Being an adult is willingly taking responsibility, and in some ways liking it. Whatever it is, I'll handle it somehow. It might not be perfect, the plan may change, and it may even ultimately fail, but it's still mine and I'll deal with it. I might do it myself, hire an expert, or ask for help. That doesn't matter.
The key is how we handle speedbumps and mistakes. A child throws up their hands, surrenders, and/or hands it over to someone else. Being an adult is less about knowing everything, but being able to see things through to the finish regardless of what comes your way.
I'm 41 years old and I'm still not convinced that I'm not just 3 kids stacked in a trench coat.
Despite the fact that I have a respectable career, own a house, have a retirement account, etc, I still feel like I'm cosplaying as a responsible adult when I put on some nice clothes and go out to a fancy dinner. What am I doing here? This is for people that have their shit together. I don't have my shit together, do I? Maybe I do?
I'm a child that tricked 5 people into thinking I know what I'm doing and gave me a job, then used that lie to swindle a bank into letting me borrow $300,000 to buy a house. I traveled to Italy last year. Are kids even allowed to board international flights on their own?
Someone told me that this feeling is actually pretty common, but it usually goes away once your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed almost 5 years ago. Still often feel like I know nothing and am just pretending to know how to navigate life.
I’m a couple years behind you and I feel the exact same. I suppose religious rituals have the goal of conferring life stages/adulthood, but I think that just proves how outdated religion is. I believe Judaism sets adulthood at 13 which is hard to believe was true even in the Bronze Age. My religion sets it in mid teenage years, but my parents sure didn’t treat me like an adult when I went through their ritual (and they were right).
I suppose you could call me a manchild, but I never really got the appeal of growing up in America - work 40+ hours a week with a week or two off per year (and that’s if you’re lucky) for a few decades as you get old and then die. And that’s if you don’t get laid off. Got help you if you get laid off with dependents who need your employment for food, shelter, and health insurance. It’s pretty grim. If I was able to believe in a religion, I bet it would help.
On a brighter note, I find it helps to think of things like play. Work is where I play with computers, the gym is where I mess around and enjoy myself. Framing is important.
> I never really got the appeal of growing up in America - work 40+ hours a week with a week or two off per year (and that’s if you’re lucky) for a few decades as you get old and then die [...] if you don’t get laid off.
America is not a country for salarymen. It is a country for entrepreneurs and business owners. Customers and employees are the human resources they exploit.
You make your money however you can then you exfiltrate your earnings back to whatever country you came from, and retire early as a king.
The good news for you then is that English will get you pretty far in most countries. Most of Europe isn't so culturally different that it's impossible. Places like Australia (good weather) and NZ (medium weather, great activities), where I was born and grew up, are good options if you can get the visa (you probably can if you're a technologist).
So many European countries have high numbers of English speakers, some are better retirement targets than others. Certainly a lots of British people Retire to Spain, Portugal and Greece.
You're at a fancy restaurant because it's your daughter's birthday therefore everybodies' life stories are meeting at this moment, to make it a memorable evening.
You might be a 40yr old man pondering what life means, as your week has been filled with boiler plate code and you've attend endless meetings with the same filler conversations around missed deadlines and dropped targets.
You wonder what the future of your medium sized business app will be in an economy clouded by AI, LLMs and ChatGPT. The looming macro-economic challenges ring faintly in the back of your mind.
Your father would have been at this table, why isn't he here. At my age he was working a respectable management position in a prestigious company. His whole family meeting around the one table, sharing big laughs and emphatic stories. Where is he tonight?
What happened to social reinforcement for my position in life? Why can I never feel truly at ease in a life position, always under threat of destabilizing shock to the government, family, social or business environments. Why is there never any real physical security? Whom will remember myself in the end?
One broken storyline after another and you end up wondering, what does it all mean? Why don't I have my shit together? Why can't I keep my mind out of troubling thoughts?
Having a long memory and metacognition is persecuted (for lack of a better word) in this modern society.
Sure, you're at a fancy restaurant. The totality of what you know is not satisfied by good company and food, man does not live on bread alone.
You're happy for a moment and so is your daughter, as the earnest waitress delivers the birthday cake.
I don't feel like a kid, but I often feel like a teenager.
Weirdly enough, I don't feel like that at work, just in my personal life.
I've been trying to reconcile the different "me" at work (I work from home) vs me in my personal life. I'm way more emotional in my personal life and get angry easier, while at work my brain takes over any time I feel any time I'm losing control, and I manage to give very respectful responses.
