Submitted 1 year ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Even with a good career and all the “adult milestones” I don’t feel like an actual adult. I feel like I’m pretending to know what I’m doing. Anyone else experience this?
What? You don’t get the instruction manual?
Calvin and Hobbes, you can’t know that’s in the parenting book till it’s too late
In my experience, pretending you know what you’re doing is what being an adult is.
School is getting enough background to fake it without blowing anyone up in the process.
Being a good adult is taking responsibility for the things you did without knowing what you were doing.
I do. It happened somewhere in my mid-late 30s. The two main contributing factors have been:
Order of those two is very important!
Same here, 56M. Realised a long time ago that everyone’s just figuring it out as they go along, and those stronger personalities that project “right” and “wrong” are just as much pretending as the rest of us.
Good for you.
You might, once the back pain sets in. Or other old people’s aches and pains?
What would you expect it to feel like? What’s keeping you from that?
I figure it’s just different responsibilities… if I didnt have kids I’d be doing more of what I want to do (like fireworks and motorcycling).I had to put that on pause for 12 years or so, and just now I’m starting to do more for me. It was a joint decision that I would be a present dad rather than career focussed. And to be honest it’s been great being able to switch off work and enjoy my personal time. Family circumstances have changed and ironically I’ve had to be even more present but with COVID changing the work force expectations,at least in my business, to be more flexible, that it all works.
I still feel 16 at heart and think I can get out of a chair really easily, but I can’t…my joints are stiffening and that really sucks.
I had to put that on pause
for 12 years or so
i cried
Now you know why southern men call each other “old boy”
Early 20’s. I work with a lot of people nearly double my age who call me a kid (endearingly and lovingly if I may add). Make decent money and have a great partner.
I pay taxes and pay bills, I have a car and I go to work everyday of the work week. I tend to ask myself “is this it? This is what I wanted so much as a kid? This is being a grown up?”
I mean I can eat ice cream whenever I want I guess, but I dread when the actual adulting comes along. Seriously, does anyone else know when the adulting comes? Is it bad?
Apologies for the rambling, but the title question always hits with me as of late. Thanks.
I’d call ‘actual adulting’ having responsibility for another’s welfare. Whether a dog, cat or human, they are all varying levels of “if I fuck up, someone else suffers”.
I still don’t feel fully like an adult, but I do feel the responsibility of ensuring there is food on the table and a roof over our heads. My partner is also responsible for these things so it is a little less pressure.
All said I do not feel as adult as I saw my parents when they were my age. They seemed very grown up and very responsible compared to how I feel today. I was 11 when my dad was my age.
PENIS
COCK! I’m 40 btw. If I’d been born in the stone age I’m pretty sure I’d have been the one carving a fuckload of granite dickbutts to troll contemporaries or future victims alike.
You’ll feel like an actual adult when you stop chasing after the idea that you think society has of what being a successful adult is.
Not only will that mean you yourself have the self-confidence and ability to dictate your own milestones of an actual adult, but modern day society is pretty sad and immature (look at celebrity culture, look at how politics use Tribalism so that people react very much like they do with sports tribalism were the stakes are nowhere near as high, look at consumer society powered by marketing using manipulation strategies taken from Psychology).
If you’re lucky it might happen when have your middle life crysis (though many, maybe most, just seem to become infantilised) or as results of some life-changing event.
Some of us are not chasing it, but instead are actively running away.
Yeah.
Once people actually figure themselves out and hence their objectives in life from the ground up, they often stop trying to be whatever they are told or led to believe are society’s metrics for success, mainly because social messaging nowadays is very manipulative and self-serving, so if anybody unquestioningly guiding oneself by those metrics is more likely than not just serving somebody else’s interests and egos.
Congratulations, that worry is you being an adult
My brother told me the first time he truly felt like an adult was when he had to go shopping for a washing machine.
I think for me it was when I suffered a back injury whilst sleeping.
Definitely not. I still feel like an immature 20 year old trapped in an older body.
We all just have to do stuff all the time. That’s it. Welcome.
I feel like I’m pretending to know what I’m doing.
No one knows what they’re doing but it’s provocative.
But seriously though, no one knows what we’re doing. As kids, we see adults and think they know what they’re doing but they’re only pretending. A lot of us also still act immature. We are still children in some form or another.
I don’t feel like an actual adult. I feel like I’m pretending to know what I’m doing.
That’s the first step. The next step is looking back on your “mundane” adult accomplishments:
Then you glance to your left and your right and see some of your peers doing magically better, but more importantly you see a chunk of your peers not able to accomplish anything in the list above. You see what you now recognize is your growth and maturing and their lack of it.
