The second biggest lie* I can recall being told from my childhood was “being an adult is so much harder than being a kid. You should count yourself lucky.” I can’t stress enough how much more preferable it is to be an adult than a kid. You couldn’t pay me enough to go back to being bossed around every minute of the day and not having the freedom to go where I want. I’ll gladly suck up every bit of responsibility I have to for the option of eating ice cream for dinner and cleaning up after myself whenever I damn well please.
So, what do you prefer? Being a kid or being an adult?
*The first was “high school is the best four years of your life”
The thing I prefer most about being an adult is my vastly superior understanding of the world. As a kid I felt as though I were in a fog, surrounded by mysteries. While it was fun to roll back those mists, I wouldn’t enjoy living in a fog for the rest of my life.
On the other hand, everything else was easier. I had an understanding Mom, fun friends, and an ability to have fun with little more than an empty field or patch of carpet.
Absolutely, adulthood is better. I just had this conversation the other day with a 25-ish woman who said she would rather be a kid. Being “care-free” and “having a chauffeur” were her listed reasons. I said I much prefer being in control of my own life, and I gladly accept the responsibilities that come with it.
I don’t know, there were a lot of things I didn’t worry about when I was a kid, which I fret about constantly now.
My parents were really good about holding up to their word. Do X, you get Y as a reward.
Health Insurance. I didn’t think about it AT ALL until I was no longer covered by my mom’s insanely good coverage. If I ever broke my arm, I’d go to the hospital to get it fixed. Needed medicine/hospital stay? Insurance would fix it. Insurance to me was just this mysterious institution that would pay for our problems. Boy was I naive.
Now, I live paycheck to paycheck. My crappy insurance pays only 60%, if even that. A recent sigmoidoscopy cost more than a month’s rent for me- and the resulting diagnosis (Proctitis) is sure to cause as much pain to my wallet as it does to my rectum :mad:
Going to College. I’m glad I went to college, don’t get me wrong. But as a kid I was brainwashed into thinking, “go to college, get a good job”. My parents CONVINCED me there was no possible way someone could make a living without a college education. This past year, my best friend, sans college education, made $60,000. Myself, with a BA, made a princely $19,000 :smack:
I think I stress a whole lot more as an adult than I did as a kid. Even if I am trying to relax, I’m thinking “I’ve got to get X, Y and Z finished by Thursday… I owe A some money… how am I going to fix C, D and E without help or cash?”
I think my biggest daily stresser as a kid was “How do I get a way without eating my peas?”
Being 17 ruled. I could put that year on repeat and it’d be a long time before I’d get bored with it.
That said, being an adult isn’t so bad. It’s definitely not as hard as they said it would be, but then I don’t have kids, don’t have a 9-5 job, don’t have a whole bunch of responsibilities… When I think about it, I probably have an easier time on paper than I did as a kid. I spent more time in school than I do at work now, and in between I do whatever I feel like.
While a lot of things have changed for the worse, I do like what aging has done to my temper. When I was 17, everything was important, there was no such thing as a trivial difference of opinion, I got angry easily, and when I was angry, everybody had to know. Immediately and with extreme prejudice. Being an adult is much more mellow.
Well, adulthood has its ups and downs. Nobody tells me to make my bed, but nobody fixes the garbage disposal for me, either. Last week a dead bird appeared on the back deck, and you know what? If I didn’t do something about it nobody else was gonna. That kinda sucks.
And they expect that mortgage payment every damned month, you know?
And remember summer vacation? You know what sucks balls? Working full time. Not because it generally sucks, although it does, but because you don’t have the time to do the stuff you want to do. Now that I’ve got the money to buy a Wii and I can buy it if I want to even if it isn’t educational enough, I don’t want to because I don’t need anything else sucking up my free time!
On the other hand, being a grownup and having your own house is pretty sweet. But it’s not unreservedly so.
It’s easier than my parents told me it would be. When my mother was my age, though, she had a husband and two young children. I have no spouse or children. I don’t have nearly as much that I have to do now that I’m an adult. When I was a kid, there was so much that was mandatory–homework, chores, going places I didn’t really want to go. Now I really don’t have to do much that I don’t want to do. The only thing I have to worry about is paying my bills and finding time and money for fun. Fun was much cheaper when I was a child. I used to lie in the grass and look up at the clouds for long periods of time. Now I don’t do that because I’m the one who has to get the grass stains out of my clothes.
I agree with the OP. I’m finding adulthood less stressful than childhood and would not want to go back to those days for a million dollars.
I was a stressed out kid. Simple things that I wasn’t old enough to do (like drive a car, pump gas, withdraw money from a bank account) seemed difficult and complicated from my vantage point, and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to figure it all out.
And I didn’t have my own money. I hated asking my parents for stuff and depending on them for even the tiniest of things. It’s infinitely better able to pay my own way.
I don’t remember anybody telling me how hard it was going to be. However: there’s no substitute for being your own boss about how to spend your free time. I don’t miss homework and being graded one bit, even though bills and job stress takes up a lot of the same mental worrying space. This is definitely better, and I like myself much more. And there’s no substitute for wanting to do something as a kid and then accomplishing it as an adult, like I did when I moved to Manhattan last week.