Why on earth does this happen? My hypothesis is that by being more emotional, I get also the upside of "feeling more the happy emotions".
At least 2 reasons I can think of: (1) they're afraid of being found out, (2) life has taught them if they don't they suffer real consequences after they slip in their responsibilities.
I think the social concept of maturity comes from social hierarchy and advance, more than any story we tell ourselves about personal growth. Grandma wanted some cake at the end just as I do now, and always have ;)
It’s a way to organize society with a common-sense-sounding multilevel marketing presentation of how you can become grandpa and have a sizable downline!
Yet. You’re still gonna be you, and that’s the scam. You can always tell which kid wants to sit around and read, and which kid wants to be a politician, and which kid is going to be a heavy metal drummer.
Sometimes a kid will never fit a mold, but they almost never flip personalities. If someone is surprised that Johnny ditches work in his 40’s, I find that the exterior world made the wrong conclusions about why he ditched class in his 8’s and teens.
I think it’s just hard for us to accept that a lot of who we are is baked into our personalities from birth.
As much as I feel like a child, I think the hallmark of being an “adult” is moderation.
Give a kid unlimited access to a box of cookies - they’ll never eat dinner. Last night I snacked on a cookie before dinner.
Sometimes I’ll stay out “past my bedtime”. Get into shenanigans. Go out with friends. Play hooky at work.
I can behave like a kid while still taking responsibility. Maintaining a job. Paying bills. Building savings. Making ~relatively~ healthy choices and understanding I could do better.
Anyways, I don’t want to be a “real” adult. Living life by the book sounds miserable. Cheating is fun and rewarding. But so is getting important “adult” stuff done. Why not both?
> Give a kid unlimited access to a box of cookies - they’ll never eat dinner.
Children do self regulate. I read some studies over the years about it but of course I can't find them now to link. However, anecdotally with my kids this seems more personality based than age related: two of my kids would not eat all the cookies, one would and so would I.
I'm not convinced "moderation" is the answer to "What makes an adult?" It excludes a whole bunch of neurodivergent adults. Is someone not an adult because they have ADHD?
I find that a lot of people seem to wait until they feel like "adults" to take on responsibility, and then end up passing up their life (or too much of their life) waiting.
Out of all the things in my life that are "adult" (eg, being responsible for people at work, and wife/kids at home) happened before I was totally sure I was up for it. And it's only through diving into those challenges, and growing through that experience, do I feel like an adult now in retrospect.
It takes a little confidence or good peer pressure to get into that.
One "signal" I have of adulthood is that I value "their" experience over "my experience." EG - if I am super-tired at the end of the day and only am kinda enjoying playing with my kid, but then I recognize that he's having fun because I am there with him, and knowing that this is what matters 100%.
> I find that a lot of people seem to wait until they feel like "adults" to take on responsibility, and then end up passing up their life (or too much of their life) waiting.
> Out of all the things in my life that are "adult" (eg, being responsible for people at work, and wife/kids at home) happened before I was totally sure I was up for it. And it's only through diving into those challenges, and growing through that experience, do I feel like an adult now in retrospect.
> It takes a little confidence or good peer pressure to get into that.
Hear, hear. I want to add that it's important to grow up in an environment where you are taught the world can be managed/tamed/apprehended/handled, not entirely but at least enough to make it out okay. If you don't have that, if you are raised to believe or to think the world is a nasty place that will beat you down and no one tells you can get back up and keep moving forward [0] then it's hard to become an adult on your own unless life throws you hard enough challenges (and I am talking life threatening stuff) that forces you to become an adult (and generally, in those situations, those challenges come way too soon and have life long consequences).
I am rambling but it's coherent to me. Feeling like being and adult, being an adult and doing the adult thing when needed or when the opportunity comes your way are all different things. But I believe wanting to be an adult, that is to owning up to your mistakes and taking up responsibility (even and especially when it's not your fault) is a worthy goal.
I totally agree with your agreement with me :) I also think the current generation has it "harder" - previous generations had positive peer pressure, where it would be very odd to not have a meaningful job, to not marry, to not have kids. So people did those things and by-and-large grew into those responsibilities (not everyone but it worked well enough!)
In more recent decades, we pivoted this around - since these lifestyles don't work for everyone, we did a good job of denormalizing. You don't need to work, you don't need to be married, you don't need to have kids -- so many people don't, but also in not-doing, they don't have the change to find why it was the right thing for them - as I believe the majority would.
