A Survival Guide for the Peter Pan Pandemic
It’s Now or Neverland for Millenials
I recently turned thirty. None of my friends are married. None of them own homes. And none of them think this is weird. Because by the standards of our time, it isn’t. In 1960, 52% of Americans who reached thirty owned a home and had a wife. That same number, in 2025, was just 12%. What happened?
Both Ludovic and John Carter provide an economic answer to this question. Here, I will try to provide a psychological one.
I think that infinite optionality retards development. In other words, the more lives available to us, the less capable we become of living. We begin, instead, to live what H.G. Baynes called a ‘provisional life.’ And the provisional life is really no life at all. It is characterised by a persistent sense that one is not yet living. One is doing this or that, but whether it is a woman or a job, it is not yet ‘the real thing’. She is ‘nice’, but she is not ‘the one’. The job is ‘fine’, but it is not the job. One is always inwardly toying with a thousand possibilities. One cannot choose just one. And so, big decisions—such as marriage and children—are perpetually pushed back.
But I’m getting ahead of myself! What, precisely, do I mean by infinite optionality?
Modern life presents us with an overwhelming and ever-expanding array of choices. One can do anything! One can be anything! This is, historically speaking, peculiar. Until very recently, you simply did whatever your Dad did. William Baker was a baker. His father was a baker. His father’s father was a baker. More than one in ten of all modern surnames in England derive from the occupation of some medieval ancestor.
Today, William Baker is not a baker. In fact, he is not much of anything. At least, he is not much of anything yet! At thirty-two, he is ‘keeping his options open’. And how many options he has! He could find himself in Europe, or lose himself in Asia. He could start a side-hustle (or get a side-chick!). Then there is the not-insignificant question of what, exactly, he wants to do with his life. Law. Teaching. A startup, maybe. AI. A trade? Writing. A novel. Bodybuilding. Something in wellness? Something, at any rate, in something. And yet, he can never commit to anything. Why?
Commitment requires sacrifice. To commit yourself to a woman, you must relinquish every other woman. To commit yourself to a job, you must relinquish every other job. To commit yourself to a life, you must relinquish every other life you might have led. The millennial man—or at the very least, a significant portion of them—cannot relinquish infinite optionality. And so, they remain in Neverland, where they can be anything (ergo, nothing).
This is, of course, a juvenile way of thinking. The adolescent lives primarily in his imagination. Which is to say, a world of what might be, unconstrained by what is. Reality, with all its limitations and disappointments, has not yet fully impinged on him.
Increasingly, I think many in their twenties, thirties, and even forties live like this. Which is to say, all those characteristics that are normal in a youth of seventeen or eighteen are continued into later life.
This is not an original observation. Indeed, that last paragraph was lifted almost verbatim from Marie-Louise von Franz’s book, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus. Von Franz believed that the puer aeternus, or the eternal boy, was a uniquely modern phenomenon. She thought it was nature’s defence mechanism against overpopulation. In other words, nature fosters psychological tendencies—such as homosexuality and arrested development—that lead individuals to refrain from producing children.
Then there is Dan Kiley, author of The Peter Pan Syndrome, who believed that there had been a ‘dramatic increase in the frequency of the problem.’ The problem, that is, of the man-child. Kiley attributed the rise of this problem to permissive parenting.
Finally, there is Ann Yeoman’s Now or Neverland. Like both Von Franz and Kiley, she thinks ‘we are continuing to experience a striking increase in the incidence of this kind of personality.’ She believes that arrested development stems from a ‘secret conspiracy between mother and son, in which each helps the other to betray life.’ The mother, who needs to be needed, unconsciously sabotages her son’s maturation. The son, in turn, is only too happy to continue suckling on her milky mammaries.
Von Franz, Kiley, and Yeoman were writing decades apart. Each believed the problem of the man-child was getting worse.
