I’ve met people who think renting an apartment or owning a condo isn’t enough, you have to own a standalone home to be an adult.
Same with relationships, being in a long term relationship isn’t enough, you have to be married.
Then again, like I was saying earlier, part of being an adult is realizing that the agenda of the society you were born into isn’t always aligned with your own agenda. I wouldn’t consider someone who bought a house and got married before they were ready to avoid negative peer pressure to be a positive adult role model. Learning to resist peer pressure and understanding that your goals may not align with those of the culture you were born into are major signs of adulthood.
Tl;Dr you become an adult when you eat ice cream for breakfast in your rented apartment, and don’t mind that some people would shame you for doing so.
I think I see what you’re getting at, but on the other hand, unashamedly eating ice cream for breakfast seems like a very childlike thing to do.
Maybe it depends on whether you’re eating ice cream for breakfast because you have learned to be in charge of your own life instead of letting societal peer pressure tell you what to do, or whether you’re eating ice cream for breakfast because you haven’t learned to be in charge of your own life instead of letting your appetites and whims tell you what to do.
Some people never own a house. Some people never get married. Who am I to say that they never become adults? But at least buying a home or getting married involves making a commitment to have the responsibility for taking care of something or someone.
The big secret about being an adult, the thing they never tell you, is that it doesn’t matter what things you do, you always just feel the same as you ever did. There is no big transition point where you suddenly feel like an “adult”. You just go through life, taking on more responsibility, then one day you realise you are 40 and half of life is gone, but you don’t feel any different. There is no “adult”, there is just you and whatever responsibilities you feel able to take on.
Just signed up to go to my 40th High School Reunion this Fall and along with the invite was a request to answer a bunch of questions for “the memory book.” It, and the remembered anxiety of my High School experience, and how I felt about being so awkward there and then, got me thinking some about this thread. I don’t think any of those “big five” markers, all hit fairly early, marked my becoming an adult at all. When I became comfortable with my awkwardness, accepting it and using it, owning it, embracing it even, that was when I felt as adult as I’ve gotten.
But similar to Spice Weasel, there certainly is the part of me that does not yet feel like an adult at all, that feels I am just faking it, and the wee irrational bit that thinks that somehow my lack of adulthood will be found out. The angsty anxious awkward and often clueless teen who bemoans a sense of not quite fitting in, I don’t think he’s ever not there, and being able to deal successfully with his persistent presence, with the parts that say “who you fooling? you just a little kid.”, to me that is what the process of “adulting” may be most about.
Machinaforce the mechanics of adulting are straightforward. But taking the responsibility for what you do and having the confidence that you can handle the responsibilities you take on, having the honest belief that you can figure it out because you know others have, thinking of yourself when you ask who is in charge of what happens to you and for how you deal with life’s challenges, that is the adulting process that honestly takes more work for lots of us.
Yes. I think for me it was the moment I realized I could cultivate my own community. I don’t have to let shitty people into my life, or buy into anyone else’s bullshit definition of success. I can just hang out with people as awkward as I am and it’s fine.
My friends are either just as damned crazy as I am, or they have a high tolerance for crazy. There is no need for the facade with them. Like with my writer’s group, before I do a critique I joke about popping an Ativan, and then sometimes I actually do, and then the guy with cancer jokes that next time he’ll bring his own drugs to share, and then someone makes an inappropriate comment, and we spend the rest of the session talking about the dangers of misrepresenting Appalachian culture in fiction, and it’s fucking fantastic. Most of them are men twice my age, and then on the flip side, one of our regulars in D&D (the DM’s son) is a fourteen year old kid with severe ADHD and probably Asperger’s. This motley crew might look ridiculous to outsiders, but who cares? I adore my friends.
I don’t know if that’s exactly what ‘‘adult’’ means, but there is real liberation in choosing your own tribe.
Bottom line is that Adult is not a destination, it is a not merit badge one achieves. It’s the stuff you learn as you navigate big events and acquire experience.
