For those of you who are actual adults, you may not be aware that you’re involved in a new millennial sport, and perhaps have been for some time: adulting.
Adulting, best preceded by a hashtag (#adulting), is an activity where people who are actual adults (over the age of 20) act like adults, but don’t feel like adults, so they feel the need to draw attention to their adulting via social media posts and verbal cues.
The sport can include practical tasks that regular adults achieve without much notice. But when millennials engage in these tasks, they are pleasantly surprised by their own competence. Examples include making and keeping one’s own dentist appointments, cleaning up one’s room, and bringing one’s own dishes downstairs to the kitchen (time lapse possible).
But then there are some parts of adulting that are less definable.
For instance, I’ve noted to my kids that most of adulting is pretending that awkward things aren’t awkward. Like when you bump into the guy you dumped at Nordstrom Rack. And you have to act normal and pretend it’s not awkward, as opposed to high school, when you would hide in the bathroom. Or when your student’s parents, whom you have to conference with at school, also happen to be your neighbors, and you have to be both friendly and professional and pretend it’s not awkward. Or when you’re babysitting somewhere and they forget to pay you and you have to speak up or say no or be assertive. This is all adulting.
Also, adulting involves activities I never had to choose at that tender age, like making actual phone calls instead of texting, and learning which conversations are fine for texting, and which mandate a phone call (there’s an app for that, millennials) and which require a face-to-face conversation. And for the in-person conversations, I refer you back to the “awkward” point.
When I was the age of my millennials we had two options: phone or face. Hiding behind your screen wasn’t a choice, so you just had to swallow hard and actually talk. But now real talking is part of adulting. Because having real conversations is hard and uncomfortable and sensitive. And dealing with all of that is certainly adulting. Having hours-long texting conversations is bad for human psychology any way you slice it, so if you can overcome that, you’re officially an adult.
Adulting is also about choosing. “Mir kennisht tantzin fun alleh chasunahs,” I was told growing up, which is Yiddish for “you can’t dance at every wedding.” You might want to be everywhere all the time (or nowhere, for you introverts) but when adulting you will have to choose. The root of the Latin word “decide” means to “cut off” or “kill” (like homicide). Because when you make a choice, you are effectively killing off all your other options. You can’t keep all your options open and still be an adult. Eventually you will have to choose a job, choose an activity, choose a home, choose a spouse, choose how you are going to spend your evening, your money, your affection, your vacation.
You may find that your best friend’s graduation is the same night as a family friend’s bar mitzvah. You will need to choose. You can only afford $100 worth of extras this month. What will you say no to? This is all adulting.
Finally, adulting, although many adults haven’t learned this yet, is about reminding yourself. If you find yourself saying “hey, can you remind me…?” then you are definitely opting out of adulting. I don’t need to set myself a reminder to remind you about your appointment or birthday party or responsibility. (There’s an app for that too.) Remind yourself, darling. Welcome to adulthood.
So now quiz yourself – Am I Adulting? Because if you’re engaged in responsible behavior with regularity, having difficult conversations while deep-breathing through the awkwardness, mindfully making choices while realizing you can’t have everything, and reminding yourself to do your stuff, then mazel tov. You are #adulting.
Go ahead, post it on Instagram. You’ve earned it.
Great post, Ruchi! Adulting can be infinitely more overwhelming and frightening (at least to me) than it seems to have been for my parents and those from their generation. Any tips on how not to be terrified of “doing it wrong?”
I don’t think there is a “wrong”… if you try and learn something from it, you’ve adulted!
This is very interesting because when I was a young adult, I was excited about being able to do things on my own. OK, not the awkward things (I still don’t like those), but definitely the routine how-tos of adult life.
I was too. I was in a big hurry to grow up.
Sigh, this is so true – I have been in my twenties for almost a decade (lol), and still stuggle with the concept of adulthood. I do not see myself as an adult, so when I act as one I am, indeed, acting, not *being*. It’s like speaking a foreign language. I feel slightly ashamed of that – my mother and grandmother were both financially independent and living on their own and having their own family at my age, and not only I am not there yet (which wouldn’t make me feel guilty, if it dependend entirely on external factors) but I am reluctant to take the plunge because, well, the idea of being an adult scares me.
It is definitely a generational thing, though I am surely a particularly affected speciman. And I wonder why. Are we spoiled? Too fragile? Do we think too much instead of just doing it, whatever “it” is? I don’t know. The part where you talked about choosing rang very true to me. I am reluctant to make final choices, especially in the professional field, because I fear that I will make the wrong ones and then have to live with them for the next 50 years. But then I am faced with the fact that not choosing at all leaves you turning around in circles like a hamster in the cage.
I do fare better re. “awkwardness” and “reminding myself”, though, so it’s already something!
I think there must be something about this generation that makes it harder to “adult.” But I don’t know what that thing is. If someone could help me unpack it, that would be great.
I think the awareness of so many choices (even if they are not, in reality, available) makes choice harder. The perfect person might be in that *other* app, if you just look through all the profiles. The perfect job might be out there if you just search hard enough. The perfect house, the perfect way to do X … because with all of the information available also comes blame. “HOW could you have made that mistake?! Did you REALIZE you could just (insert thing that can be done online if you just realized it was there).”
There are also macro economic factors. The middle class HAS gotten smaller. There ARE fewer jobs that can support a family. There is more gig work, less full time work with good benefits. Economic insecurity has always worked against marriage and children and big, expensive decisions. It was just as true in the 1930s.
Successful young people are learning how to focus — how to tune out the noise, choose how to use their time, not get distracted by the infinite possibilities. If you don’t have that skill or naturally tend towards indecision, the online world offers so many ways to waste time.
They’ll figure it out, this generation — they always do!
I like that.