What Makes You An Adult?

I will happily admit that gallons of gin and bushels of weed and loads of jazz-listening are involved in my coping strategies for adulthood.

Personally I don't love working but I accept it as the price of my freedom to do bong hits while my children live in a stable home and enjoy plentiful food and clothing

knowing that none of these options is necessarily the answer

i'll go with that Mike Myers gag "understanding escrow"

I'm a baseline adult, I guess, based on the criteria being bandied about itt. I just don't generally feel like much of an adult when in the presence of other, more adulty adults. I'm just adult enough to get by (ie I pay bills and rent and manage to keep us stocked in essentials but I am otherwise completely shit with money, eg no savings or investments but piles of dumb + worthless crap that tauntingly surround me on all sides).

Middle-Aged Man!

i knew i was an adult when i got excited about budgeting and saving money :((((

Having to care for a dependent to the extent that they matter more than you seems like an option. Could be a child, could be a sibling, could be a parent

Or a pet ocelot

Just sayin

don't drink, don't smoke -- what do i do

Anyone who has taken on thousands in debt for their cat’s cancer treatment is an adult IMO

Many of these answers are depressing, and about loss or constriction, I don't find adulthood especially depressing, losing, or constricting.

I had some very adult thoughts, and very adult understandings, and even a few very adult experiences when I was a child. But they didn't make me an adult, because they were fleeting. From adolescence on, I'd have glancing moments of adulthood... and then I spent college and my early twenties gadding about trying to find meaning in the universe and it was all very silly and depressing. And achingly earnest.

To my mind, adulthood is a series of recognitions that anybody, even a little squirt, can have. But until the recognitions are truly felt (not just thought) and lived and integrated into the essence of an outlook, I don't think they become 'adult.' I guess every-kid comes pre-loaded with some pieces of adult-brain, and has to learn others, and the exact make-up is different for each person.

Some of the things I had to learn 'the hard way' were:

As long as I am me, I will always have to live with myself so I better get square with my choices.
I can't lie, cheat, steal, use meanness to hurt other people... I am through-and-through a moral being.
I don't want to die, but, like, I'm going to and it's actually not a big deal to anybody but a very small number of people.
Healthy humans don't vacillate between 'happy' and 'sad' ... they're content with neutral.
It's hard to cause harm with individual acts of compassion.

Some things I am still learning are

If you speak the truth it will anger people who embrace bogusness, and you should always speak the truth
There is a kind of anger that is compassionate
People who believe themselves to be 'gifted' can be dangerous, and often need a lot of compassion
It never pays to take shortcuts; I am not a 'shortcut person,' even if that means I can't have the comforts other people can have.

i like the last two posts a lot

Going and buying carpeting for the house. That felt like a pretty adult thing to do.

excellent post by remy

That's a great post, remy bean.

I've got a lot of the trappings of adulthood (a mortgage, two teenaged kids, various - mild - chronic ailments; I drive, cook, garden, fix shit) but I don't think any of those things particularly carry an essence of adulthood or maturity in and of themselves. Which is to say, adulthood is a style, really, or a mode of being. I've had what in retrospect looks like a pretty comfortable run at things, and I was still pretty childish until the last five years or so - almost like I was bitterly clinging to the gasps and vestiges of my adolescence: I got drunk a lot (and was a shitty drunk), I didn't face into a future that very much needed my attention, I was stuck in a job that was slowly killing me (with boredom). I wasn't an awful husband or dad, but I very much wasn't a great one. The thing that changed me (and to which I was nudged, then shoved, then dragged) was becoming a teacher - a process that, it's not too dramatic to say, broke me and out of which I'm still putting myself back together. Very much for the better.

The greatest thing is that it forced (and forces) me to be present, and out of that attention comes a sense of agency and causality: I'm in charge of this thing; my actions have repercussions in ways I'm still making sense of; I have to make sense of the mess and find a way to live. This all sounds blindingly obvious now it's written down (and needlessly portentous, probably) but it took me until my late 30s to realise it. To paraphrase Charles Olson, we have to learn the simplest things last.

I am firmly committed to making my own mistakes and owning the consequences.

my emphasis -- for me, YMP hit the nail on the head here. I guess that is "Other".

Diagnosed with a chronic illness
Undergoing major surgery
Getting married
Getting divorced
Having a kid
Taking on a mortgage
Death of a parent
Other

Depending on how major my multiple surgeries are considered, I only need a divorce for the full set.

