Adultescence: the invisible psychological damage on the new generation
Adultescence: the invisible psychological damage on the new generation
How does the fear of becoming an adult manifest itself in contemporary society? What can online therapy do?
There is a generation that can no longer truly become adult.
People who have reached the age at which they are supposedly expected to “have everything sorted out”, but who still feel suspended, as if life has yet to truly begin.
They have studied, they work, some have a stable relationship, yet inside there remains a sense of limbo, a subtle voice that says: “I’m no longer a kid, but I still don’t feel like an adult.”
It is a common feeling, even if rarely openly declared: that of living in a middle ground, where youth never completely ends and adulthood always seems postponed.
A psychological condition known as adultescence — a sort of prolonged adolescence, in which the body grows, but the mind and identity struggle to make the leap toward full emotional maturity.
Adultescents are not immature people in the trivial sense of the term.
They are intelligent, sensitive individuals, often creative, ironic, curious, but at the same time trapped in an existential dimension that keeps them halfway between who they were and who they are not yet able to become.
They want the freedom of the adolescent, but also the security of the adult; they seek autonomy, but fear responsibility; they desire love, but are afraid of intimacy.
Their emotional life moves between surges and withdrawals, enthusiasm and disorientation, idealism and disillusionment.
The culture of lightness
We live in a culture that celebrates lightness, immediacy, eternal youth.
Being an adult is no longer perceived as an achievement, but almost as a defeat.
The social message is subtle but constant: don’t grow up, don’t age, don’t stop.
You must always be new, performative, flexible, desirable.
Maturity, with its slowness and depth, is seen as something to avoid.
And so, in this suspended time, growing up becomes a countercultural act.
Responsibility is confused with the loss of freedom, stability with boredom, commitment with renunciation.
The adultescent moves within this ambiguity: they want to belong to the world of “grown-ups”, but at the same time they fear its gravity, its structure, its consequences.
Behind their irony, behind their apparent lightness, there often hides a deep fear of failure, inadequacy, of being “exposed” as not strong enough, not capable enough, not ready enough.
The psychology of suspension
On a psychological level, adultescence can be seen as a form of developmental arrest, a phase in which the process of individuation — to use Jung’s terms — gets stuck halfway.
It is as if the individual remains in the corridor that connects adolescence to adulthood: no longer a child, but not yet fully themselves.
This liminal state generates anxiety, a sense of inadequacy, and a perpetual search for identity.
Many adultescents live an “almost complete” life: almost fulfilled, almost happy, almost in love.
But that “almost” becomes the trap: it is the symptom of an identity not yet integrated, one that fears limits and rejects loss as an inevitable part of life.
In a sense, adultescence represents a flight from evolutionary pain — from that healthy and necessary suffering that accompanies every authentic transformation.
Suspended time
The adultescent lives a distorted relationship with time.
They have the impression that everything is still possible, that nothing is definitive, that choices can always be postponed.
But the more time passes, the more a subtle anguish grows: the feeling of not having truly lived.
Every postponement, every “later”, becomes a fragment of uninhabited life.
And so, behind apparent lightness, the invisible weight of suspension takes shape: the fatigue of not being able to fully enter one’s own life.
“I stay on the surface, because depth frightens me.
But sometimes, lightness becomes heavier than any weight.”
A social and inner phenomenon
Adultescence is not only an individual experience: it is also the reflection of an era.
In a society that has made uncertainty a permanent condition, where the future is unstable and the present is everything, it is natural that many people remain anchored to an eternal emotional present.
This is not weakness, but a psychic adaptation — a defense against a world perceived as too complex, too fast, too changeable.
And yet, this defense has a cost: the risk of never building a solid identity, a rooted sense of self, a clear direction.
The adultescent lives, but never truly feels “alive”: always one step behind what they could be, trapped in an unfinished version of themselves.
This article was created to deeply explore the phenomenon of adultescence, not as a label or a sociological trend, but as a contemporary psychological condition affecting an entire generation.