Now, perhaps you dismiss all this—as Ludovic does—as ‘the elderly hectoring the young’, as they have always done. Every generation kvetches about the one that comes after it. Boomers kvetching about Millennials is, therefore, nothing new.
I am not, however, entirely convinced. Contra Ludovic, I think Millennials (to say nothing of Zoomers) actually are a uniquely stunted generation. Even the youngest Millennials are no longer young. And yet, they continue to say things like I’m just a girl. ‘They literally look younger than previous generations did at the same age,’ Dudley Newright observes, ‘with neotenous faces and fashions.’ Then, of course, there is the Disney Adult phenomenon. Not to mention the fact that Millennials marry later (if at all), have kids later (if at all), and buy homes later (if at all).
I think that infinite optionality leads to the proliferation of a certain type of person. That type, or archetype, is Peter Pan. Indeed, we appear to be in the midst of a Peter Pan pandemic. I’ll begin this essay by outlining the symptoms of Peter Pan syndrome. I will turn, thereafter, to its treatment.
Peter Pan Syndrome Symptoms
The first symptom of Peter Pan syndrome is narcissism. Where, exactly, does this narcissism stem from?
Often, the man-child was a ‘gifted child’. The gifted child is distinguished from his peers by his curiosity, intelligence, and imagination. He is told, repeatedly, that he is special. That he can do anything he sets his mind to. And so, he begins to imagine himself as a hero, artist, statesman, or explorer. He imagines himself, in short, as something extraordinary. This makes it very difficult for him to engage with anything ordinary. Indeed, many gifted children develop contempt for ordinary people, whom they consider sheep, normies, goycattle, and so on. They also develop contempt for ordinary life, which they consider—dare I say it—the matrix. Marriage. Mortgages. Monday morning commutes. All these things are dismissed as bourgeois trifles.
The puer aeternus tends to have both a superiority complex and an inferiority complex. Which is to say, he recognises—on some level—that he is a failure. But he often interprets this failure as evidence of his own superiority. He doesn’t have a family, because he cannot be domesticated. He doesn’t have a job, because he cannot be reduced to wageslavery. He cannot be a normie, because he is just too abnormal! Too unique! Too special!
The NEETocrat is a case in point. The word is, of course, a combination of NEET (not in education, employment, or training) and aristocrat. The NEETocrat conceptualises his unemployment as a principled refusal to debase himself through labour. He is, after all, a Brahmin—not a vaishya.
Now, of course, not all gifted children develop Peter Pan syndrome, and not all Peter Pans were gifted children. Nevertheless, it is a common characteristic among eternal boys. Another common characteristic is a vivid imagination.
Children live, in large part, in their imagination. For them, the boundary between fantasy and reality is thin. A stick is a sword. A shadow, a monster. Jung describes this as ‘fantasy-thinking’, and contrasts it with the utilitarianism that defines adulthood. The adult dreams only when asleep. The child, by contrast, lives in a waking dream. The puer aeternus never grows out of this. He remains, well into adulthood, a daydreamer.
What, exactly, does a man with Peter Pan syndrome daydream about? Everything.
Pan, from whom Peter Pan takes his name, was the god of everything. And so, the man with Peter Pan syndrome dreams of everything. He imagines himself a novelist, a fighter, a founder, and a politician. And yet, he never commits to any of these visions. Or at the very least, he never commits himself for long. Why can’t the man-child commit? Because nothing real is ever as compelling as his daydreams.
The eternal boy finds his interiority more compelling than the external world. This often leads to sterile intellectualism. To quote Von Franz:
The vitality of action, that masculinity which molds the clay, which seizes and molds reality, he leaves behind, for that is too difficult; he escapes into the realm of philosophy… One could call it neurotic philosophizing, philosophy at the wrong moment, just when what is needed is action. Every time he wants to go into action he will argue that he should not act until he has thought it over very carefully.’
Yeoman, writing separately, arrives at the same conclusion:
The puer is, then, never quite in life. He hovers above it all in the realm of ideas and fantasy, feeling that life owes him a living because he is special.