For me, adulthood is all about agency; Being an adult basically means you can do it yourself. You can take care of yourself, you can navigate life by yourself - not that you always get it right, more that you don’t need your parents to step in and get it for you.
Isn't adulthood the socially acceptable murder of your "inner child"?
In all seriousness - this article reads like someone who just plain old doesnt have their shit together. Nothing at all to do with adulthood? How hard is it to get a big enough bag to put your things in, a clean bottle, cook a good meal, blow your kids nose, and comb their hair before you leave the house.
None of those things are hard or signal adulthood.
I have the unique vantage point of my mum having worked as a cook in a childcare centre. She's noticed in her 25 years of holding that job - the steady descent of quality in parenting:
The shirking of "raising" to grandparents.
The complete ignorance of child raising basics (such as introduction to foods in a gradual manner)
The insidious invasion of "choice" to children's lives. Why the fk are you asking your kid if they want nuggets or brocolli? Of course the kid's going to choose nuggets...
The widespread seeming fatigue in parents (this i understand as it was common in the early 90s for there to be a single breadwinner, and with the cost of living increasing - this becomes increasingly impossible even if a family would love to have a parent stay at home)
Parents on their phones instead of paying attention to their kids.
I dont have kids - but - I have lived and worked amongst parents and have noticed a marked "drop" in the inner-strength of parents over time. My mum admitted she was "winging" it when raising kids - and im not sure if her being a mum to her own siblings as a child (lived in a large family as the oldest girl) had anything to do with it.
I think it all comes down to priorities. "Adults" are the ones that seem to have the best balance of those (for the location/culture) with the most experience living out those values (aka they learned it from their parents). Having money that's 75%+ percentile helps too.
I've experienced this moving from more rural spots in the south to a NE suburban existence. Lawns and landscaping matters. There is etiquette around how/when to put out your trash cans and leaves. Etiquette for how the kids should play around in the neighborhood. I've had to figure those out on the fly, but the kids learn those rules without even realizing it.
I think the most important thing about being an adult is making sure your kids are happy, healthy, and have opportunities to do well and be proud. You can't let them jump on every culture phenomenon, but you also have to let them be a part of the culture they're in. Unless you're doing the exact same thing as your parents did, it's going to take some figuring out, and that's totally ok. It's adult to figure things out.
Yes, I am an adult and have grown into a pretty cynical one, probably will continue to do so till I eventually transform into an old coot. Having a wife with Amber Heart (BPD / crazy b**h) syndrome which I haven't divorced (yet) solely for the sake of the kid doesn't help either.
I know a teen girl with BPD. Holy smokes! I mean this sincerely - you have my empathy. I’m sure I can’ begin to know what it’s like to live with that. I hope she fan find some medication or something that brings peace. BPD is not a small thing.
I just launched a full-scale offensive attack against my wife's never ending skirmishes. I'm a nice guy but also compared to my wife, in intellectual, physical and first and foremost, expendable capital resources, I'm the Roman Empire versus Dacia.
She crossed the Rubic^H^H^H^H^H Danube one time too many.
Two Incomes, No Kids is really an easy-mode shortcut to life. My wife and I can fully devote ourselves to our hobbies and interests without shame or judgement. All of these parenting articles sound exhausting for the participants.
Just piggybacking on this since the context is relevant. I don't think there is anything wrong with dink'ing. I think there is a personality thing at play. I'm only 5 months into parenthood, and it is exhausting. I don't regret it all though. Life was easy before, maybe too easy for me. All endeavors felt frivolous, and I was desiring something more. Well, this was it.
Two incomes. One kid and one on the way. My wife and I can fully devote ourselves to our hobbies and interests without shame or judgement. Pretty similar to above, no?
Never understood this shame and judgement. Can you explain a little more?
I don't find kids/parenting exhausting at all. They actually give me power to do more, to do better for them, my wife and myself.
Do you worry at all that (a) you are either missing out on something in the present (that there is something valuable in the exhausting struggle of parenthood), or (b) you might look back with regret in your later years?
None of the DINKs I know have expressed regret over not having had kids though one couple did decide to have a child and got divorced not long after he was born. It changed the dynamic of their relationship and it no longer worked.
