Puer Aeternus

Here is a Maureen Dowd podcast where she is talking about the first few weeks of Trump 2.0, and she mentions this term “puer aeternus,” which is basically some variation on man-child, Peter Pan Syndrome, boys who never grow up but still get power, etc. She talks about it in the context of Silicon Valley “bro-ligarchs” sitting in the first row of Trump’s indoor inaugural, but honestly, I think you could apply the idea of “never growing up” to wide swaths of society beyond simply the rich. Some have called this a “failure to launch” problem.

The term quite literally means “eternal boys,” I believe.

It’s easy to look at a guy like Zuck, who got into wake-boarding and cage-fighting after becoming a girl dad and now looks like he does regional sales for energy drinks, and think, “Yea, that’s an eternal boy.” Same with a guy like Musk, who has been in board rooms for decades and knows the general rules of civil comportment, yet is questioned about a potential Nazi salute and responds by tweeting a bunch of Nazi jokes he likely got off ChatGPT Version 1. Those guys seem like eternal boys, absolutely, and they were both in the front row at the inaugural, so I understand why that’s a common visual and parallel to draw.

We also know we have increasing rates of 30-somethings living at home. Talk about “eternal boys,” ya know? It’s hard to look at a stat like that and think, “This is a functional society.” However, I can also speak personally and say I’ve had several jobs — and several since I turned 35, years back — where the pay rate would cause me to probably have to live at home if I wasn’t either (a) making side money from writing or (b) married and had access to a second income for some bills. I get it, and I realize it’s hard for many people (feels hard myself many days), but the generalized expectations of “I am 34” is that you’d live on your own. Decades ago, that expectation might involve marriage and kids and a home — and it still does for millions — but that’s even less of an expectation these days, although I still think most of us have the general baseline of, “I’d like my kids out of the house when they have been alive 34 years.”

That’s becoming more challenging for lots of people too — I wonder if we will see more multi-generational homes in a single-family setting, as I already know several instances of that — so as these challenges mount and there's a “prerequisite” problem to some (you can’t achieve Z until you’ve achieved X and Y, which makes the process of “adulting” slower), we may have more “eternal boys” (and girls).

I’m not even gonna go down the Red Pill or 4Chan rabbit holes here. That’s a different type of “eternal boy.”

It does seem like a nice analogy for where we’re at, though. Agree?