Adulthood Is a Mirage
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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 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.
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.
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 dinner to enjoy the fancy dinner.
You either do or do not know what you’re doing at work. Hopefully you do. I feel like most people do.
You borrowed money and are presumably repaying it.
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.
What does your life mean? Nothing, obviously. You’re doing a job to survive and have wealth to enjoy life.
Your dad had a different economic context. It’s not relevant or a standard you need to care about.
You’re not living on bread, you’re enjoying a nice dinner with a daughter on a milestone.
The tone of all this is distinctly non child like. It’s extremely adult. I feel like you’re conflating anxiety with immaturity
I don't care about past standards, I care about a continous existence.
It is neither anxiety nor immaturity. Irrelevance is fine.
The father and son connection across generations and the larger context we live within, simply is.
A different question, why wouldn't you want an existence?
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".
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.
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?
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.
Part of being an adult is realizing that any other adult who claims they've figured it out is lying.
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%.
> 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.
[0] sorry, not sorry ^^
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.
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'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.
She crossed the Rubic^H^H^H^H^H Danube one time too many.
We left behind a structured world where you are expected to do certain things by certain ages and you got social respect for it.
Now we are free to do anything, knowing nobody outside your social circle will really understand what it is you did.
99% of the time, no one on the proverbial soccer field honestly cares about your family setup - they are more worried about what's for dinner.
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.
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?
Whenever the thought even feels like it's beginning to pop up, I visit friends/family with children, and those thoughts magically go away.
Why would or should there be, though?
People can find meaning in many things and you can create challenges or struggles for yourself to overcome in other ways, should you desire it.
This mindset sound like a coping mechanism people tell themselves to make the struggle somehow feel more tolerable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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?
for children...
For adults, it's very very real...
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.
- reminds me of this passage by Dave Barry: https://www.wsj.com/articles/dave-barry-the-greatest-party-g...
archive: https://archive.is/Uyrys#selection-2693.0-2696.0
> 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.
"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."
- C.S. Lewis
I am trying to follow this model -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-range_parenting with my kids.
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.