An interesting concept in anthropology is liminality.

Liminality is just the temporal version of finding yourself in a liminal place. When you're right on the cusp of a life milestone, not quite before or after it.

Every culture has life milestones, transitions of roles that are expected as one ages.

This could be graduating, getting a first job, moving out, having a child, retiring, etc

These expected transitions mark anticipated milestones in one's life.

When they fail to appear, a person enters a liminal state as real as finding yourself in a darkened stairwell or the quiet fluorescent buzzing back corridors of a busy mall.

You've begun the ritual (Moving Out, Finally Graduating, Preparing to Have a Kid, etc), but for reasons actually completing that ritual is inaccessible.

Maybe the economy has crashed twice in once-in-a-lifetime circumstances. Maybe a parasitical billionaire class has sapped every resource necessary to complete that ritual.

Maybe you just got sick, and never got well.

For whatever *cough*dystopian*cough reason, you find yourself entering a liminal state just as real as the empty dark halls of your high school at night.

So you're in this liminal state, you're literally on the outside staring in, you're in an unexpected place that is neither destination nor origin.

The parking lot is oh so dark, so empty. So quiet.

For whatever reason, you are now on the outside.

The expected ritual never happened, the milestone was never reached. You no longer find yourself comfortably classed with the people still awaiting that transition, or those who've already made it.

Some of the people you know, anticipate that transition. They talk about their plans for it, how they imagine that rite of passage to go.

Some talk about the transitions that follow. They already got married, now they are having kids.

But you, you can't see yourself in either group. You can't say you're still awaiting that rite of passage, for fuck's sake you've been trying like hell but it's constantly being yanked from you.

And you can't simply shrug it off as "I thought about it, decided not to," because, again, you expected it, prepared for it, struggled to achieve it, but it never came.

So you're in a liminal state, on the outside looking in, at a societal expectation that for some reason has just vanished like smoke.

You woke up to find yourself in an empty train station.

And, having this perspective from the outside, simply *existing* in this liminal space where people are not expected to be, breaks you.

Identity begins to dissolve, anomie sets in as one feels unmoored from the norms and structure of society.

You're in the dark parking lot of a gas station at night, far out in the middle of nowhere. No one can hear you sing, or scream.

What happens then, is you somehow bump into another person also wandering the quiet corridors, and form a community

This is called "normative communitas," a camaraderie that exists among people who find themselves in the same liminal space they thought they were alone in.

You bump into someone else also in the same nowhere state. And then more people.

Because nature abhors a vacuum, you and your new friends begin trying to form a community in the back corridors and silent hotel hallways of society.

At first you all simply recognize that other people are in the same place. You're not alone, there are other people living here too.

Then, you begin to form your own bonds, and structures.

Then, you begin trying to find a way to escape.

These liminal places can be highly individual and personal: very specific trauma made that ritual inaccessible.

They can be societal: widespread economic circumstances cast a whole generation into the same space.

Parodoxically, the larger the group who finds themselves waking up into a liminal state, the less certain they are of how to escape it. There's less consensus on what exactly an escape would look like, or whether an escape is even desired.

And interestingly, there *are* monsters in the liminal state, the dark places between other places.

It's in this liminal state that you're most vulnerable to a monster persuading you.

It's in the liminal state that you're most psychologically vulnerable to anything that promises a return to structure, an escape from the dark corridors back into the bustle of crowds and normality.

These monsters are just as real, and just as deadly, as any you imagine silently following you through a dark parking garage.

"You're not afraid of being alone in a darb room. You're afraid of *not* being alone in a dark room."

So: liminality.

Imagine what it'd be like to live in such a completely theoretical state that absolutely does not resemble life for everyone under the age of 50.