Will Teenagers Disappear?

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The right to be economically unproductive until the day after college graduation--amendment one to the teenage constitution--will seem incredibly quaint if not downright crazy in a few years. Fourteen-year-olds in 1950 were not expected to know how to use metal lathes even if one day they might end up working for General Motors. But nowadays 14 is rather late to get in the cyberharness for a position somewhere down the road at Oracle. This trend will only continue and even speed up as parents and children alike see the advantages in mastering change at an early age, when human beings are most adaptable, instead of in their 20s, when there's a risk that they'll be behind the curve. And it's in the national interest to encourage this, since one solution to supporting a populace top-heavy with retirees is putting the young to work as soon as possible.

The next distinction to vanish will be social. One thing that used to make teenagers teenagers was the postponement of family responsibilities, but these days even 30- and 40-year-olds are postponing family responsibilities, often permanently. Coming of age is becoming a lifelong process--it's not just for Holden Caulfield anymore. Teenagerhood as preparation for life makes no sense when the life being prepared for resembles the one you've been living all along. Meanwhile, teenagers are discovering that there are medical ways to escape the angst part of growing up. Why have an existential crisis if you can be on Prozac? If current trends in psychiatry keep up, there won't be a drug or a diagnosis that kids and their parents won't be able to share. But a teenager on Prozac is not a teenager; he's a depressive studying for a driver's license. (And when Viagra starts being prescribed for shy 16-year-olds, we can be sure that teenagerhood has passed.) Personally, I foresee a time when people will enter "recovery" at 13 and pen best-selling memoirs on their struggles before they've even taken their SATs. Expect a crop of precocious old souls filling the talk shows with painful reminiscences of their abrupt descent into addiction after, in the months preceding their Bar Mitzvah, their Internet start-up lost half its market cap because of an unforeseen jump in interest rates.

The teenage years, as formerly defined, were a time for people to get away with things, to make mistakes and not really have to pay for them. The legal system has changed all that by trying kids as adults for serious crimes. And teenagers have contributed to this shift by committing so many of them--or at least so many horrific ones. In the future, however, even minor infractions once considered normal high jinks will draw severe reactions from the authorities. In 1999, brawling at a football game could get a kid expelled from school for years; in 2025, a spitball may get him life. As the penitentiary replaces detention, expect a generation of Goody-Two-Shoes too frightened to chew gum. Indeed, statistics tell us that youthful crime is decreasing already, and it's no wonder.