How To Know If You're An *Adult*
What does it mean to be an adult? Many countries throw an age out there and say ok - after this date, you can be tried for adult crimes. Maybe you can also now vote, or buy things that are bad for you. This is all pretty arbitrary, and none of it really captures the idea of being an adult and being responsible for your own life. Being an adult is a feeling, an enormous feeling, that you can sometimes go through without even realizing it has happened. I certainly didn’t feel like an adult at eighteen, and I also only realized when I had become one retroactively. So how do you know?
I would argue that being an adult is objectively better than being a child for one chief reason - choice. Ideally, as an adult, you are now allowed to make all of your own choices. Because your parents legally cannot force you to do things anymore, you have more freedom to run your life. You can spend money how you want, you can eat how you want, and basically choose how to spend all your time. However, this is also simultaneously the worst thing about being an adult, because you are constantly making decisions. If you find yourself responsible for most of the decisions of your life in a day, then congratulations, you’re an adult.
Another definition that I love actually comes from this old Jenna Marbles video. In it, she describes adulthood as a point in time where you have to start spending your own hard-earned money on things you don’t even like. In the past, your parents would take care of buying random kitchen supplies, or toilet paper, or trash cans, but now that you’re an adult, you have to spend money you worked for on all these boring necessities and you finally understand why your parents always said the generic brand was just as good as name-brand. It adds up!
In the same vein, adulthood can often feel like a never-ending string of repetitive administrative tasks. You have to schedule doctor’s appointments, you have to call your insurance, you have to pay bills, you have to file taxes, you have to remember to fix that one odd lightbulb, you have to take that suit to the cleaners, and on and on and on...until you die. As a child, your parents would take care of most of this, and you’d be left alone to stress about school or whatever drama was happening that week. Now just calling the internet company can be the biggest accomplishment of my day. If you do all your own admin work - you’re an adult.
The next element I believe distinguishes adulthood is being responsible for your own health. I believe this is different than just having general freedom because this is the portion of your life where parents and other adults have the most influence. As a child, you need other people to literally keep you alive, and they teach you how to eat, how to move, and everything else about taking care of yourself. But one day you leave and there’s no one reminding you to go to the dentist, or put a bandaid on a skinned knee, or decide if you should call in sick because you threw up that morning. You’re completely responsible for handling keeping yourself healthy, keeping your energy levels up, and taking care of yourself when you’re sick or injured.
Lastly, when you start having multiple experiences that your parents didn’t, is when I believe you’re fully your own adult person. Maybe they are small experiences, like trying squid for the first time, or much bigger like going to college, or living in a new country. It’s when you start doing things your parents or guardians can no longer guide you through because they’ve never experienced it for themselves. The repeated process of figuring out something new with little oversight or knowledge is when some of the most growth occurs.
Notice that none of these have anything to do with age. I didn’t fully grow into these until I was about 23, but many people are well into them much much earlier. Sometimes way before whatever age the government has specified should qualify them as an adult. Either way, there’s no set path to adulthood. No list of tasks you need to accomplish in order to get there. I believe being an adult is about having the freedom to develop the ability to consistently choose what is best for your own health and growth. If you’re the main person responsible for decisions regarding your life, money, health, and growth - then you’re an adult. Everything else is extra.
On the other hand, being a successful child includes learning things like how to tie your shoes…