The goal is to understand what happens in the mind and heart of those who remain suspended between youth and maturity, analyzing its emotional roots, cultural influences, and consequences for mental health and relationships.
Finally, the article aims to offer a perspective of hope: to show how, through awareness, introspection, and the therapeutic process, it is possible to transform this suspension into an opportunity for authentic growth, learning not only to become adults, but to be so with truth, sensitivity, and courage.
The invisible roots of immaturity: when growing up is frightening
To truly understand adultescence, one must look beneath the surface.
This is not a simple “refusal to grow up”, but the complex result of psychological and cultural dynamics that intertwine silently within us from childhood onward.
The roots of this condition sink into soil made of overprotective families, performative social models, a culture of immediate pleasure, and unstable digital identities.
An entanglement that, over time, has generated a generation that appears free, but is internally imprisoned by subtle anxieties and deep fears.
The overprotective family: the nest that holds back
Many adultescents come from family environments that have confused care with control.
Loving, present families, but so protective that they leave no room for risk, error, or falling.
Growing up in an environment where every difficulty is anticipated or avoided, the child does not learn to tolerate frustration nor to experience their own strength.
The consequence is a subtle emotional dependence, a sense of inadequacy when facing the challenges of real life.
The implicit message is: “You can’t make it on your own.”
Thus, as adults, these individuals internalize the fear of autonomy, constantly seeking substitute figures — partners, friends, superiors — to depend on in order to feel safe.
Family love, though born from good intentions, becomes an invisible cage that prevents the necessary separation required for growth.
The performative society: the myth of success
Added to this emotional fragility is the constant pressure of a performative society, in which personal worth coincides with the ability to succeed.
From adolescence onward, we are taught that we must “make it”, “do”, “stand out”.
But when performance becomes the measure of identity, every stumble turns into shame.
Those who cannot keep up feel wrong, inadequate, out of sync.
Insecurity is no longer a natural stage of growth, but a fault to hide.
This produces a generation of hyper-aware yet fragile young adults, skilled at showing themselves but incapable of tolerating failure.
In the attempt to live up to unattainable standards, many end up stopping altogether, preferring not to choose rather than risk falling.
The result is a constant sense of suspension: always living “on trial”, never feeling ready to truly begin.
The culture of immediate pleasure: fleeing from frustration
Contemporary culture feeds the illusion that everything should be easy, fast, and pleasant.
In a world where every desire can be satisfied with a click, the ability to wait, to persevere, to endure effort weakens.
Tolerance for frustration — one of the cornerstones of psychological maturity — becomes increasingly rare.
Pain, uncertainty, and limits are experienced as injustices, not as stages of growth.
And so, at the first difficulties, many withdraw, change direction, seek immediate relief.
Adult life, with its slow constructions and inevitable compromises, then appears unbearable: too tiring, too real.
One prefers to remain in the dimension of lightness, instant gratification, eternal unchosen possibility — an emotional comfort zone that anesthetizes, but does not truly allow one to live.
Technology and social media: the stage of liquid identity
Finally, the digital environment has amplified and chronicized many of these fragilities.
Social media, with their logic of constant exposure, have transformed identity into a display to curate and update.
What matters is no longer being, but appearing.
In this context, comparison is constant, visibility is social currency, and self-esteem depends on likes and external approval.
The mind becomes accustomed to living projected outward, losing contact with its inner world.
Identity becomes liquid, mutable, shaped by the gaze of others.
And when that gaze is absent — when one does not feel seen, followed, validated — emptiness emerges.
An emptiness many fill with new images, new projects, new distractions, without ever dwelling in the silence of the self.
The result: frozen development
All these forces — family protection, social pressure, immediacy culture, and digital fragility — combine into a common effect: frozen psychological development.
The subject remains emotionally stuck in the limbo between carefree lightness and panic about failure, unable to integrate the child part with the adult one.
Inside, they feel unready; outside, they must appear as if they are.
This gap generates anxiety, a sense of inadequacy, and a fragmented identity: never truly “enough”.
