I'm 38, and feel like I'm only just turning the corner on adulthood. My career has been grad school followed by a string of postdocs: relatively sheltered from the consequences of failure. I haven't married or had kids, and I don't have a mortgage. (I do have substantial savings.)
In a bad mood, I think I'm retarded. In a good mood, I think it's neoteny. Certainly I'm better off than my parents, who unconsciously followed societal expectations, had kids in their early twenties and in so doing doomed themselves to decades of misery because they're profoundly incompatible. It's not clear to me that I've lost anything of value by the path that I've taken.
In a bad mood, I think I'm retarded. In a good mood, I think it's neoteny. Certainly I'm better off than my parents, who unconsciously followed societal expectations, had kids in their early twenties and in so doing doomed themselves to decades of misery because they're profoundly incompatible. It's not clear to me that I've lost anything of value by the path that I've taken.