IGF CultureWatch

I was at a bar the other day when someone I'd just met shouted at me across the table, asking me how long I've been writing my column.

"Oh, 10 years," I shouted back.

He was startled. "I thought you were in your early 20s."

He meant it as a compliment, of course, more a reflection on what I look like than on my intellectual maturity. My sister has commented on it, too. She just turned 23 and the last time I saw her, she looked me up and down and said, "You dress like my friends."

But I've been thinking lately about what it means that I and my mid-30s friends all look-and act-like our compatriots in our 20s.

Adam Sternbergh of New York magazine calls people like us "grups": grown-ups, condensed. Grown-ups who refuse to grow up. Grown-ups who aren't sure what, exactly, being grown-up means.

"This is an obituary for the generation gap," he wrote. "This cohort is not interested in putting away childish things. They are a generation or two of affluent, urban adults who are now happily sailing through their 30s and 40s-and even 50s-clad in beat-up sneakers and cashmere hoodies, content that they can enjoy all the good parts of being a grown-up with none of the bad parts (dockers, management seminars, indentured servitude at the local Gymboree)."

We hang out in bars. We watch "Grey's Anatomy." We drink the newest drinks and watch the coolest movies and listen to the same music in the same iPods as the 25-year-old sitting next to us on the train. Heck, we're probably dating the 25-year-old sitting next to us on the train.

Adulthood is even more compressed for gay men and lesbians, I think, because there are fewer of us and we tend to clump together and we follow the general American trend of wanting to be younger than we are instead of older. So instead of young lesbians and gay men aspiring to be like their wise elders, the wise elders are getting tattoos.

Is this a bad thing? Well, not really. People should be able to wear and listen to what they want, right?

What struck me in the New York article was not the riffs on our grupster clothes-I thought those were funny and true. What struck me was this sentence: "For a grup, success isn't how many employees you have but how much freedom you have to walk or boogie-board away."

That sentence struck me because oh, that, that right there, is the problem for so many of us in our 30s and 40s. We define success as freedom. And freedom means no defined roles and an overabundance of choices.

So we wake up in the morning and our choices include not just what we're going to wear or make for dinner, but whether we're going to quit today, whether we should move across country and take up snowboarding, whether we should be single again or move in with our girlfriend and whether we should go back to school and try something completely new.

We grups are a people without a map. Especially we gay and lesbian grups, who don't have the traditional heterosexual plan to follow, who may not be asked by our families when we're going to have kids or get married or settle down.

Even if we are settled down-even if we have kids-we likely don't have a plan. Instead, we are literally unsettled, insecure in the knowledge that we can leave anything at any time.

We chose this shedding of obligations and requirements because it's how our generation defines freedom. We don't want to be the company men or women. We don't want to be trapped in gender or social roles. We don't want to be the person with a lifelong regret that we had never tried to make it as a rock musician or a novelist.

So we've immersed ourselves in youth culture-and not even our own youth culture but the culture of the millennials (whose music, admittedly, is very similar to the Gen X music that we played on our Walkmans growing up). We have immersed ourselves in a youth culture where, like in all youth cultures, the driving force is the individual pursuit of our own passions, whatever passions those happen to be at the moment.

This differentiates us, I suppose, from the "Greed-is-Good" corporate types of the 1980s. If that's what being grown-up is, we don't want it-and good for us.

But maybe it's time to define what being grown-up is for us grups. Because pursuing our own passions seems to make us happy in the short term but not content and secure in the long term. Many of us are still looking for purpose. We're still trying to find our way.

I suspect that this contentment will come when we start devoting ourselves to our community-our communities-instead of the latest band.

But until we solve the puzzle of who we're going to be when we grow up, we'll continue being grups-dressing and acting like we're in our 20s, as if seeming younger will give us more time to figure life out.