Adultescence, ultimately, is precisely this: a condition of suspension between what one would like to be and what one fears becoming.
The emptiness behind the smile: the silent wounds of adultescence
Beneath the polished surface of lightness lies a silent distress, difficult to name but increasingly widespread.
Adultescence does not manifest through dramatic crises or glaring symptoms: it seeps slowly into the psyche, impoverishing the sense of self, the ability to choose, and authentic contact with reality.
It is an invisible wound, nourished by silences, postponements, half-lived lives.
Many adultescents do not perceive themselves as ill or unhappy: they describe themselves as “a bit lost”, “without direction”, “stuck”.
They live in a condition of active apathy: they do things, move, produce, but without truly feeling present.
Behind the mask of irony, commitment, or ease hides a profound identity void.
Identity crisis: who am I, if I no longer know who I should become?
The first wound is that of identity.
Many young adults struggle to answer a seemingly simple question: “Who am I?”
Their identity is fragmented, built to adapt to external expectations — from parents, work, social media — rather than an inner feeling.
In the absence of a stable, recognized Self, every role becomes provisional: work is an experiment, relationships are attempts, choices are temporary bets.
This fluidity, which sometimes appears as freedom, over time turns into existential disorientation: no longer knowing where the image ends and where the person begins.
The result is fragile self-esteem, easily destabilized by judgment and comparison.
Existential anhedonia: everything accessible, but nothing satisfying
In a world that promises everything, the adultescent ends up desiring nothing.
The ease with which every experience is within reach — a relationship, a trip, a pleasure, a like — produces a subtle form of existential anhedonia: pleasure loses intensity, desire fades, enthusiasm burns out quickly.
One becomes accustomed to constant stimulation, but not to satisfaction.
Everything is possible, but nothing is enough.
This condition generates a mute distress, a sense of emptiness that finds no words, often masked by constant distractions, emotional consumption, and new beginnings.
The individual moves on the surface, incapable of dwelling in the creative emptiness from which true transformations arise.
Soft addictions: anesthetics of the soul
Faced with this emptiness, the mind seeks relief.
Not always in traditional addictions, but in subtler, socially accepted forms that are difficult to recognize.
These are the so-called soft addictions: hours spent on social media seeking validation, compulsive gaming as an escape from dissatisfaction, pornography as a simulation of intimacy, shopping as a temporary adrenaline rush.
They are anesthetics of the soul that momentarily soothe discomfort, but leave behind deeper fatigue.
The adultescent, accustomed to rapid gratification, ends up confusing pleasure with connection, possession with presence, noise with life.
And thus the emptiness expands, fed precisely by attempts to fill it.
Chronic anxiety and early burnout
Another invisible yet devastating effect is constant anxiety.
The weight of expectations, fear of failure, and inability to choose generate an inner tension with no outlet.
Many young adults feel “tired” already at thirty: mentally saturated, emotionally exhausted.
They experience early burnout, not because they work too much, but because they no longer know what their efforts are for.
Anxiety is not only fear of the future, but above all fear of reality — the everyday, concrete reality made of responsibility and limits.
The mind, constantly on alert, consumes vital energy in a futile attempt to control the unpredictable.
Behind external lightness hides a tense body, irregular sleep, held breath.
Fragile relationships: the fear of intimacy
On a relational level as well, the adultescent lives a deep contradiction.
They desire love and to be loved, but fear the intimacy that love requires.
Emotional closeness is frightening because it implies vulnerability, commitment, confrontation with one’s most fragile parts.
Better light, liquid relationships, where one can stay without fully exposing oneself.
The fear is not only of being hurt, but also — and above all — of disappointing the other.
Behind the flight from bonding hides the belief of not being “enough”, of not being able to bear the weight of authentic love.
As a phrase many carry inside without ever saying aloud goes:
“Better to remain children than risk disappointing.”
A distress that is not seen
These symptoms do not always manifest clearly.
They often appear as diffuse tiredness, a sense of lack, a life that seems full but is inwardly empty.