Have you had any of the big events listed upthread? Are you considering any? You mentioned having Asperger’s and your parents “taking care of things for you.” What do you see as the next one or two things you want to do on your own?
One of the benefits of learning how to be an adult when you are young is that when you get old and retire you get to start being a kid again. At least for a while and then a whole new set of adult type issues start kicking in and the learning process starts over.
One other thing I would add is that adults fix problems, then assign blame if it’s worth it. Anyone who lfirst ooks around for someone to blame when there is a problem is not an adult.
Spilled water on the floor? Wipe it up, and who cares how it got there?
Broken glass on the floor? Clean it up and dispose of properly, then have a word with the stupid idiot who broke something and didn’t clean it up or at least tell someone about it.
Don’t know if it was a disappointment or an insight, but when I was a child I thought grown-ups knew what was going on. Then I became one, very much against my will, and I realized we are all just muddling along by guess and by God.
It’s like when I fixed my first plumbing problem. Turn off the water so it doesn’t leak. Take it apart and see if I can spot the part that is leaking, or doesn’t work. Replace that part. Put it back together. Turn on the water. Hey presto, it doesn’t leak any more.
I want to talk a little more about the nuance of how we ended up in a “how to adult” question to begin with. I’m about to turn 30 and my peers frequently talk about how “my parents didn’t teach me any life skills.” They didn’t teach us about taxes, about investing, about how to write checks, about how to rent an apartment or buy a house, about how to apply for a loan, how to cook anything more advanced than a grilled cheese, how to paint your house, about sex. They left it up to the school, and the school didn’t do it because parents either said “hell no you’re not teaching my kid that” or they thought the parents would do it themselves. So we ended up, apparently, with a lot of people that have had to wing it or use google a whole lot. And google sometimes has some blind spots (see my thread on discovering how people get their cars to the mechanics when they also have a full time job they need a car to get to). That isn’t even getting into the people who never think to google the answers to their questions.
But there’s a second part to the adulting equation. It’s technology and the changing times. Whenever I HAVE gotten advice from my parents’ generation on doing things, their advice is…well, outdated. On everything from taking out student loans, to how to job search, to how to buy a car. For example, they might tell me all the ins and outs of haggling for a car, when the dealerships I went to said flat out they don’t haggle anymore because you can compare all the dealership prices online. The prices are already as low as it goes. None of that, “let me speak with the sales manager” just, “take it or leave it”. In a way, we’re in a new frontier where half of all the old advice no longer applies, and things are always changing so much it’s hard to keep abreast of how to actually do things. Don’t worry about getting health insurance because you’ll get a job with health benefits? Good luck in this day and age, I’ve never had a job that offered me benefits (and I’ve worked six different places). Walk into a bank to apply for a loan? Nope, do it all online, and make those bad money decisions possible in mere minutes! So I’m not surprised we have young adults who feel like they’ve been dropped in the wilderness and told, “figure it out” while at the same time feel mocked for not being able to figure it out as “easily” as all the older people did.
Sure, maybe y’all are muddling along just like us. But that’s certainly not the facade adults like to portray, and that causes part of the disconnect.
I mean, I’m only 34, I’ve had to navigate the same bullshit. It was drilled into my head that ‘‘student debt is good debt, you can always pay it back.’’ Well, that was more true when people had $10,000 loans. We have a combined total of $150,000 in student loan debt, all from graduate school. Previous generations cannot fathom the idea of starting a professional career with the burden of a $1600/month loan payment. The idea that you can work your way through college is a joke, not the least because many programs forbid it. If you crunch the numbers, it’s usually still worth it to get an advanced degree… barely. The benefit is significantly less than it used to be. And you are right, the condescending attitude that we are lazy or incompetent because we don’t do things the way they were done thirty years ago is utter bullshit. When I entered college in 2001, you could get a job anywhere. When I left college in 2007, there were no jobs to be had. I went to grad school. I graduated there in 2011. Still no jobs to be had. I went to an Ivy League school and it still took me a year to find employment after I graduated. I recently did a search in my state for jobs related to the one I’m doing now… not a single job. We are not living in our parents’ world.