Peter Pan, of course, could fly. No wonder the man with Peter Pan syndrome is always hovering above the ground! Von Franz notes that the puer aeternus has a highly symbolic fascination with flying, travelling, and mountaineering. He wants to get as high as possible, the symbolism being to get away from reality, from the earth, and from ordinary life. ‘Some puer aeterni escape from earth by means of actual airplanes’, Von Franz observes, ‘others do the same thing in thought airplanes—going off into the air with some kind of philosophical theory or intellectual system.’
The puer loves to travel because he does not want to be tied to a place. In fact, he does not want to be tied to anything. Nor, for that matter, does he want to be tied to anyone. He has a proclivity for intense but short-lived romantic attachments. He can never fully commit himself to one woman, because he is terrified of ‘settling’. This applies not only to women, but to everything. Indeed, he cannot decide what to do with himself, because deciding means becoming. And becoming one thing means ceasing to be all the others. It means, in other words, giving up on your unlimited potential.
But enough Jungian psychobabble (or, dare I say, flights of fancy)! What does Peter Pan syndrome actually look like? Let us get clinical. I am, after all, a certified clinician. And you can and should—nay, must!— take what follows as medical advice.
I have devised a diagnostic test. If you score above 8, you have Peter Pan Syndrome (hereafter referred to as PPS), a bona fide DSM-5 condition.
PPS Diagnostic Test
Please read each statement carefully. Award yourself one point for each statement that applies to you. Answer honestly.
Note: results are only valid if you are above the age of twenty-seven.
You have considered moving to Berlin, Byron Bay, or (God forbid) Uluwatu.
You hate your job but cannot quite bring yourself to leave it.
You have never had a relationship that lasted longer than a year.
You use the words normie, normgroid, goycattle, etc.
You consider yourself a ‘creative’, though you have created little to nothing.
You are obsessed with travelling.
You prefer thinking about doing things to actually doing them.
You struggle to maintain steady employment.
You oscillate between negative and positive self-inflation.
You have a vague but persistent sense that you are meant for something larger than your current life.
You frequently mock adult concerns (like mortgages, marriage, and retirement funds) as ‘meaningless trifles’.
You are terrified of ‘settling’.
You have said the phrase ‘not all those who wander are lost.’
If you scored 8 or above, I regret to inform you that you have Peter Pan Syndrome. The prognosis, while serious, is not hopeless. In the following section, I will outline a course of treatment.
A Course of Treatment for PPS
More is lost by indecision, Tony Soprano once observed, than wrong decision. So true, Tony! The puer aeternus is indecisive. If only, he thinks, I could find the right women, job, and location. Then—then!—I would commit. Then I would start living!
But ‘the right thing’ is not discovered and then pursued. It is pursued and thereby discovered. ‘Men did not love Rome because she was great’, Chesterton once observed, ‘ she was great because they loved her.’ The same is true of marriage. You do not find the perfect woman and then love her. You love a woman, and she becomes perfect. The puer is always searching for something worthy of his commitment. He doesn’t understand that commitment is what makes things worthy.
The treatment for PPS is, then, commitment. That, at any rate, is what Jung thought. Von Franz recalls him saying to a puer aeternus type, ‘it does not matter what job you take. The point is that for once you do something thoroughly and conscientiously, whatever it is.’
She continues:
This man insisted that if only he could find the right thing, then he would work, but that he could not find it. Jung’s answer was, ‘Never mind, just take the next bit of earth you can find. Plow it and plant something in it. No matter whether it is business, or teaching, or anything else, give yourself for once to that field which is ahead of you.’ The childish trick of saying, ‘I would work if it were the right thing,’ is one of the many self-delusions of the puer aeternus.
So, the puer must stop hovering above the earth, and begin to plow it. He must, in other words, humble himself. Humility stems from the Latin humus (not to be confused with the Levantine hummus). It means earth, or soil. To be humble is, quite literally, to be grounded.
