When I was a little man

Playdoh came in a little can

I was Star Wars’ biggest fan

Now I’m stuck without a plan

GI Joe was an action man

Shaggy drove the mystery van

Devo was my favorite band

Take me back to my happy land

There’s ambivalence about growing older and nostalgia for childish things. But Blurryface is longing for something more basic––feeling safe (“when the Mama sang us to sleep”), having aspirations (“we used to build a rocketship and fly it far away...”).

I remember the stress I felt packing up my dorm with no clue what job I would get or how long it would take to find. My student loan payments were about to start and continue for untold years. So it isn’t that I don’t relate to being stressed out by that unnerving moment when I had to “wake up and make money,” or else, for the first time.

But I still loved being 22. At 6, I may have taken comfort in my mom singing me to sleep, but I hated having a bedtime. At 16, I didn’t have to worry about student loans.

I did, however, have a curfew.

I remember being a teenager with a crush and nowhere more private to make out than a parked car. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older / Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long,” the Beach Boys sang. “You know its gonna make it that much better / When we can say goodnight and stay together.” At 16, I figured they were right.

At 22, I knew they were.

After graduation, I hung out in L.A. for a couple days with a woman I liked, sleeping on the hard floor of an apartment where a mutual friend had just moved. I wanted no more than to sit around drinking cheap beer and listening to music and talking all night. That was allowed! My friends and I could afford dollar tacos and beach camping. If we split gas we could drive anywhere we wanted. It was glorious.

Some years ago, when my Millennial cousin turned 16, I recall that she and a bunch of her friends were just uninterested in getting a driver's license. I couldn't fathom it. How could a freedom that generations had prized so zealously just lose its appeal? A part of me identifies with the anxieties so powerfully expressed in “Stressed Out.” But when Blurryface moves beyond nostalgia to an outright preference for treehouse homes over any adulthood that includes student loans, I don’t relate.

Garber: I hear that!

Given how obsessed the culture is with youth, I keep expecting to resent getting older—but so far, I never have. I love getting older! That said, one thing that strikes me about “Stressed Out”—one thing that makes it relatable, I think, even to non-Millennials and those blissfully free of student debt—is how easily it works as, yes, A Metaphor.

And not just for young people.

To backtrack a tiny bit: I’ve recently gotten interested in the idea of age as a social construct as opposed to a biological fact. Phases of life regulated by the cold, hard math of time’s passage are being challenged by a whole host of cultural shifts, from the rise of emerging adulthood to the availability of plastic surgery to the influence of the Kardashians to the collapsing of generations to the general death of adulthood. What does it mean to be “an adult,” right now? The answers used to be pretty easy: home ownership, marriage, kids, turning 21. They are no longer easy. People may still be turning 21, but otherwise: Home ownership is declining. Marriage and kids, if they come at all, are coming in general later than they used to.