so you’re a grown up now … what are the biggest surprises?
Me:
the sheer amount of effort put into maintenance (all kinds)
what a headache scheduling is…when I was a kid getting together with friends was effortless, now it feels like treaty negotiations
small talk is not all that hard
sex in the shower…not all that fun
having breasts, while nice for special occasions, is a jiggly annoying hassle
How much shady activity lurks everywhere.
I am not immune to it myself but I was raised to believe that most adults were upstanding people that legitimately shook their fingers at adultery, drug and alcohol addiction, hidden hobbies like porn and gambling, plus many other things. I work in a professional job. The first two years of my career back in my early twenties were a real shocker about how many affairs their are in the workplace. I worked for a famous Boston area company and affairs were flouted there partly because it seemed because it needed to be made clear who was with who much like in high school for territorial purposes. The wizened VP that hired me just had respect written all over him. He was even a lay minister in his church. He was quietly escorted out one day when his embezzlement plan was uncovered by auditors. He had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars in a very clever plan.
Now about ten years later, it seems like every month brings a friend, family, or coworker to being caught or admitting to some insidious thing. It goes both ways and I have stuff I could drop on people as well but I had no idea bad, lurking things were just so common and pedestrian. I have a hard time believing that any family is a pristine model of functionality any more.
How hard is it is to keep things looking nice.
When you’re a kid, you never worry about how dirty or junky your living space is. Usually it doesn’t even get that way because your mother rides your ass about keeping it clean. But when you’re an adult, there’s no one nagging you about house chores, so signs of neglect accumulate exponentially. And it’s embarrassing.
Well I’m surprised I don’t want to eat candy all the time. I remember as a kid just thinking my mother must be some kind of robot to have her own wallet and stand beside candy and just not buy any!
I’m not afraid of the dark, or of being alone in the house at night! That’s a perk.
OP’s list is pretty good for me, actually. Maintenance does take amazing amounts of time, and then I turn around and discover some job that I should have been doing that I didn’t even know existed…
Responsibility is a big, fat, boring pain in the butt.
You never feel ‘grown up’, whatever that means.
Years whizz by after you leave your twenties.
People are not nearly as nice, decent, or moral as you grew up believing.
There really isn’t a ‘happily ever after’. At best there’s some great times.
This is why Great Big Sea’s Consequence Free has so much resonance. 
When I was a teenager I would save for weeks and months to buy tickets to see my fave singer/band in concert.
Now I can afford to do so more easily, I opt to buy the latest CD because concerts are a waste of time and money.
Plus, they tend to go past my bedtime and I get very cranky with little sleep. 
Despite what I was told, being an adult is not harder than being a kid; different, but not harder. And please, people, do not tell depressed, near suicidal kids that their life is only going to get worse, forever; it doesn’t help.
I don’t get embarrassed by much anymore. I can admit that I like “cheesy” stuff, and if no one else likes it I don’t care. If I do something dumb in public, so what? It happens to everyone sometimes, and for the most part, it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks. Really!
Man, this is the friggin truth. The effort my mom and dad had to put in to keep the house together with 4 kids running around must have been insane.
I remember my dad being outside working on the house, mowing, raking, gardening, blah blah blah all weekend long, after working all week. It didn’t seem like that big a deal when I was a kid, now that it’s my job to do all that work (on a smaller lot with no kids around) it’s pretty daunting.
That the boogeyman in the closet and the one under the bed (for years I leaped into bed from a good 3’ away) would be replaced by far more frightening and overwhelming specters, i.e. environmental degradation and the Bush administration.
That a lot of adults are crazy.
That the world didn’t judge me as harshly as my parents did, primarily because the world just doesn’t care – and, later, that the world’s indifference is actually quite liberating.