How does the puer humble himself? The answer, in short, is through work. Von Franz specifically recommends humble, unromantic work (as, say, an accountant or plumber). By fully committing himself to this kind of work, the puer begins to live a satisfactorily ‘bourgeois’ or ‘grown-up’ life. But this solution often ends up causing more problems, as Von Franz herself acknowledges:
The great problem is that you can drive people out of this childhood paradise and fantasy life, in which they are in close connection with their true inner self, but then they are completely disillusioned and cynical.
They become, in other words, like an extinct volcano. The childish eruptions stop. But so too does the inner fire and emotional intensity.
Is it possible to grow up without losing that inner fire? Is it possible to grow up without becoming completely disillusioned and cynical? Can you dream, without becoming a listless daydreamer? Does imagination help or hinder the adult? Can one retain their puer spirit—its aspirations, spontaneity, and creativity—while consciously affirming senex virtues, such as order and responsibility?
These are not rhetorical questions. I have spent the last two years grappling with them.
Conclusion
Over the past two years, I have—in the parlance of my generation—been ‘adulting’. I have kids. I own a home. I am engaged. Broadly speaking, I am happy about all of this. And yet, alongside this happiness, there has been a persistent and unsettling dread. A dread that I am going to live a petty bourgeois life.
I’ve always been suspicious, if not outright contemptuous, of ordinary bourgeois life. The chief aim of bourgeois society is peace and prosperity. Which is to say, comfort. Most adults live comfortable yet uninspiring lives. They go to work. They mow the lawn. They look after their kids. Then they die.
I don’t want to be like them. I am, after all, special. And yet, the belief that you are special is nothing special. Indeed, our entire generation was told that.
No, you’re not special. You’re just another garden-variety millennial narcissist. And like every other garden-variety millennial narcissist, you suffer from delusions of grandeur and arrested development. If you want to overcome your arrested development, you need to develop humility. Which is to say, you need to ground yourself.
But how nice it is to fly! How nice it is to aspire and daydream! Must one really give all this up? Must one really give up the puer spirit in order to embrace senex virtue?
I don’t think so. Or at the very least, I hope not. I hope there is a way to disentangle what is really childish—laziness, dependency—from the creativity, spontaneity, and imagination of youth. It is, I suspect, enormously difficult. And yet, I believe it can be done.
One way to achieve puer-et-senex unity is through art and creativity. The artist has an unusually vivid interiority. He finds this interiority, in the words of Walt Bismarck, ‘richer, more persistent, and more emotionally compelling than the external world.’ He is, in other words, a daydreamer. And yet, if he is to be an artist—and not just a daydreamer—he must eventually sit down and do the work. He must submit his imagination to the discipline of craft. He must take what he finds in the air and bring it back down to earth.
This is, it must be said, an exceedingly hard thing to do. Most people simply kill the puer. Which is to say, they grow up, settle down, and the inner fire goes out. Others never develop the senex virtues at all. They remain, well into middle age, in Neverland. They continue to cling to a sense of infinite optionality, as their options continue to dwindle.
Brother, it is now or Neverland! Even the youngest millennial is no longer young. It’s time to cut back the overgrowth of fantasy. It’s time to stop kvetching about the Boomers. And it’s time, at long last, to grow-up.
Related essays:
Also, I think there’s a lesser-talked about but equally depressing outcome for men that I privately refer to as the Knight of Infinite Resignation (stolen from Kierkegaard.)
These are guys that are the polar opposite of Peter Pans. Their lives are driven by commitment and routine but it is hollow to them. They might use some vice to cope with their day-to-day existence, trudging along, but they don’t truly want what they have. They do what’s expected of them and that’s it.
This is what the Puer Aeternus fears becoming.
But I think in actually, the antidote to both is the same. You need enough imagination and interiority to create potential solutions and goals for yourself, but also enough grounding and responsibility to take action and realize them.
This asshole wrote my biography!