No Stupid Questions

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.

What? You don't get the instruction manual?

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.

I believe no one is and it's kinda Auto-Pilot of preventing bs from happening to yourself

In my experience, pretending you know what you're doing is what being an adult is.

School/experience 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:

1. Years of therapy so that I'm able to have my shit together
2. Having a kid so I've got a reason to have my shit together

Order of those two is very important!

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.

Now you know why southern men call each other "old boy"

Growing old is mandatory, growing up optional.

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.

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:

• Finding and negotiating your housing
• Making sure you (and possibly your family) are maintaining basic nutrition
• Managing your finances well enough that the first two are not in imminent danger
• Navigating though various "adult" BS such as contacting a bank or merchant about a process or payment in error, and chasing it through various channels until its resolved.
• Identifying your next need and the starting point for how to go about getting it resolved.

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.

You'll feel like an actual adult when you stop chasing after what you think society expects a successful adult to be.

Not only will that mean you yourself have the self-confidence of an adult and the adult ability to set one's own milestones, but modern day society is pretty shallow and immature and not really design for people to be self-driven and independent (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 you have your middle life crysis (though many, maybe most, just seem to become infantilised) or as result of some life-changing event.

We all just have to do stuff all the time. That's it. Welcome.

Definitely not. I still feel like an immature 20 year old trapped in an older body.

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.

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.

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 think my wife does. She has to deal with 3 kids and a man child.

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.

The only thing you are is you. You are not "something". You will always just feel like you.

Everyone else can be adults or kids or whatever. But you will just be you.

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.

Nope. Not at all. I have just a vague Idea what Im doing.

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.

Same and nope I do not feel like an adult

Relevant SMBC:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-06-24

Feel like? Maybe not. Accepted? Maybe.

More often than not now, I find myself having to be the adult in the room. My father recently died, and while my parents both have wills sorted, they didn't have other things like power of attorney sorted, or a real discussion of what his funeral arrangements he would like. It was not a sudden death. That was a turning point for me.

I guess that's where I'm at, I've accepted I'm an adult. I'm losing backstops, but also becoming other people's backstop.

Yes. I'm 43, married to my college sweetheart, we have three boys, a house in the suburbs, own a business, take care of my family, and am responsible for everything. Becoming completely independent of any outside help is part of it. Having others that depend on you to handle anything that comes along is the next part. Becoming an adult isn't a switch, it's a gradient. Having kids definitely catapults you along, though. I don't know how grown up I would be right now if I were unmarried and childless, but I'm guessing less so. Above all else, becoming responsible for an entire family is the thing that did it for me, and even that was a gradient.

I'm 42. I have blue hair, watch cartoons, play board games, wear novelty shirts, no I am not an adult. Until I have to be.