It is a silent pain, difficult to explain even to oneself: there is no precise cause, yet everything feels heavy.
One lives with the feeling of “not being in the right place”, as if an invisible piece were missing.
This is the true damage of adultescence: a deep disconnection from oneself.
A detachment that does not explode into crisis, but settles day after day, undermining motivation, planning, and trust in life.
Behind eternal lightness lies immense fatigue: that of those who can no longer fully feel.
The mirror society: the illusion of existing only if one appears
We live in a society that does not reflect, but distorts.
A mirror that does not return reality, but filters it, embellishes it, modifies it until it becomes unrecognizable.
In this world of images and visibility, personal value no longer arises from interiority, but from the ability to appear, to exist in the eyes of others.
What matters is not who you are, but what you show; not what you feel, but what you communicate.
It is within this culture of reflection that adultescence finds fertile ground to grow and root itself.
Today, more than ever, the adult is no longer a model to imitate, but a figure to avoid.
Being an adult has become synonymous with heaviness, seriousness, routine, responsibility.
Words that, in collective narration, are associated with something dull, finished, “old”.
On the contrary, youth has become the absolute icon of value: carefree, fluid, colorful, always connected.
The eternal adolescent — the one who never ages, who always laughs, who reinvents themselves daily — is the new cultural hero.
And when this model is internalized, growing up becomes a fault, a loss, a risk of invisibility.
The glorification of lightness
Contemporary culture — fueled by media, advertising, and social platforms — celebrates lightness as the supreme value.
Pain is censored, complexity is bothersome, limits are to be avoided.
We are surrounded by messages that repeat like a mantra:
“Don’t age, don’t commit, always stay cool.”
A seductive but toxic promise: that of living without consequences, without time, without depth.
The result is a world that pushes us to smile even when we are tired, to appear strong even when we are fragile, to chase an image of permanent happiness that does not exist.
In this context, the adultescent is no longer an exception: they are the coherent product of a system that has lost the meaning of growth.
Media reward those who are “always young”, who never stop, who do not take themselves too seriously.
Even language betrays this ideology: we speak of “perceived biological age”, of “anti-aging”, of “eternal wellness”.
Time, once a path toward wisdom, is now the enemy to fight.
Thus, youth becomes a brand, an artificial identity to be maintained at all costs.
The eternal adolescent as cultural model
Social media have amplified this dynamic to the extreme.
Digital platforms have become the stage where continuous youth is performed: smiles, filters, daily performances.
Those who manage to appear light, ironic, and “always relevant” gain approval, visibility, and success.
In this sense, the eternal adolescent is not just an individual: it is a cultural product.
Influencers, public figures, digital stars embody the idea that remaining young, beautiful, and brilliant is not only possible, but mandatory.
Being an adult, instead, means disappearing from the feed — losing relevance.
Thus, millions of people struggle to remain visible, adapting themselves to the language of the network, gradually renouncing their authenticity.
The psychological consequence is devastating: living to be seen, rather than to feel alive.
Identity becomes an aesthetic construction, continuously updated and validated by the gaze of others.
The inner self, meanwhile, thins until it almost disappears.
Those who grow up in this logic quickly learn that depth does not pay, vulnerability should not be shown, and inner coherence does not interest anyone.
Thus, one remains suspended in an aestheticized version of oneself — always smiling, always performing, but inwardly disconnected.
The loss of depth
The mirror society produces individuals who reflect, but do not know themselves.
The absence of interiority does not stem from superficiality, but from constant saturation with external stimuli.
When everything is visible, deep thought becomes invisible.
Lightness, once a quality of the free spirit, today becomes a social obligation: one must be light to not scare, to please, to survive in the image market.
And those who cannot be so — those who stop, who feel, who think — are perceived as “heavy”, “complicated”, “out of time”.
We thus live immersed in a collective paradox: a world that has abolished depth, yet suffers from an ever-deepening emptiness.
A society that invites us to remain young to avoid suffering, but precisely in this flight from growth generates the greatest suffering: the loss of meaning.
