a sack of fakeness when adulthood gets closer to us? Let’s answer that question with an example that may not make sense at first but will eventually get you.

Adulthood 101: After taking the PSU you are supposed to choose a good college who offers you what you are looking for in a degree. However, your older cousin or uncle recommended to choose a college who has a good name, so when you are looking for a job, your future/ employee would choose you among many other aspirants. You will obviously need to work and make money, so you choose name over passion. What forces you to make this decision? The world of adulthood. The overly competitive, harmful, evil and fake world of adulthood.

Besides the phoniness of adults and how bad it may be, how can we survive without being like that? It’s really hard, if you ask me. I can recall our last class discussion where we were talking about the graphic novel Watchmen and how the ‘superheroes’ were not much of heroes but actors instead. Super actors. The same thing is represented in The Catcher in the Rye -minus the heroes and the possible end of the world- adults are phonies and our world is corrupted by society.

To survive in the world of adults, you have to fake many things: that you enjoy your job, that you don’t hate your boss and probably that you don’t regret that decision you took after taking the PSU. Deep down his thoughts, Holden understands this too, and that can be seen when he talks about his history teacher at Pencey:

"Even the couple of nice teachers on the faculty, they were phonies, too," I said. "There was this one old guy, Mr. Spencer. (…) But you should've seen him when the headmaster, old Thurmer, came in the history class and sat down in the back of the room (…) he'd start interrupting what old Spencer was saying to crack a lot of corny jokes. Old Spencer'd practically kill himself chuckling and smiling and all, like as if Thurmer was a goddam prince or something."

Holden knows that his teacher was angry at the headmaster but didn’t say anything, that’s why he calls him fake; a phony. Holden is a smart kid, who probably knows that his teacher needs his job and a fight with the headmaster is a mistake, but he’s still being aggressive towards Mr. Spencer’s behavior. He is disappointed and afraid.

Sure society and your boss can influence in your behavior and make you act to survive, but we still have to try to stand for what we really are. It sounds idealistic and beautiful, but it cannot happen because most of us –adults- have developed this thing called conformity. We want to be validated by other people, we want to fit in society -or any other aspect of life- so we act as expected even if it doesn’t represent our real self. Holden knows that at some point he will be like any other adult, so he tries to escape that being “the problematic kid” he is. However, he can’t be a problematic kid forever, and Holden lost the battle against adulthood when he started to realize the phonies around him, maybe when his hair started to get grey and he grew to be as tall as... well, someone tall.

People always say that there’s always a kid inside us, a kid who speaks the truth and acts following their heart. I strongly believe that if we wouldn’t have the responsibilities that come with adulthood, for a lot of people it would be easy to stop being phonies and would start living like their younger -true- self; but until that day comes, let’s just face the fact that we are fake and let’s live with it. Shouldn’t be hard since we already do it every single day anyway.

(my pessimistic final statement represented by a picture which is a complete  joke on its own | art by wikihow)