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I love to observe people from a social and cultural perspective. Lately I see the new breed of actors-this topic especially pertains to men- and I notice that they all have a youthful demeanor. Chris Pine, Channing Tatum, Shia Le Beouf...etc etc. These are men in their late 20s to mid 30s and yet if you compare them to men of the same age from previous eras, it is so blatantly obvious.
I won't even go so far back as say the 50s or 60s but even the previous batch of young stars(Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Costner etc) appear so mature at the same age. And if you go further back it is even more obvious. James Dean died at 23 and there is no way in hell he looked and behaved like a 23 year old man of today.
Actors like Harrison Ford, Paul Newman, Brando, Tom Berenger, Robert Mitchum, Steve Mcqueen and those types of guys are just nowhere to be found. Look at any new films. Actors even enacting 30 somethings look much younger and fresh.
Now let me put forth this opinion in the larger context.
At my age 28, most of my friends(men and women) are not married. Many don't intend to marry until well in their 30s. This wasn't the case in the olden days. A 28 year old man was not only married but perhaps even had a child to support. Yes, he was a father! My father was one and his father was even younger.
Look at mental illnesses- depression, anxiety, ADHD(very important). Why didn't young men(or women) in older generations pop ADHD tabs like candy?
Is it circumstantial?
The great depression meant they had to get off their behinds and work, the wars meant you became a man at 18. No worries of a global recession like we had in 2008. No need to worry about getting a masters degree when you could get by with a high school diploma(meaning you could start earning and start a family asap).
I found this on a thread to a similar query:
New breed of actors: They play at being men, because they don't know the first thing about being a man.
The first thing about being a man is: you put the safety and well-being of your friends and family first and foremost, no matter what. This is the #1 reason men tend to die much younger than women, STRESS. The stress of being a provider. Unless they were like John Belushi and Chris Farely, shoving everything in sight up their nose but that's a different story.
Those who play at being men: they put their safety and well-being first and foremost.
But they can hardly help acting like children well into middle-age since they were essentially robbed of their childhood. It's just arrested development. Like someone else mentioned, the men of the greatest generation became men at 18 because there was no other choice.
It's the marketing to the youth culture. Nothing more, nothing less. Our society is youth obsessed, and companies can sell much easier to insecure, demanding young people. Maturity is a hard sell. Even that older folks still have the bulk of the disposable money in our society, teens have access to it through them. And older folks want to look and appear 'younger' as well. To the point of being ridiculous.
In the good ole days, there weren't helicopter parents swarming over their children at the faintest opportunity for mischief.
"Son, you've just turned 8... Bout time you learned how to use the vertical band saw. Have fun!"
Seriously, the way my dad describes it, the kids were swapping transmissions at 13 with no supervision whatsoever. And what do ya know, working class boomers can damn near diagnose the trickiest of mechanical malfunctions. Better yet, they can quickly think of effective solutions that get the wheels turning in no time. The youngins will be in quite a bind once they are pushing their parents around in wheel chairs. Their only hope is that there will be an app for that
People were "more mature" because there were a lot more poor people (percentage-wise) than there are today. At the turn of the 20th century, the sons of the middle and upper classes were going to high schools and colleges, and even some daughters as well. These young people frequently didn't expect to marry until their late 20s or early 30s. Women married younger because there were fewer educational and/or employment opportunities for them.
The poor, OTOH, had a very short "youth": Child Labor
In the good ole days, there weren't helicopter parents swarming over their children at the faintest opportunity for mischief.
"Son, you've just turned 8... Bout time you learned how to use the vertical band saw. Have fun!"
Seriously, the way my dad describes it, the kids were swapping transmissions at 13 with no supervision whatsoever. And what do ya know, working class boomers can damn near diagnose the trickiest of mechanical malfunctions. Better yet, they can quickly think of effective solutions that get the wheels turning in no time. The youngins will be in quite a bind once they are pushing their parents around in wheel chairs. Their only hope is that there will be an app for that
Actually there were. I recall we used to call their male offspring "mama's boy" back in JrHS in the 1970s.
As to the OP's question I think whenever life is more difficult then there is more the necessity to mature quickly.
In the "Old" days kids weren't coddled with the idea that they should have this thing we refer to as a "childhood" to enjoy.
They were put to work as soon as they could walk.
Four year-olds fed the farm animals. Six year-olds harnessed the horses.
Twelve year-olds plowed the fields.
Today's kids are being baby-sat when they are 12.
They don't need a "childhood". They should make themselves useful as soon as possible. There should be some sort of work program for all ages after school. They would have a break and a snak and then to work for 2 to 3 hours depending on the time their classes were over. It could be some sort of light industry with jobs suitable to each age with periodic breaks for the younger ones. They would learn something about whatever business was employing them. They would be paid which would teach them that they are rewarded for their work.
