Adulting Is Hard
As I’m scrolling endlessly on the timeline on whichever social media platform at two A.M., I’ll surely occasionally come across the phrase: “I’m finally adulting!” or alternatively, a twenty-something desperately scrambling to solve some comically mundane problem pleading that they “need a real adult!”
But what does it actually mean to be an adult?
Legally, we become adults at the ripe old age of eighteen, and for the next two years we have to grapple with the pains of newfound responsibility while still being teenagers. Really, though, what changes when we turn eighteen? I’m nineteen, but I’m completely reliant on my parents or other guardians for the vast majority of my life. I can vote, and I can die for my country, but I can neither drink nor rent a car. I can’t pay my own tuition, and my focus right now is still my education rather than finding a job and supporting myself. I’m lucky enough to still be in school, in a familiar environment, but not much has changed since I was seventeen and packing my bags for college. Realistically, it seems like we gain much more freedom at sixteen, if we are lucky enough to have a car and a driver’s license. We have the freedom to go where we want regardless of whether our parents permit it or not. In a sense, driving is America’s coming-of-age tradition, part one of a multi-step process of “adulting.”
But these milestones don’t make sense and are completely arbitrary. At sixteen, why am I old enough to drive a car every day—one of most dangerous things we are exposed to in our normal lives—but not old enough to have a voice in choosing our nation’s leadership and the policies they’ll pass that will undoubtedly affect my life? At eighteen, how can I be old enough to make the decision to enlist and potentially die thousands of miles away from home, but not old enough to drink? Why, when I am legally of age, are certain privileges still unavailable to me? If we can’t drink until we turn twenty-one because we worry about our developing brains, why does society consider us adults at eighteen when our minds aren’t matured yet? We just collectively agree on these ages to be milestones for unknown and unexplainable reasons.
The biggest difference I faced turning eighteen is that older adults (more “adult” adults) pushed the responsibilities of adulthood onto me and took them away as they pleased.
We’re told that we need to take responsibility and be self-reliant, but we’re too young and lack enough experience to get hired. We need to start thinking for ourselves, but we’re naïve and foolish if we’re too radical in our ideas. We need to grow up, but youth is a virtue! These hypocritical messages tell me and others that our “adulthood” is defeasible. Society constantly challenges or ignores our validity. We grow up but we aren’t real adults, even by our own admission. But what are “real adults?”
Real adults, as we like to call them, are an ambiguous colloquial term employed by those who passed the legal age but do not consider themselves responsible enough for adulthood. Real adults do real adult things, like marrying, having kids, owning a house, and being able to construct IKEA furniture, among other examples. We have completely internalized this perfect conception of what every actual grown-up should be able to do, never mind that finding anyone this put-together is impossible. “Adulthood” is a collective figment of imagination, but its impacts aren’t. It created the meme of “adulting,” where people celebrate instances of good decision-making or productivity and label it as such. On a less lighthearted note, it has created real pressure for late-teens and twenty-somethings, where we always need to look put together and worry about falling behind. No one knows what they’re doing when they reach these milestones, and that should be okay. Our lives do not need to come together like a perfectly crafted puzzle when we are at the ripe old age of twenty-five.
The lack of a solid definition for what “adulting” means culturally has caused us to come up with one, for better or for worse. But we stress too much on processes of getting there, and what to do once we suddenly find ourselves thrust into the shoes of responsibility. Adulthood isn’t a choice—it’s a lifestyle, and we all will just have to deal with it the best way we can.