i'm cool with childhood. it's very necessary. but young adulthood i have qualms with. i think it's definitely a stage that should be cut shorter than it goes for. after all, eventually it becomes repetitive. you spend your hangovers thinking about this ever-imminent great accomplishment of yours, and then do the same shit week after week, which is mostly nothing that really, authentically works towards it. then shit gets real, and you have to clean yourself up and enter the matrix. that was valuable working time you gave over to 'being young'.
I think the moment "shit gets real" is when you realise it's actually BEEN real, and then you have some sort of an epiphany. I agree that young adulthood could take a breather tho. I've been stuck in that stage for long enough now. Now it's about having the will to move past it. Question is, does one keep flying like a plastic bag, letting the wind control where you land up, or does one put together a vision and work towards it? I agree with briCK that the "loser spirit"..."opens more doors and leaves a wider margin", but briCK had a vision - the whole married at 25 thing. That was something he could measure his outcomes against. And it's up to him to decide whether he's satisfied with or disappointed with his current standing. Same goes for all of us. If I think back to my teens I most def had different ideas about whre I'd be. It's not all bad, the current standing, but I look at some of it and I'm like "Really? THAT's what you decided to do?"
At the end of the day, you can't change anything that's happened. You can only try
influence where you'll land up. The young adulthood fun times are great and all, but honestly the sooner peeps do proper introspection and forward looking, the better. In order to prevent a situation where you're 30 and thinking "WTF HAVE I DONE?!?"