Imagine a television show that revolves around a group of married men and women. They run their own advertising agencies, raise kids in suburban homes, argue about who should do the dishes and obsess about whether to have affairs.
They are also just past their 30th birthdays.
When the show Thirtysomething made its debut 20 years ago, in September, 1987, the hour-long drama was praised for its realistic portrayal of angst among then-30-year-old members of the baby boom generation, with characters who bemoaned the impact of always having "too much."
If a show with the same title were made today, it is a fairly good bet that excess would not be an issue. Few of the characters would be married, many would work as Web designers or graphic artists, they would all be renting condos, and at least one would be considering freezing her eggs for future in vitro fertilization.
In the course of 20 years, Thirtysomething has been reduced to Thirtynothing, as the members of the generation currently approaching their fourth decade of life realize they have achieved few of the trappings associated with adulthood.
"We live in this era of a delayed adolescence, but it should be over at 30," said Oonagh Duncan, whose play Talk Thirty To Me is currently showing at the Toronto Fringe Festival.
"Everyone's coming to grips with the fact that they're an adult, but it's not what they thought being an adult would feel like."
Ms. Duncan decided to write the play while struggling to deal with her own 30th birthday, a milestone that sent her into a tailspin of reflection and self-doubt.
Hoping to discover that she was not alone, she interviewed an array of Canadian 29-year-olds.
All of them admitted they were having trouble reconciling where they were in life with where they thought they should be.
"I thought that I would know what I was doing," one man told her. "That the experimentation would be over."
"I just changed careers, went back to school," another said. "Got no house, no wife, no kids, no car and 71 cents in my bank account. Not where I thought I'd be at 30 if you asked me when I was 20."
During the play, Ms. Duncan intersperses these confessionals with figures from Statistics Canada, which flash on a screen on stage: "The average 30-year-old has had 7.5 jobs," "has an average income of $29,013," and carries "between $1,500 and $19,200 of debt."
These numbers help to give context to her own fears, she said, but also to show her generation - and their parents - that age-related disappointment is not unusual.
"Everyone talked about how they were broke and don't have a family yet and their parents think they're a screw-up," she said of her subjects. "The expectations of 30 have not really changed. Everyone says, 'Where's my picket fence and RRSP?' but they all just got out of school."
Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, explored the root of this conflict in her new book, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable Than Ever Before.
In it, she uses three decades of psychological surveys to compare the assets, personalities and priorities of the baby boom generation when they were in their late 20s with those of a group she calls "Generation Me," men and women born in the 1970s and early 1980s.
The latter group, she found, have higher self-esteem, assertiveness and narcissistic tendencies, but also report higher anxiety levels and are more likely to suffer depression.
Ms. Twenge, who is 35 and considers herself part of Generation Me, understands this profile, saying people her age were encouraged to be individuals without thinking about where it may lead them.