The mirror as responsibility
Recognizing the distorted role of society does not mean assigning blame, but recovering awareness.
We are all, in some way, reflections of this deforming mirror: parents afraid of aging, educators struggling to transmit the value of limits, professionals who constantly feel “inadequate” compared to the surrounding image of success.
But it is precisely through this awareness that the cycle can begin to break.
Choosing to grow today is an act of cultural resistance: it means accepting depth in a world that celebrates surface.
The courage to grow: rediscovering the meaning of becoming adult
Growing up does not mean losing something, but finding oneself in a more authentic form.
For too long adulthood has been portrayed as surrender: the end of lightheartedness, the closure of dreams, the beginning of routine.
But in reality, maturity is not the negation of youth — it is its natural evolution, its transformation into awareness.
The healthy adult does not kill the child they once were: they welcome them, integrate them, listen to them.
Psychologically growing up means precisely this: giving a place to one’s infantile parts without being guided by them.
The child part brings curiosity, imagination, the capacity for wonder and intense feeling; but if it does not meet an adult part capable of containing and guiding it, these qualities disperse, becoming fragility, dependence, need.
The mature adult does not lose lightness: they choose it consciously, knowing that life cannot be only light or only shadow.
Maturity is not the end of play, but the ability to play with responsibility.
In a society that pushes us to avoid depth and flee from time, rediscovering the meaning of adulthood is a revolutionary act.
Being an adult today means truly being there: inhabiting one’s life with presence, taking responsibility for choices, tolerating limits without experiencing them as condemnation.
Limits are not prisons, but points of support: they define us, orient us, anchor us to reality.
Accepting them does not mean resignation, but recognizing that every direction implies a renunciation, and that every renunciation, if conscious, is a form of freedom.
Adulthood as rootedness
Healthy adulthood is not a destination, but a process.
It is not made of fixed certainties, but of dynamic rootedness: the ability to remain balanced even when everything around changes.
The mature adult is not the one who has no fears, but the one who recognizes them, passes through them, and learns to manage them.
They are the one who, faced with life, no longer seeks a script, but accepts writing their own story with all the imperfections this entails.
This rootedness does not remove lightness; on the contrary, it restores it in a more solid form.
Because only those who have learned to stay can truly allow themselves to fly.
Being adult, then, does not mean living without dreams, but transforming dreams into possible directions, learning to nourish them with reality, commitment, and care.
It means building a freedom that is no longer flight from limits, but dialogue with them.
True freedom is not the ability to do everything, but to choose what is truly worth doing.
Accepting the weight of freedom
Becoming adult requires courage.
It is the courage to stay, to decide, to accept that every freedom carries weight.
But — as a phrase that captures the heart of this journey reminds us —
“Becoming adult is accepting that freedom has weight, and that it is worth carrying.”
In this sense, psychological growth is not a social obligation, but an act of love toward oneself.
It is the choice to stop running, to stop living on the surface, to face reality even when it hurts, because only by passing through it can one become whole.
Being adult does not mean extinguishing one’s youthful part, but giving shape, meaning, and direction to what was once only impulse.
It is a maturity that does not take life away, but gives it back in a full, rooted, conscious way.
When this is understood, the word “adult” stops sounding like a synonym for routine or renunciation, and becomes a new word: presence.
The presence of one who knows where they are, what they feel, what they want, and — above all — who they are willing to become.
What can online therapy do?
In an era in which adulthood is experienced as a burden and lightness as refuge, psychotherapy becomes a precious space to recover balance, authenticity, and rootedness.
It is not about “teaching how to grow up” like a parent would, but about accompanying the person on a path of integration: recognizing one’s fears, listening to the inner child without being dominated by it, and developing the resources needed to inhabit one’s life as a conscious adult.
Many young adults approach online therapy not because they feel “ill”, but because they sense a silent block: a feeling of disconnection, suspension, of not being able to fully live.
Psychotherapy, in this sense, offers a protected, non-judgmental space where one can finally stop and look inward without fear of being labeled.
