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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

People today think a 18-19 year old (which is still a legal adult in most places and for most purposes, can drive, go to war, live alone, work, and was always considered an adult throughout history) is "a child".

Of course kind of makes sense when 30 and 40 year olds also behave and live like children and find "adulting" out of their capabilities.

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I can't tell you how strange it is to have become a parent at 24. It anecdotally feels like the average parents my wife and I meet (with similarly-aged kids) are about ten years older than us.

Making life is a normal part of life, and it's quite sad that we don't acknowledge the capacity of young adults.

Once people take responsibility for their lives and other people's lives, lots of things change. Perhaps the zeitgeist of behaving like a child in your 20s is just an emergent behaviour coming out of a consumerist economy?

When I was 30, I once thought to myself, "When my parents were my age, they had 3 kids and lived on a Navy base in another country. I still feel like a child that has fooled people into thinking I'm an adult."

I'm 43 now and I'm still not convinced that I'm not 3 kids stacked in a trench coat. Despite having a great career that pays for an upper-middle class lifestyle, when I travel first class or go out to a fancy dinner, I feel like I'm merely cosplaying as a functional and respectable adult that has their shit together. When I bought my house at 33 years old, I was thinking "Should someone be calling the state AG or something, they're allowing a child to sign mortgage papers".

Someone once told me this feeling is pretty common and that it goes away once your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed in 2019 and it definitely has not gone away.

My theory is that this feeling is the result of not enough socialization with people of varying ages. Their behavior towards you in aggregate grounds you to your age subconsciously, something like that.

> Making life is a normal part of life, and it's quite sad that we don't acknowledge the capacity of young adults.

I think it’s more that we’re all just faking it. The thirty or fourty year old that thinks they know better than the 20 year old is deceiving themselves. The differences between individuals are much larger than the differences between the averages at those ages.

I had the same experience a decade ago being ten years younger than everyone else at the park or birthday party.

For most of human history, people didn't have to worry about

- Exposure to exotic chemicals in every day items

- Regularly operating a multi-thousand pound machine just to travel

- Adversaries thousands of miles away working tirelessly to misinform and scam you

- Massive conglomerates working tirelessly to manipulate your behavior

- Being compared to the best in the world (in their skills and hobbies etc.)

- Competing against literally the entire country and sometimes the world for labor

My point is, modern life is getting more and more complicated. New challenges pop up every day. Each subsequent generation is born into an increasingly challenging situation. It makes sense that it takes longer to get ahold of things and feel stable enough to start a family

Have you seen Idiocracy, specifically the very beginning of the film?

These excuses sound similar to those made by the “prosperous yuppie couple” (who end up never having children)—contrasted with “trashy” couple, who churn out progeny without a care in the world.

https://thescriptsavant.com/movies/Idiocracy.pdf

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