That said, the hard parts of adulthood have been very hard. Being dumped by a long-term girlfriend right after graduating college and then suffering through months of listless unemployment? Very hard. Having a friend of 10 years die? Harder. My youngest brother fighting a brain tumor for the last six months? Harder still. None of those things are guaranteed parts of adulthood, of course, but as life goes on, the odds of those kinds of things happening only go up. Nobody told me how hard those things would be, but then again, even if there were words for it, I wouldn’t have believed them. Some things you can only experience.
When I read the thread title my first reaction was “Yep, but WAY more fun.”
I have read the other responses, and mine remains the same. I thought being a late teenager (18/19) was awesome. But when I turned 20, my 30-year-old friend told me that the 20s are the best years of your life.
I did actually really enjoy my 20s, a lot more than any years previous.
But then I turned 30, and it’s been less than a year, but so far my 30s are even better than my 20s!
And it did get a bit easier, actually, after that point in my 20s sometime when I chilled out and realized that everything doesn’t matter nearly as much as I thought it did.
True enough. But are they harder than they would have been in childhood?
I do remember being told how hard adulthood would be. And now that I’m in it… it’s even harder than I expected. Of course, a lot of that is my own fault because I have a tendency to WAY overdo things. There’s a lot of things I miss about being a kid… I could run around outside for hours, or play with toys, and it wasn’t “weird”. I didn’t have bills, or pretty much any other responsibility besides school, which was a joke, so it doesn’t even compare to having a full-time job, or grad school. I could have fun with friends by just hanging out together and watching TV or playing video games or running around in a field doing whatever. Now-a-days, we have to find time and “schedule” when we “go out”. Damnit, I still have fun playing video games, why is that so “childish”?
Yeah, there are some perks to being an adult… I have no restrictions on where I can go or when. If I don’t feel like going to work, I can call in sick. Having money to spend on pleasures I couldn’t afford as a kid. But I’d gladly trade all of that for the perks of being a kid… knowing I’d have a roof over my head (without having to worry about bills), knowing there’d always be food on the table, knowing I’d have at least two months of complete freedom each summer to do with as I pleased.
I think as others said, the best age isn’t being a kid (where one is overly naive and has none of the perks of being an adult), it’s somewhere in-between like late teens to early twenties (especially if you went to college). I think the best years of my life, in terms of balance between adulthood and childhood was being an undergrad where I only had to work enough to have the money I needed to do what I wanted to do.
After all that, I STILL try to be child-like, but try to stay away from being childish.
Some of them can’t even happen in childhood. Sure, every kid has probably had a “broken heart” by the time he was 12 or 13… but how many that age have actually had a disasterous relationship? Of course, love definitely has higher highs, but it also has MUCH lower lows. I think I’d be happy just being oblivious largely oblivious to the whole thing once again.
Similarly, losing a job… if a parent loses a job, they bare all the stress. When we didn’t have much money when I was a kid, I didn’t miss anything, because I just plain didn’t know anything else. Adults have this frame of reference; they know what they’re missing. As long as a kid has an imagination, a roof over his head, food, and clothes… he’ll be fine.
Something odd I’ve noticed - though I work in a high-stress occupation as an adult, and have to cope with matters of real responsibility as a parent and home-owner, my subconcious evidently thinks that childhood stresses are worse - I still get exam anxiety dreams, and it has been decades since school.
If someone had told me when I was a kid that I had to take out the garbage every day, get myself to work/school on time every day, decide what I was going to eat and make the time to prepare it, pay significant portions of my income on non-fun basics like electricity and water, have to go to work/school all through the summer and give up the two weeks of vacation around Christmas, get the car fixed when it is broken, make my own appointments for the dentist,and so on and so forth, as a kid I would have absolutely not accepted it. All that stuff would be like, WAAAAAY too boring, dude! I could rebel against the fascist parents and school authorities who would make me do such lame things.
Now, as an adult, I don’t even think about any of that stuff. It’s just what life is.
Being an adult is pretty easy for me. Why? Because I’m in good health, I make a decent salary, I have a girlfriend, some close friends and family, no kids and I work in Manhattan with a bunch of 20 and 30 somethings who like to go out a lot. I have no problems thankfully other than about 20 extra lbs (which doesn’t really look THAT bad).
I think what I liked about being a kid was the sense of looking forward on things instead of looking back.
I find it far easier. And a free bit of advice to parents/teachers; please do not tell a depressed kid about how much worse life is going to get.
I can choose what to do in my free time, I have privacy, and if some big guy starts shoving me around I can call the cops and not get called a tattletale by the police, unlike teachers. Say what you want about the stresses of work; your boss and co-workers are not allowed, much less encouraged to physically assault you. And at least you are allowed to try to find a different job if you don’t like the one you have.
Of course, a lot of that is my own fault because I have a tendency to WAY overdo things. There’s a lot of things I miss about being a kid… I could run around outside for hours, or play with toys, and it wasn’t “weird”. I didn’t have bills, or pretty much any other responsibility besides school, which was a joke, so it doesn’t even compare to having a full-time job, or grad school. I could have fun with friends by just hanging out together and watching TV or playing video games or running around in a field doing whatever. Now-a-days, we have to find time and “schedule” when we “go out”. Damnit, I still have fun playing video games, why is that so “childish”?