That is true for the most part. High school is almost, but not completey, different than the rest of someone’s life and that is a good thing. Teenagers become evil little psychos operating en masse during those years and it is generally hard for most people. I have no idea why schools reinforce that stuff with a King and Queen of this and that like it means something. The successful person is more likely to be the class nerd 10 years down the road. The perpetual King and Queen of everything at my school never went to college and got crappy jobs that make them look 15 years older than they are.
College is difficult as well and I made some written notes to myself from that time to remind me of that. I suppose it wouldn’t be bad if someone goes to some 3rd rate college on their parents dime and doesn’t care about grades but that wasn’t me. I went to great schools, got great grades, and worked three jobs to pay for everything college wouldn’t. I often stayed up for 2 days straight studying and working and once went 72 hours straight studying and taking finals (all A’s BTW).
It was a shock when I got my first professional job and found the “grueling” work hours rather easy and they were considered hard-assed and grueling by corporate standards. I had money and I could do things at night rather than studying.
The big surprise on the other end was how hard small children are. I guess I knew the math in an abstract sense but having to account for 2 or more small children every second of every day is brutal. I don’t like babies much at all anymore but they get to be easier by the time that they are three or so.
I still don’t know what I’m doing. I think I thought that by this time I would have some kind of idea of how to be an adult. Nope. I’m still just as confused as I was when I was a kid. (I am glad that some experience has taught me better ways to get through times. I no longer run away from home when I’m angry! Or, from a different perspective, I now run away on a much bigger scale.)
Learned: That most adults are just big kids.
Learned: Some adults can be just as snarky as some teens, but with no one t be accountable to.
Learned: That growing old tactfully is the fun way to go. Love the better toys (quads, vacation cabin in VT, boat…money in general)
Dislikes: being looked at weird when my inner child gets the better of me. 
My biggest surprise? That incompetence is as endemic in adulthood as it is in elementary school. A certain percentage of kids in my fourth-grade class were just total snotlicking idiots who were fine with always doing shoddy work cobbled together at the last minute and attempting to get through school by doing the absolute minimum (while expending a ton of energy on lowering that expected minimum as close to zero as possible) and filling in the gaps with cheating, bluster, bullying, finger-pointing, avoidance, and feigned indifference. I always assumed that an adult in a position of responsibility would be competent – teachers, bankers, book editors, store managers, what have you. Most are, but every place I’ve worked had had it’s shared of those stupid kids all grown up, trying to get other people to shoulder their responsibilities and trying to parlay ignorance into a positive trait.
On the upside, I’m happy that many adults still enjoy baseball as much as they did when they were 10.
As a kid, adult motivations just stumped me. I wanted to know why people did things so I worked to develop a good sense of observation.
As an adult I find that the more I understand about people, the more mindnumbing it is. As a highly observant adult I am sorry to have seen half the things I notice.
Oh yeah! And housekeeping is never done… Screw that!
I am shocked to discover exactly how stupid adults usually are and how unreliable authority can really be. When I was a kid, I thought if I just read enough books and talked to enough people I’d understand all aspects of the world around me. Turns out that the books don’t agree with each other and most people are so dumb as to leave me astounded they’re capable of functioning.
I was also surprised to discover that I don’t live in a tree house, I have never met a pirate, and I don’t have pizza for dinner every night. :mad:
I’m still working on the tree house, though.
Let me know when you are ready for that treehouse. Just because we are adults doesn’t mean we can’t have our toys.
That’s huge for me. I wasted so much time and energy being acutely self-conscious it amazes me now that none fo that stuff bothers me.
Maintanance and all the minutae of daily like like keeping up with bills. That takes more effort than I ever realized. And having to be responsible and not blow my entire paycheck on shoes. And I actually like vegetables now and don’t eat (or even want) just onion dip and chips every night for dinner.
The biggest surprise is that other grown-ups are actually…people. Just normal people with the same motivations and fears and foibles as anyone. For an emabarrassingly long time (like up until my late twenties), I had the world divided into me and my peers and “grown-ups” or everyone more than five years older than me.