The second step is to realize that you are indeed an adult. This is what being an adult is. The situations change, the difficulty in scope or scale increases, but its variations on what you’ve done before and the second, third, fourth…hundredth iteration aren’t as hard as your first attempt in your early adulthood.
You realize that there isn’t a single defining threshold you crossed at some point in the past where you went from “kid” to “adult”. You also realize that some people make it all the way into their 60s and 70s without ever becoming an adult.
Maybe I’m rare but I made a bucket list in high school of things to do as an adult. Some lame but some cool.
Accomplished
Travel to Europe
Live in Europe
Get Married
Have a kid
Win the lottery (won $50K on Powerball in 2021)
buy a brand new car
eat at a world class restaurant
take a cruse
visit Walt Disney World (worked there)
be a tv director
buy a house
live my shitty small town
live debt free
golf at St. Andrew’s
I had maybe five I haven’t completed yet but should be able to in a few years.
I’m glad you’re knocking out so many items you listed you wanted to do when you were younger, but I’d consider about 6 of those “adulting”.
We reach adult status when we do all the necessary responsible things for survival without having someone to tell us what we need to do and how to do it.
I’m sitting here procrastinating doing books with stacks of paperwork for the business spread all over the table, but all the bills are paid and I’m in the black so yeah, a little bit.
Yes, I feel like an adult.
The misconception though is that somehow you just “gain” wisdom and adult smarts and whatever. That’s all bullshit. I don’t feel like a different person than I did at 17, but I know I’m not a child, I know society expects me to be accountable for my own actions. I know I have a whole different set of responsibilities than I had as a teenager.
Oh, I didn’t make my bed and the world didn’t explode. Seriously, does anyone clean their house to the extreme your parents did? We only do if someone is coming over.
I believe no one is and it’s kinda Auto-Pilot of preventing bs from happening to yourself
But bs happens all the time, and sometimes it’s not even my fault
Most of the time though it is my fault
Same and nope I do not feel like an adult
My family says your an adult the day you enjoy buying adult things. I just recently bought some good knives and glass food storage containers. I was super excited when they arrived. Video games and other fun things are exciting to buy myself but some good knives were next level.
Buying my own Costco membership was the first moment I truly felt like an adult.
Either I’ve always been an adult, or I’ve never been an adult. Honestly not sure which.
Growing old is mandatory, growing up optional.
I think my wife does. She has to deal with 3 kids and a man child.
Of course not. No one on earth is really an adult. We do not do things correctly here to foster adulthood, being in the service of “corporations” rather than other actual people. Money - dependence upon money - is the reason.
Here’s an example. I brought my car in for service today. In the car service game, they have broken the concept of “service” into itemizable, chargeable subtasks. This is not adult, natural human behaviour, this is marketing. The person you speak to is paid to upsell you on items which should be included in the concept of “getting your car serviced” - wheel alignment, fluids etc. The suggestion this makes is that if you do not pay two or three times for the same job, they will do the work improperly or not at all. We have accepted this behaviour as normal, because it’s common and we can’t do anything about it, but it’s still fundamentally wrong and our lives are absolutely full of insulting, greedy, corporate-mandated childish shit like this. This is done not because the business isn’t taking in enough money to be viable, but just to enrich the parasite whom is the head of the organization, and to be able to fund third party parasites like lawyers and the marketing department, out of your pocket.
The falseness, the fakeness that is part of every interaction, is the childishness. The reason for that childishness is money. Money is a child’s toy, greed is a childish trait, and “Western” culture which has now taken over the world does everything in its power to hamper the development of grown-up personality.
To the haters, no, I make six figures, I’m not poor, but you are being childish again.
This fucking trash statement with the chefs kiss last sentence makes me think you’re a teenager yourself.
i mean, i’m no fan of capitalism, but when i take my car to the guy who has been servicing it for 10 years, i don’t mind that he’s itemized the work to ensure that he and the guys who work for him are paid fairly for their expertise and time.
we do, unfortunately, exist in a system that requires money at present.
vividspecter@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I see adulthood as a gradual undoing of the damage that the process of going through childhood and “growing up” does to us. Not necessarily from any specific trauma, but just that almost all of us will reach our 20s and beyond with quirks and mental health issues just by nature of a very complex and at times traumatic world. And an ideal adulthood is the ability to eventually move beyond merely coping but regaining some of the lost joy and innocence of childhood but with the increased responsibility of the self and others that comes with adulthood.
SoleInvictus@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I came to say exactly this. I have a career, have hit life goals, and done all that stereotypical stuff, but I didn’t really feel like an ‘adult’ until powering out with my therapist through childhood trauma and weird mental things, like handling my ADHD and coming to terms with my mortality.