Go ahead and laugh at it. What’s so real about the lives of the seven 20-somethings starring in “The Real World: Denver”?
Not much.
What they experienced during their three months in LoDo was an all-expenses-paid fantasy bachannal, not the gritty, tactile world of entry-level jobs and college-loan debt that many of their peers know all too well.
But don’t get too carried away with the chuckles. While few 22-year-olds – the average age of the participants in the Denver installment is just that – lead such unencumbered lives of leisure, even fewer come close to mirroring the so-serious adult world of their parents and grandparents who, at 22, were often married and with a child, latched to jobs they might still perform today.
And that difference is what makes this generation of youths so interesting to watch on shows such as “Real World.”
“I really have a pretty easy life,” says bartender Aphton Griffey, 22, who lives in Lakewood. “I work a lot and make great money. I’m not financially stressed out.”
She’s in no hurry to settle down. Most of her friends are “very casual” when it comes to sex, but she tends toward more long-term relationships. Her latest is about 3 months old.
“Uncharted territory”
Today’s 22-year-olds represent a new kind of “emerging adult,” says author Jeffrey Arnett. They are a generation of ex-kids reshaping what it means to live out their 20s.
“It’s really uncharted territory in many ways,” he says. “It’s not about getting a job you’re going to have for the next 40 years, or getting married or having a child. It’s about finding out who you are, what kind of job you real ly want to have, at least for now. And it’s really about deciding what sort of life you are going to live.”
It’s also, he says, a period of life that flirts with adventure, like traveling to Europe, moving to San Francisco on a whim, joining the Peace Corps or toiling to become a rock star.
“This is the big chance to use that exceptional freedom to do those things you couldn’t do when you were a child or an adolescent,” says Arnett, who studied the age group for his book “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties.”
Most previous generations, he says, didn’t experience this ferment of freedom between adolescence and adulthood. As recently as the 1970s, the norm was to march straight from high school or college to career, marriage and child-rearing.
Tom Ooley, 22, the middle child of seven kids, grew up in “the rough part of Colorado Springs.” The family saw divorce and never had much money. Nobody in his family had ever attended a four-year college, but Ooley excelled at art and got into the Art Institute of Colorado in Denver. He’s now about to graduate with a degree in media arts and animation, and he just scored an internship in Boulder, but he’s already $26,000 in debt, thanks to his college tour.
The teetotaling, punk-rocker artist lives in a tiny studio apartment in Capitol Hill, dates an older poet, spends much of his time at school or working on animation, and for fun plays video games and goes to concerts.
A typical 22-year-old? There’s no such thing.
Finally stepping away
But like many others of his age, he’s finally stepping away from adolescence and toward something else, maybe not responsibility-saddled adulthood, but at least a future with details strewn around.
Now is the “time to fix an individual to this body,” he says. “There’s not as much time now to sit around and figure yourself out, to develop your personality.”
For Ooley, his art has become all-encompassing. In one way or another, he says he’s determined to make it as an artist.
Dana Allen, 22, a student at Metropolitan State College of Denver and a member of the student government, wants to be a TV journalist, but she also wants to own a home within the next two years. So she plans to leave Denver – she describes the housing costs in the city as “sky high” – and move to Dallas.
“It may be a rare occurrence for a 23- or 24-year-old to own a house, but it is truly my main focus right now,” she says.
Highly political, she’s disappointed in her peers. None of her friends voted in the midterm elections, even though they, for example, constantly complain about marijuana laws and anti- gay laws, two issues that were on the ballot this month.
“We get to decide”
When author Christina Amini turned 22, she and a bunch of friends moved from California to New York City without jobs or plans of any sort.
“We’d been in school for so long,” she says, and suddenly they all realized, “Oh, my gosh, from now on we get to decide what we’re doing with our lives.”
After a few years, she and one of the other New York friends moved back to their parents’ houses in California. They thought a bit about their experience as 22-year-olds and eventually published a book about it, “Before the Mortgage: Real Stories of Brazen Loves, Broken Leases and the Perplexing Pursuit of Adulthood.”
For the whole group of Californians who moved East, the period was freighted with “all of these questions getting asked,” Amini says. “What to do, who to love, where to live and how we should do it.”
“I think it really is a big turning point,” she says, “being 22 and realizing, OK, I need to take ownership of my life.”
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