I do wonder if DINKs have higher or lower divorce rates during childrearing years. I've known many couples who divorced after the kids got out on their own. They weren't staying together "for the sake of the kids" but raising children together was something that bound them together in a common mission. Once the kids were out on their own and established in their lives, the parents found they didn't have much in common and had different ideas on how to spend the rest of their lives. Do DINKs find their own common purpose that keeps them together or do they have a different relationship structure that really doesn't need one?
People without kids get these questions repeatedly, and they’ve surely asked themselves the same questions. If the answer is no, they probably don’t especially relate to the premise of the questions in the first place. If they do relate and their answer is yes, it can be painful to have those regrets highlighted.
I’ll take your word on your intent. But so you might understand my reaction, it’s often the case that people ask these questions in full awareness of those possible answers—asking them as a form of social pressure to undermine the former option and/or to reinforce and exploit the latter.
No. My mother told me on my 12th birthday not to make the same mistake she did and it wasn't worth the sacrifices. Got fixed in my early 20s (I'm in my mid-40s now). My wife is disgusted by pregnancy and never wanted to put herself through that.
I have everything I want and need, and no baggage anchoring me to a place (not attached to my parents, so if they need elder care, sucks to be them).
My wife and I constantly remark how nice our life is and wouldn't change it for anything.
Between your mom's comments and your statement about your parents, it sounds like you had a very challenging upbringing that obviously has shaped your world view. And I can't argue with that...
But I want to throw in that this is not the default experience. For example, my wife and I love taking care of our little kids although it's obviously challenging. The thing you get out of it is that it's deeply meaningful. I had "more fun" single (eg, would go to 20 countries every year) but to continue that lifestyle, childless, into my 40s, would have been sad. In contrast, I now love being a suburban dad who's all about the family.
Similarly, as our parents age we know we will be there for them even if that presents its own challenges. There's no part of me that would feel better if I told my kids and parents to go fucks themselves to focus on my hobbies.
I guess it goes back to the parents. Our parents modeled good parenthood for us and we want to keep doing it, and to also repay them as they need us. It's not an onerous obligation - we're happy to do it. But we're lucky to have had good parents.
I was 8 years old when I realized there is no god and I'm going to die and just disappear into nothingness and all I'd done and will ever do would mean nothing anymore. I told my parents and they tried to keep the happy story of heaven and all that going, but I just never could believe any of it no matter how much I wanted to. I can't imagine what I would tell a child since I don't have religion; I think it's a quite important component that I am simply unable to participate in. Plus college expenses are only going up and it seems pretty grim for the kids if they don't go.
I don’t get that attitude frankly. The reason you are here is testament to all the generations of your ancestors. If you had and raised good children that’s the obvious thing that will go on well past you.
If you create ideas, help people, etc then that outlives you too. It’s unfortunate your parents weren’t able to explain it like this.
I wouldn’t worry about college cost. That stuff is getting disrupted.
How many of your ancestors can you name? I can name one of my 8 great-great grandfathers (theoretically I have 8 but it was a small town and these things are not perfect) because I dug the grave for his youngest daughter myself and saw his tombstone. That is all he is to me. I cannot name any others. Eventually your children will be as forgotten as my ancestors.
I’m not saying not to enjoy the time we have here, but that doesn’t mean that that comes easy or that the burdens of existence are ones I would wish on a child.
You do you. I love the idea that in the future, thousands of people might descend from me. If they don't know my name - who cares? It's not about me, it's about them!
If you never meet them and they do not know who you are, it would seem that they are effectively strangers. I’ve long accepted that this is just something I perceive differently than others. What bothers me is the idea that it’s just some thoughtless, selfish; never-want-to-growup affectation that those who do not wish to have children posses; some of us have thought through things quite thoroughly, and perhaps have reasons you do not seem to have considered.
I will also say that if you are concerned about future people, I would endeavor to take on climate change in any way I could if I were you. That sure isn’t looking too good either. It actually makes me quite glad I never wanted children due to all the above stuff; it’s another conversation I’m glad I’ll never have to have. Frankly I’m continually stunned that more parents aren’t outraged over what we’re doing to the world. I’m sure they have more near-term worries (as I said they’ve got to pay exorbitant college bills and all that), but the consequences sure look like they’re already starting to bite.
When I just came to the US in 1993, I remember a crazy-looking substitute teacher walking into our 6th grade class and deciding to share his peak oil anxiety with us and the logical conclusion that people shouldn't have kids because of it.
