From job-hopping to open relationships, keeping your options open in life is often held up as a winning strategy. Across society, the markers of adulthood are being abandoned: job tenures for those at the start of their career have shrunk to just over a year, marriage rates are plummeting, and one in five adults have abandoned long-term goals altogether. Committing to a partner, career, or fixed set of beliefs is seen as the losing move — a surrender of personal freedom. But philosophers from Kant to Sartre warned that the endless deferral of real choices is nothing but a self-deception. A meaningful life requires commitment, not the illusion of infinite choice. The result of a culture that refuses to grow up isn't liberation; it's loneliness, burnout, and a mental health crisis.

Does genuine freedom require commitment, not the absence of it? Should we view the refusal to settle not as a lifestyle choice, but as a symptom of a deeper cultural crisis of meaning? Or is the idea of adulthood an illusion, and should we seek to remain forever young and open to all possibilities?

Heterodox sociologist Frank Furedi, radical journalist Laurie Penny, and FT columnist Jemima Kelly debate whether the refusal to grow up is liberation or a crisis of meaning.