ABSTRACT
When members of the Situationist International drifted around Paris, according to Guy Debord (1956) they let go of other concerns, including their usual motives for moving and acting (such as commuting and working). In advanced economies such as Australia, the labor or workforce has been understood as those aged from around fifteen to sixty-five. It is legally possible to work from fourteen years and nine months of age, and retirement at sixty-five is no longer compulsory in many occupations. Adulthood is deemed eighteen, but of course some members of the workforce are minors, and others are elderly. I am less definitive about the span of ages that concerns me in this chapter than I have been in previous chapters, and it is a decision I am comfortable with. Certainly, among participants in Sandy Nicholson’s (2011) 0 to 100 Project, ideas of what constitutes adulthood do vary. Michael Leggieri, aged twenty-nine, revealed that it “feels like childhood’s got a little bit more stretched out than [for] my parent’s generation”. Jeff Anderson, forty, described adulthood in terms of the symptoms of prosperity as Aristotle also might have: “career, house, wife, family, friends, all that kind of good stuff”. At forty-seven, Lori Livingstone noted that as “I get older, the word ‘old’ keeps getting pushed out, so to me, old is over 70 now”.