It is a place where one can give voice to ambivalences — the desire for freedom and the fear of responsibility, the wish to love and the fear of bonding, the need to assert oneself and the terror of failure.
In a world that constantly demands choice, therapy restores the right to listen to oneself first.
A space to find oneself
In the therapeutic relationship, the person is helped to explore their way of being in the world, to recognize the mechanisms that trap them in a “half-identity”.
Online therapy becomes a real mirror, not distorted like that of social media or family expectations: it reflects what is, not what one wishes to show.
This encounter with oneself can be uncomfortable, but also deeply liberating.
Only by seeing one’s entire image — lights and shadows included — can one begin to integrate, choose, and change.
Often, the therapeutic process does not aim to “do more”, but to stop and understand: what am I avoiding? what truly frightens me about becoming adult?
Behind the fear of growth often hide ancient wounds — fear of disappointing, of not being enough, of losing love if one becomes independent.
Psychotherapeutic work allows these dynamics to be recognized and transformed into awareness, gradually building a more stable and autonomous sense of self.
Autonomy, identity, and freedom
One of the most important functions of online therapy — especially for those experiencing adultescence — is facilitating the transition from the need for approval to the capacity for choice.
It means learning to recognize one’s inner voice, to trust one’s decisions, to accept that every choice involves a loss, but also a gain.
In this process, online psychotherapy helps reactivate the internal adult function: that part of the Self capable of caring for the inner child without silencing it, but also without being dragged by it.
It is a delicate but fundamental balance to stop living in wait of someone or something telling us what to do.
At the same time, therapeutic work fosters greater emotional awareness: recognizing emotions, naming them, tolerating them without being overwhelmed.
Frustration tolerance — often lacking in adultescents — is built precisely here, in this space of encounter and reflection, where impulse can finally give way to processing.
Becoming adult, ultimately, also means learning to go through effort without fleeing from it, to remain in reality even when it is not as one wishes.
The added value of online therapy
In recent years, online therapy has revolutionized the way psychological help is sought, breaking down many barriers that prevented young adults from approaching self-care.
For those who live with a sense of precarity, constant mobility, or fear of direct contact, the online modality represents a concrete possibility of accessibility and continuity.
It allows the therapeutic thread to be maintained even during periods of change, to reconcile daily life with the psychological journey, and above all to overcome the stigma that still surrounds asking for help.
Many young people and young adults find it easier to open up in front of a screen: a space that, if competently managed, can become intimate, protective, and deeply authentic.
Online therapy also responds to the needs of a generation accustomed to communicating digitally, but often disconnected from itself.
Bringing psychotherapy into this context means bringing depth back where surface dominates, offering the possibility of transforming a technological tool into a place of truth.
It is not a shortcut, but a bridge: between the virtual world in which one lives and the inner reality that often remains unexplored.
Therapy as an act of freedom
Ultimately, psychotherapy — in whatever form it is experienced — is not a path to “grow up fast”, but a journey to stop running away from oneself.
As someone wrote:
“Therapy doesn’t make you grow faster.
It helps you stop running.”
It is a journey that gives back time, space, and dignity to human experience, reminding us that growth is not an obligation, but a possibility.
In a world that wants us always light, performative, and connected, therapy represents the opposite: a space of slowness, depth, and listening, where one can finally begin to feel again.
And perhaps this is precisely the first step to truly becoming adult: not stopping dreaming, but learning to remain present while doing so.
“Adultescence is not the failure of a generation, but its silent cry for help: that of those who need to return to themselves in order to finally grow.”
Bibliographic references:
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Arnett, J. J. (2023). Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
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Hill, N. E., & Redding, S. M. (2020). The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Kloep, M., Hendry, L. B., Taylor, R., & Stuart-Hamilton, I. (2016). Development from Adolescence to Early Adulthood: A Dynamic Systemic Approach to Transitions and Transformations. London: Routledge.
For information write to Dr. Jessica Zecchini.
Email contact: consulenza@jessicazecchini.it, WhatsApp contact (+39) 370 32 17 351.