I am convinced that now that "peak oil" is no longer a popular concern, exactly 0 people said "oops, I guess I should have had kids" - they just pivoted to using climate as their retroactive justification for their decision.
So you're right to observe that the kinds of people who become parents are less likely to be paralyzed by climate anxiety but I suspect there is a very strong self-selection bias in either group, and if climate was "solved" tomorrow, people with existential anxiety would find something else to justify their anxiety with.
The fact is there was always "a reason" to be existentially anxious: plagues, poverty, communism, nuclear, terrorism, etc. And yet people who "ignored" those problems and went on to have kids were right to do so.
> The fact is there was always "a reason" to be existentially anxious
I would add the certainly of death and the extinction of consciousness and all you ever were to that list, but as we've established, I'm a bit preoccupied with that one personally.
Have you considered that there are more authoritative sources of climate science than your "crazy-looking substitute teacher"?
Who cares about my ancestors? I never understood that or the whole 'leaving a legacy' bit. Just want to live my life and fade away like I was never there.
> My mother told me on my 12th birthday not to make the same mistake she did
I don't want to read into your family situation at all, but this seems like an extremely weird thing to say to your pre-teen. Could she not wait for you to be a bit older?
I think there is something to the idea that in the U.S., each subsequent generation is more infantilized, whether by less economic control leading to stunted growth (delayed home ownership, marriage, etc.) or simply by an entire market trying to tickle their childhood nostalgia by creating consumer products and content that appeals to less-than-adult tastes. Or simply the further absence of multi-generational households, where at least new parents could readily receive knowledge and wisdom from experienced adults.
But we should also remember there's nothing new under the sun. This passage -
> A whole category of responses could be labeled “self-loathing goblin mode”: Parents who still act like teens, despite themselves, when they’re at home. Lying in bed with a hangover while the kids watch TV (which I’m pretty sure was a cornerstone of parenting through the mid-20th century at least and gave rise to an entire genre of television, Saturday-morning cartoons), letting the house get real messy, and serving “subnutritious meals,” as one parent put it.
> My mom, like my dad, and millions of other members of the Greatest Generation, had to contend with real adversity: the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, hunger, poverty, disease, World War II, extremely low-fi 78 r.p.m. records and telephones that—incredible as it sounds today— could not even shoot video.
[...]
I do know this: Unlike the “Mad Men” characters, the grown-ups back then had fun. A lot of fun. And it didn’t stop just because they had kids. My parents had a large circle of friends, and just about every weekend, throughout my childhood, they had cocktail parties, which rotated from house to house. I loved it when the party was at our house. Dozens of cars filled our driveway and lined the narrow dirt road we lived on, and dozens of couples poured into the house—the men in suits and ties, the women in dresses and heels, everybody talking, shouting, laughing, eating hors d’oeuvres, smoking, heading to the lineup of bottles on the kitchen counter to pour another drink.
[...]
Above all, they did not worry about providing a perfect, risk-free environment for their children. They loved us, sure. But they didn’t feel obligated to spend every waking minute running interference between us and the world. They were parents, but they were not engaged 24/7 in what we now call “parenting,” this all-consuming job we have created, featuring many crucial child-rearing requirements that my parents’ generation was blissfully unaware of.
[...]
Whereas we modern parents, living in the era of Death by Handshake, rarely pause to celebrate the way our parents did because we’re too busy parenting. We never stop parenting. We are all over our kids’ lives—making sure they get whatever they want, removing obstacles from their path, solving their problems and—above all—worrying about what else will go wrong, so we can fix it for them. We’re in permanent trick-or-treat mode, always hovering 8 feet away from our children, always ready to pounce on the apple.
> I think there is something to the idea that in the U.S., each subsequent generation is more infantilized, whether by less economic control leading to stunted growth (delayed home ownership, marriage, etc.) or simply by an entire market trying to tickle their childhood nostalgia by creating consumer products and content that appeals to less-than-adult tastes.
"Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret, and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
I remember feeling the same. As a child there's a sense that EVERYBODY knows better than you, open to reproach / correction from all angles. Part of being an adult is staking a claim to self-identity.
Yeah - and when we get together with friends it's a party with no set end time.
If people can't drive they stay over or take an Uber.
I've woken up with my fair share of hangovers.
Just because we are adults does not mean we can't have fun.
The key is how we handle speedbumps and mistakes. A child throws up their hands, surrenders, and/or hands it over to someone else. Being an adult is less about knowing everything, but being able to see things through to the finish regardless of what comes your way.