I think another part of the disconnect is that you seem to think it was different “way back when”. It was , for some people, in different ways but I get the impression that you have the idea that in the past, parents taught their kids how to rent an apartment/buy a house in advance. Nope, they would give you advice ( if they could) at the point where you were actually buying/renting. And I say if they could because a fair amount of parents had never rented an apartment and another group had never bought a house and a much smaller group had never done either*- how could they give you advice on something they’ve never done. Investing , student loans - lots of things fall into that category. How will my now 27 year old daughter be able to advise her children about student loans- neither she nor her husband have any? **
Regarding some of the other issues - I'm not sure what you mean about being taught to write a check. Seems sort of self explanatory to me , so I'm guessing you mean something other than the actual writing of the check. Some of the other things weren't taught so much as they were learned. My cooking skills are more advanced than grilled cheese, but I also helped with meal preparation at least occasionally for as long as I can remember. Now of course, I wasn't actually cooking at 5, but a 5 year old can shuck corn, or snap the ends off green beans or peas or bread chicken cutlets. Spend a few years in the kitchen doing that stuff while the adults are doing the cutting and frying and you will pick up enough by watching that when you can be trusted with a knife or hot oil, you already know how to do it. But if your family cooks in a way that is not conducive to having a couple of kids "helping", you aren't going to learn that way.
I know that sounds crazy- but it happens. I know multiple people in their 70s who have never rented an apartment not bought a house. They got married in their 20s and moved into an apartment in the 2-4 family house that their parents owned and inherited that house when their parents died. If the kids don’t follow their example, the parents are less than useless with advice about renting/buying.
** And they both have Master’s degrees. Because although Spice Weasel may be correct that “The idea that you can work your way through college is a joke” in many areas, it isn’t a joke in mine.
I would hope that a 50 or 60-year-old wouldn’t be “muddling along” like a 20-something or 30-something. I’d like to think that by the time someone hits 50, they’ve got SOME shit figured out.
It sounds like you think when previous generations turned 18, they were better equipped to navigate the world than 18-year-olds today are. That’s kinda nuts. Your parents’ parents didn’t do any better of a job preparing them for the world than your parents did you. The difference between ya’ll is that your parents came of age in a less cut-throat economy, where an average person could screw up multiple times and still find a soft landing somewhere. Like, there was no random drug testing “back in the day”, and no Facebook and Twitter accounts to scour for embarrassing posts. No one did background and credit checks on applicants for basic positions. No one expected the grocery store clerk to score high on a personality test. Nowadays, it really does seem like minor screw-ups and flaws can derail a person’s trajectory. High school grads are competing with college grads for the same jobs. But this is all an indictment against the economy, not contemporary parenting. You could teach a teenager everything they need to know about “adulting”, but they will still feel like a child they can’t find a job that is good enough to allow them their own apartment and transportation.
I don’t know anyone who was taught about taxes or finances or anything else “grown up” by their parents. Especially not any Gen Xer’s, the generation known for laissez-faire parenting and latch keys. My father taught me how to swim by throwing me into the deep end and shouting at me not to drown. That’s how he did me with adulthood, too. He was there to rescue me when I’d sink, and occasionally he did have to throw me a life preserver or two. But it was up to me to figure out how to keep my head above water. The best teacher is first-hand experience.
And you know you are a parent when you are at a party and find yourself in a very interesting conversation about baby poop.
My parents did teach me a lot of specific things about being an adult - how to change a tire, how to balance a checkbook, how to budget, how to behave in public, things like that. But I think part of becoming an adult is the realization that I could pick and choose and do my own thing. I never saw the point in making the bed, so I don’t. I can’t stand tuna fish, so I don’t eat it. (Don’t tell my mother.)
The flip side being, of course, when I was a child, I looked forward to being an adult because I could eat all the candy I wanted and stay up as late as I like. Now I am in my sixties. I don’t want a lot of candy, and bedtime is something to look forward to.