The fantasy of independence
If you’re living in New York City, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or London, or wherever, it doesn’t really matter, and you’re between the ages of 18 and 30 (let’s say), you’re probably in the “independence phase” of your life.
If you’re lucky enough to have graduated from college, get a job, move to a Big City, and have everything go relatively well, there’s this idea that you get to spend time finding yourself and focusing on you: your career, your love life, your creative interests, your friends. This independent phase of life is the phase that really matters, we think. There’s some truth to this, of course. This is the phase where we form ourselves as individuals. It’s usually the phase before our parents get very old and we become parents ourselves.
This “independence phase” is independence from everything and everyone: the pursuit of oneself by focusing totally on oneself. It is unencumbered independence in all forms. We are free from stifling obligations and free to choose every aspect of our lives, from how we spend a Friday night, to the IKEA bathmat that speaks most to who we are deep inside. It’s the phase of life that we prepare and perfect ourselves for, so that we may go on to revel in our perfection for many years on end.
But even if everything is perfect, which it seldom is, the time each of us has for total self-focus feels so short—so shockingly, almost insultingly short, especially to the millennial sensibility—that I’ve begun to believe that independence itself is nothing more than a fantasy. I would go so far as to say the phase of life that we have been taught to believe matters most, this “independence phase,” doesn’t even exist.
This is certainly true from a historical perspective.