Your friends are stealing your soul.

But it’s happening so subconsciously that the stark obviousness of it all is lost to your eyes — unless you’re looking for it.

This isn’t your fault, nor is it their’s; our culture has conspired to throw as many young people together as possible, remove all the adults, and expect us to figure out what we want to do with our lives, personally and professionally, emotionally and physically — by ourselves.

We college students live, oftentimes for the worse, in an arrested-development Kid Land.

Think about it; most of us at this school spend the vast majority of our time with other young people, talking about young-people issues, doing young-people activities. We rarely get time to ourselves, to, heaven forbid, reflect on that which occurs around us, or consult with adults who may have useful experience.

And when we do get some of that precious time when a roommate is gone, or nobody’s calling or texting, what do we do? Go on Facebook to — you guessed it — talk to our friends.

How did we get so closely identified with the identities of our friends, and not of ourselves? And, more bluntly, why do most young adults have a poorly developed sense of self?

Robert Epstein, writing in “Scientific American Mind,” reveals that teen/young adult angst is not necessarily caused by underdevelopment, but by Western-style upbringing.

In fact, according to research conducted by UA anthropologist Alice Schlegel and University of Pittsburgh psychologist Herbert Barry III, out of 186 preindustrial societies surveyed, 60 percent had no word for “adolescence,” and teens spent much of their time around fully developed adults.

Thus, these teens’ transition into adulthood was not marred by emotional distress, antisocial behavior or delinquency in general; they had the experience of their elders and the time to find their identities before they hit 30 and began to panic that their youth was spent in a haze of pervasive unhappiness and substance abuse.

In our Western society, however, this is not the case.

We young adults are expected to have reached adulthood at the age of 18; we’re ready to move out of our parents’ homes, to go off to college and to find our professional calling.

When we reach the arbitrarily magic age of 18, being a kid ends and being an adult begins.

Obviously, this is not the case. High rates of recreational drug use, binge drinking, crime and other forms of unhealthy social behavior all point to one cause: Many of us are simply not ready to become adults.

When I started at ASU, I was about as far away from an adult as one could get. However, I was struck with a feeling of displacement — that somehow, something was amiss.

Finally, I figured it out; most everybody has a group of friends they identify with, and that group of friends often sets the level of emotional maturity for everyone in it.

The development of the group is often limited to the level of maturity in the most grown-up kid, and as we know, young adults aren’t known for their limitless amounts of emotional maturity.

In essence, a one-eyed person is leading a kingdom of the blind.

But it doesn’t have to be like this.

You don’t have to buy into Kid Land just as much as you don’t have to buy into terrible music or pointless drinking games. Make the conscious choice to stay home, think about your life, and talk to someone over the age of 25.

I know your friends mean a lot to you, and I know culture tells us all that youth is something to cling onto well into our 40s, but if you want to do big things with your life, I suggest you stop looking to your friends for guidance and start listening to that inner voice — you know, your soul.

Alex is purposely alone, but can be reached at alexander.petrusek@asu.edu.