Adults Aren’t More Emotionally Stable. We’re Just Better at Pretending.

Rola Elnaggar

3 hours ago

4 min read

“I’ve always enjoyed her music, but nothing really connected with me personally until this one,” is the statement all over social media after listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. I thought I was the only one under that impression after listening to the first single “drop dead”, but it was suddenly everywhere, as if we were in an episode of Pluribus. The interesting part is that this came from people in their thirties, forties, and beyond. And it made me wonder what this record offers that her previous records didn’t.

When Olivia debuted with “drivers licence” in 2021, she was 17. I was 21, and I had one semester left before graduating from college. I found her music exceptionally liberating, confessional, angsty, and very of the moment. However, at that point, she wrote from a perspective that didn’t align with where I was in life. When she screamed her lungs out in Sour and Guts, I danced, and I cheered, but I didn’t feel like screaming along with her. I was busy trying to figure out the next phase of my life. I was applying for jobs and getting rejected. I was definitely as angry as she was, but my anger came in a different shape. I didn’t need to eye roll, cross my arms in defiance, or talk back. I didn’t fantasize about burning someone’s clothes or breaking mirrors in fits of rage. I was calm on the outside, but resentful on the inside. I don’t think my anxiety disappeared overnight. I just learned to hide it well, and that is the difference between teenage malaise, which Olivia captured impeccably in her first two albums, and adult malaise, which she nailed with You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love.

Something in the soft, dreamlike tempo of her new music matches the burning anxiety simmering inside of us, adults. Songs like “drop dead”, “the cure”, and “stupid song” all start gently and quietly. They are breathy, the vocals slightly pushed back with slow piano, or, in the case of “the cure”, some soft acoustic guitar, then a gradual crescendo into an explosive chorus followed by an even more explosive bridge towards the end. This structure mimics our adult reaction to anxiety triggers. We seem put together, quiet, competent, and even productive. On the inside, however, we are on our phones, spiraling, reading the news, trying not to fall for fake AI-generated photos and videos, watching people vacationing in Europe, struggling to both follow trends and make rent. We do yoga because everyone else is doing it, so we feel we’re expected to, but we don’t adopt its teachings into our lives.

We are so mentally overworked from all the scrolling and data consumption that we end up physically withdrawn, forced into silence, spending our free hours on the sofa with sore wrists, only giving the impression we are peaceful adults.

Adolescents have the privilege of expressing irritability through impulsive, rageful behaviors with few consequences. However, adults internalize this anxiety to keep up appearances in society, which transforms later into chronic stress, sleep disorders, joint and muscle pain, and gut issues. Teenagers lack the vocabulary to describe their feelings, while adults know how to verbalize their anxiety, but they tend to downplay it.

Studies show that anxiety in teenagers is triggered by social dynamics, peer acceptance, academic performance, and identity formation. They are supposedly different from those that affect adults, but as people in their twenties experience adulthood, they would probably say that the triggers remain the same, if only we switch academic performance with career pressures. Adults are expected to know who they are and stop feeling peer pressure, so they suppress these stressors, as expressing them is not socially acceptable, but that doesn’t mean they disappear. Olivia isn’t yelling the lyrics of “stupid song” as she is in “all-american bitch” and “good 4 u”, but she is still yelling them.

The development of the prefrontal cortex isn’t Internet folklore; it’s proven biological reality, but it’s also not a flip of a switch. New Gen Z adults aren’t instantly fine the second they turn 25. They copy those before them to survive, by being cool and collected, when they should be breaking behavioral patterns and deconstructing preconceived notions as they encounter them. Like Olivia Rodrigo, past the threshold of your twenties, you start viewing notions like love with more nuance. It’s no longer positive feelings all the time. You start to realize that being in love is an amplifier. If you’re content, it will amplify your contentment. If you’re resentful, it will amplify your resentment. Olivia has reached the conclusion that self-love should come first rather than relying on other people for solutions, which is a testament to her emotional maturity. A maturity that resonated with a lot of older fans. A maturity they found in songs like “what’s wrong with me”, which features Robert Smith of The Cure, her first feature, and one that connects her to a completely different generation.

It’s a magical feeling when music meets you at a certain point in your life and manages to give words to the indescribable. When my parents tell me I’ve calmed down a lot in recent years, that I’m less anxious and angry about everything, I want to tell them that I still am, but I don’t have the energy to express it because it’s futile and potentially harmful. I’m the guitar strumming in the opening of an Olivia Rodrigo song on the outside, but there is simmering tension in my chorus waiting to be unleashed in the bridge, and I must power through this crescendo to safely reach the other side. Olivia knew how to unravel this truth with her artistry, that to be considered a competent adult, you need to go against your instincts and subdue. And, for a moment, I felt seen.