The mid-twenties “Referendum”

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Sometimes you stumble over the kind of essays/articles that just make your day. Yesterday, I found this gem called “The Referendum” by Tim Kreider on the Happy Days column in the New York Times. (The magic of the piece is as much in the writing as in the message it conveys, so though I’ll do my best to sum it up here, I’ll ask you to go read it for the full effect.) Kreider, a forty plus male who lives alone and has never been married, and who is very happy with his life decisions, discusses the phenomenon of comparison and judgment that goes on between friends and acquaintances of a certain age (30+) that he calls “the Referendum.” Married people judge single people. Parents frown at the childless. Forget “let live.” In the age of constant comparison, everyone wants to know how everyone else is living in order to judge how their own lives measure up.

Kreider writes:

Yes: the Referendum gets unattractively self-righteous and judgmental. Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.

Because, ultimately, in this age of choice, we’re terrified of making the wrong choices. “Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control.” We can’t do it over.

I’m not at the age that Kreider determines to be prime-time for the Referendum. But, as someone in my mid-twenties, I can nonetheless see the active comparing going on all around me, all the time. Just yesterday, in one of my graduate school courses, another student (who is about to turn thirty) said with regret that his friend group has reached that point where people can be declared failures. “But you’re so young!” the professor exclaimed. “You can’t rule people out already!” My classmate frowned, “At this point, the failures have branded themselves.”

Gulp.

At 24, I play the comparison game plenty. Sure, I’m not comparing myself to married people with children, but after my boyfriend showed me an article about the newly appointed 26 year old female Managing Editor of The New Yorker, I was gloomy for a week, muttering about it all being “too late.” And I know I’m not alone. When my friends get together, the conversation often turns to what other acquaintances of ours are up to, the undertone being: are they enviable or pitiable? And while interviewing Gen Y:ers about work-life issues, I heard a great deal of anxiety voiced by twenty-somethings who measured themselves against the lives of others.

Social networking sites like Facebook have made it even easier to perpetuate this kind of behavior. Out of the over 1,000 people on Facebook who are my “friends,” only a fraction are really friends in the traditional sense of the word. But the vast sea of acquaintances I have access to online makes the comparison game incredibly easy, and addictive, to play. I can see what job someone has, what their apartment looks like, what kind of clothes they wear, their academic pedigree, if they have a significant other or a dog, if they are taking exotic trips, and if their friends look attractive and successful. And don’t play high and mighty. You know you’ve looked at someone’s Facebook page at least once and felt great relief that your life was better than theirs. Similarly, I’m sure you, like me, have stumbled across some old contact who grew up gorgeous, fluent in six languages, and saving the world, and not been able to stop yourself from scanning through their interests, their photos, their friends and feeling…terrified.

Clearly, the Referendum is not contained to people in their thirties and above. We twenty-somethings do plenty of fretting and back-patting too. For all of you caught in the Referendum rat race, do yourselves a favor, read Kreider’s article. It’ll make you feel better…until you stumble across one of those enviable people and once again wonder: Am I doing it all wrong?

- Astri