Are we all Peter Pan?

Take the “second star to the right and straight on ’til morning”.

That’s the path to Neverland… but what does it mean to live there?

Peter Pan first zoomed onto screens 100 years ago. Two decades earlier, the staging of JM Barrie’s 1904 fantasy-drama had caused a sensation in London.

Peter was once a normal boy. He ran away to Neverland because he didn’t want to grow up, grow old or die. In a rather grim turn, Neverland was also where little children who were lost and never found ended up. Now, Peter began to help care for these boys. In the play, he occasionally returned to our world, zooming through the stars to turn up at a window and invite the children within to go on adventures with him.
“No such play was ever seen before on any stage,” The Guardian said, in 1904.
In the American silent film Peter Pan (1924), the lost children were guided out of Neverland and adopted, but Peter still wouldn’t consent to stay in the real world and grow up.
There is a term, of course, for people who prefer the fictional refuge of Neverland. “Peter Pan syndrome” was coined by American psychologist Dan Kiley in his 1983 book of that name, subtitled Men Who Have Never Grown Up.
Though not a psychological condition, the syndrome is often ascribed to people (not just men, as Kiley first hypothesised) who exhibit traits of narcissistic personality and social immaturity as adults.
In the 1980s and ’90s, one could be said to have Peter Pan syndrome if one failed to meet the conventional markers of adulthood: entering the workforce, becoming financially independent, marrying and having children. Because of how much society has changed over the past half-century, there is an interesting arc to how the syndrome has been redefined.
In a sense, amid the rise of technology, disposable incomes and the cult of the individual, ours has become a sort of Peter Pan world. The transition between adolescence and young adulthood has been delayed; the markers themselves are far less pervasive and less clearly defined.
Ever-Neverland
A key factor at play is life expectancy.
A person born in 1960 could expect to live to the age of 52; someone born in 2016 can expect to live to about 80. Amid this shift, and the relative ease of 21st-century urban living, the rather sudden shift from teen to adult — marked by the acts of finding work, earning a living, setting up home and starting a family, typically achieved in the span of a few years — has begun to stretch out over a decade or more.
It is now being referred to as “emerging adulthood”, a term coined by the American psychologist Jeffrey Arnett in his 2004 book of that name, subtitled The Winding Road from the Late Teens through the Twenties.
He defines emerging adulthood as “a distinct new period of life” characterised by instability and a state of in-betweenness born not of circumstance but of choice. An emerging adult is typically earning but not financially independent, does not rely on themselves alone for key decisions, and is focused on self-exploration and the exploration of the possibilities and opportunities open to them.
In his research, Arnett found that this stage was lasting, on average, until the age of 29.
By 2008, there was new slang, born on social media, for this stage of life. “Adulting” is used by young adults to express mock frustration at having to hold down a job, pay bills, plan one’s finances or take care of one’s health. If it seems odd that adults should complain about adulting, it’s another sign that ours is, in some ways, a Peter Pan world.
Based on how societies respond and adapt, this could have dramatic long-term implications for the evolution of economies, communities, workforces. Already, there is relative panic over low birth rates in the Global North, a panic driven partly by the concern over how a dwindling working population will support a booming aging one.
Meanwhile, fresh research indicates that things are about to shift again, with Gen Z (those born between 1995 and 2010). This is a generation that grew up watching job security and the 9-to-5 workday collapse, first in the global economic downturn that began in 2008, and then in the pandemic. The shifts that this has caused in their approaches to work and the work-self balance are already being studied.
Between artificial intelligence and a lifespan expected to reasonably extend to 100 (at least among the wealthy), Gen Alpha — those born between 2011 and 2025 — will likely drive extensions and intensifications of these trends.
Alpha will be a generation defined by their longevity, says Joe Nellis, a professor of global economy at Cranfield University in the UK. “They will take longer to take on adult responsibilities, stay in education for longer periods, join the workforce later.”
It is hard to estimate the impact on societies and economies, researchers say.
Back to Barrie’s imagined world: Is it even Peter Pan syndrome, if everyone’s in Neverland?