This would get them home about the same time their parents got home from work and there would be no need to have some baby sitter or kids just running loose doing who knows what in the interim.
The vocational - occupational - educational structure was different in the 1950s and 1960s than now. Back in the '50s, my grandpa on my mother's side was making the equivalent of over $100,000 at times in the mines on Minnesota's Iron Range. He was about 20 then and had a sixth-grade education (though he does seem a lot smarter today!). I wouldn't say he's a typical case, but in post-war American prosperity, the average blue-collar (white) guy could find a job that paid enough to support a wife and kids at home, according to the 1950s standard of living at least. He married my grandma at about 23 years of age, and went on to have seven children with her.
Now every high school graduate is encouraged to go to college, where they will spend at least four years. Both women and men are encouraged to start careers outside of the home. Formerly called "fornication", premarital sex is almost fully accepted to the point where being a virgin at 20 is considered unusual, and having multiple partners before marriage is the norm. Pornography is available to the average teenager or young adult 24/7/365; most boys at least occasionally indulge, and many regularly.
And so teenagers are propelled into an extended adolescence, in which they are free to do as they please, and live a totally self-serving lifestyle focused on ME. Obligations have been stripped; for example, a thread in the Parenting forum had as an OP a mother of a pregnant girl around 17 or 18 years of age, asking what she should do. Several suggestions in the thread were to suggest that she abort "it" and get on with her life, or even to kick her out and not provide any financial support for the baby! Society has become very individualistic, both in its conception of rights and in its conception of obligations. Granted, in past times she could have been sent to a monastery, but that was because of shame, which is an emotion very common in collectivist societies.
As for your question about drugs: probably because they didn't have as good an idea of how the brain worked. Diazepam (Valium) was popularly popped for anxiety. Men drank alcohol to ameliorate their depression. (Doctors used to prescribe it, at least for other medical problems) Psychiatry was not as developed as today, although Ritalin came out in 1955 for "hyperactivity". This is an advance I mostly welcome, since NuVigil, Zoloft, and probably even Ambien have improved my quality-of-life dramatically.
Who said people were more mature before???
Are you talking about actors here and celluloid "reality"? Lol
Quote:
Originally Posted by rishi85
I love to observe people from a social and cultural perspective. Lately I see the new breed of actors-this topic especially pertains to men- and I notice that they all have a youthful demeanor. Chris Pine, Channing Tatum, Shia Le Beouf...etc etc. These are men in their late 20s to mid 30s and yet if you compare them to men of the same age from previous eras, it is so blatantly obvious.
I won't even go so far back as say the 50s or 60s but even the previous batch of young stars(Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Costner etc) appear so mature at the same age. And if you go further back it is even more obvious. James Dean died at 23 and there is no way in hell he looked and behaved like a 23 year old man of today.
Actors like Harrison Ford, Paul Newman, Brando, Tom Berenger, Robert Mitchum, Steve Mcqueen and those types of guys are just nowhere to be found. Look at any new films. Actors even enacting 30 somethings look much younger and fresh.
Now let me put forth this opinion in the larger context.
At my age 28, most of my friends(men and women) are not married. Many don't intend to marry until well in their 30s. This wasn't the case in the olden days. A 28 year old man was not only married but perhaps even had a child to support. Yes, he was a father! My father was one and his father was even younger.
Look at mental illnesses- depression, anxiety, ADHD(very important). Why didn't young men(or women) in older generations pop ADHD tabs like candy?
Is it circumstantial?
The great depression meant they had to get off their behinds and work, the wars meant you became a man at 18. No worries of a global recession like we had in 2008. No need to worry about getting a masters degree when you could get by with a high school diploma(meaning you could start earning and start a family asap).
I found this on a thread to a similar query:
New breed of actors: They play at being men, because they don't know the first thing about being a man.
The first thing about being a man is: you put the safety and well-being of your friends and family first and foremost, no matter what. This is the #1 reason men tend to die much younger than women, STRESS. The stress of being a provider. Unless they were like John Belushi and Chris Farely, shoving everything in sight up their nose but that's a different story.
Those who play at being men: they put their safety and well-being first and foremost.
But they can hardly help acting like children well into middle-age since they were essentially robbed of their childhood. It's just arrested development. Like someone else mentioned, the men of the greatest generation became men at 18 because there was no other choice.
Society has become very individualistic, both in its conception of rights and in its conception of obligations. .
But isn't this a great thing. A sign of evolution? The reason the west is so far ahead of most Easter societies. Individualism as opposed to caring for family/collective hive mentality?
People had shorter lives. High school was not so emphasized, so many got out there early to make a living. BTW, many actors, if you read their bios, dropped out of high school to pursue acting, and quite a number still do.
Social Security started at 65 because most people retired then and died shortly thereafter. Life expectancy in 1950: age 65.
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