Audra Nuru, a professor of communication and family studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of St. Thomas, spoke with MPR News about the experiences and expectations many people face in their 30s. Nuru discussed how this stage of adulthood often includes major life transitions, shifting priorities and societal pressure to have life “figured out.”
From the conversation:
Kyra Miles: Audra, I’ll start with you first. Sometimes we look at our 30s like the time we have to have stuff figured out, but where does that idea come from? Why does it seem to have such a hold on us?
Nuru: So many of us are carrying around these deadlines for our lives, right? Like somehow we know exactly where we think we should be by 30, even when we’ve never stopped to ask where those deadlines come from.
And I don’t think we invent those expectations on our own. I think, by being here, we learn them so early that they stop feeling like these cultural scripts and just start feeling like reality.
There’s actually a term for this. Bernice Neugarten called it a “social clock,” and that’s just this idea that every culture develops expectations about when major life events are supposed to happen. Without even realizing it, we begin measuring ourselves against that timeline.
But like you said in the intro, times have changed. Even though census data shows us that people today are marrying much later than they did 50 years ago, we’re becoming parents later, and our work lives are much less linear than they used to be, those scripts remain the same.
So the milestones move, but many of the expectations didn’t. And I think that gap between where life actually is and where we think it should be is where so much of that pressure lives.
