Once upon a time, boys and girls grew up and set aside childish things. Nowadays, moms and dads skateboard alongside their kids and download the latest pop-song ringtones. Captains of industry pose for the cover of BusinessWeek holding Super Soakers. The average age of video game players is twenty-nine and rising. Top chefs develop recipes for Easy-Bake Ovens. Disney World is the worldโs top adult vacation destination (thatโs adults without kids). And young people delay marriage and childbirth longer than ever in part to keep family obligations from interfering with their fun fun fun.
Christopher Noxon has coined a word for this new breed of grown-up: rejuveniles. And as a self-confessed rejuvenile, heโs a sympathetic yet critical guide to this bright and shiny world of people who see growing up as โwinding downโโexchanging a life of playful flexibility for anxious days tending lawns and mutual funds.
In Rejuvenile, Noxon explores the historical roots of todayโs rejuveniles (hint: all roads lead to Peter Pan), the โtoyificationโ of practical devices (car cuteness is at an all-time high), and the new gospel of play. He talks to parents who love cartoons more than their children do, twenty-somethings who live happily with their parents, and grown-ups who evangelize on behalf of all-ages tag and Legos. And he takes on the โHarrumphing Codgers,โ who see the rejuvenile as a threat to the social order.
Noxon tempers stories of his and othersโ rejuvenile tendencies with cautionary notes about โlost souls whose taste for childish things is creepy at best.โ (Exhibit A: Michael Jackson.) On balance, though, he sees rejuveniles as optimists and capital-R Romantics, people driven by a desire โto hold on to the part of ourselves that feels the most genuinely human. We believe in play, in make believe, in learning, in naps. And in a time of deep uncertainty, we trust that this deeper, more adaptable part of ourselves is our best tool of survival.โ
Fresh and delightfully contrarian, Rejuvenile makes hilarious sense of this seismic culture change. Itโs essential reading not only for grown-ups who refuse to โact their age,โ but for those who wish they would just grow up.