For me it wasn't quite having children, it was realising I put their welfare at the top of the list in decisions.

Other - posting on the internet

yeah I voted having children but mainly because "realising I put their welfare at the top of the list in decisions" is what I think of here, where you could replace "their welfare" with "the welfare of a few particular humans", because it could be that you take welfare responsibility for e.g. a parent in a way that your own personal welfare is no longer your chief priority. I say "a few particular humans" because I don't think being involved in charitable work is necessarily enough, unless that work involves a close personal relationship with some of the people you're working with & you subvert your own ends for their ends.

I would add losing one's religion to the list, even if that's not an option I would vote for.

https://rollingstoneindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Screen-Shot-2016-03-12-at-1.47.23-pm-480x336.png

cmd-f "sex"
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wtf

It might be a stupid answer, but my first thought was "first key sexual experience." If it's a good one, it's an introduction to one's adult body; if it's a bad one, especially a coerced or nonconsensual one, it's an introduction to the miseries and cruelty of adulthood.

I've been paying my own way since I was roughly 20, have stuck it out almost 16 years at my current company, have good savings, am fairly independent, and have been helping take care of my parents. most days I still feel like a 12 year old inside - not in a good way, but mostly in a 'timidity' sort of way.

i don't mean to put down other people's experiences of sacrifice of self in raising children but i think that's a really limited and frankly sad vision of adulthood especially when so many admirable adults choose not to have children and also when the world is on track to warm 3c by 2050. tests of sacrifice for and devotion to others is an important part of being a well-rounded and not-miserable adult imo but i wish it wasn't so often in the name of blood family or like nation/the patriarchy or whatever.

hell people do the same thing for their cats / dogs as milo mentioned. i wish people were a little more abstract / general about what these experiences mean when they talk about them especially when traditional modes of access to these experiences are frankly becoming toxic and also leave a lot of people out of the discussion.

as many people have pointed out, having children, like having sex, doesn't necessarily make one an adult. the same applies to working a job, getting married/divorced, or losing a parent. one can still be very childish in the wake of any of the events listed in the poll. it has more to do with evolving an emotional maturity, as opposed to mere grimness or resignation. adulthood has its joys, too.

Nothing. There is no such thing as adulthood.

i might argue the opposite: there's no such thing as childhood!

If this question has an answer it might be recognising that you're both wright/rong

my chainsmoking Kerry grandma once told me when I was 14: just cos I'm a ugly old relic it doesn't mean I see life any differently to you young lad. Now I'm an ugly ageing relic I know exactly what she meant!

anyway, i've been reading jacques derrida's the gift of death and feel like maybe the real answer to this question is .. accepting your inevitable death as a gift that no one else can take from you and using that perspective to 'be' more fully. in some ways my answer to this question would be 'learning to be fully alive and present,' which there is strong evidence that a lot of people never achieve this hence they never become adults.

otm I'm still back there marveling at this.

otm2

Does Derrida discuss Heidegger in that piece? Now I want to read it.

remy’s post yesterday evening is my favorite so far, I think

The Gift of Death is a really good and p accessible Derrida. There's definitely some Heidegger in there but I can't remember much detail.

i would also recommend shrooms

the first half at least is an explication of an essay by jan patocka. there's quite a bit of heidegger. some levinas. there's also reference to western christianity in somewhat positive terms. so if any of that puts you off i would proceed with caution. it's a bit of a religious/mystical text but it's also derrida so it really gets into the nitty gritty of phenomenological concepts and language. i was skeptical at first but now i'm enjoying it.

so you agree with me

shrooms = phenomenology so yes

I second all the love for The Gift of Death. As an aside, Donner la mort, the less passive original French title, is a banal euphemistic expression which means 'to kill', so it's a poisoned gift in more ways than one (this reminds me that a 'Gift' is literally 'poison' in German). For the morbidly inclined among us, I also recommend Derrida's even more accessible seminars on the death penalty (2 vols., 1999-2001) and there's also an earlier seminar, La vie la mort (1975-1976) that was edited last year in French and whose English translation was published a couple of months ago, but I haven't read it yet.

Chronological age. Pretending otherwise provides manchildren with yet more excuses to act as if they are forever 14.

Will get a copy. Derrida a large void in my reading, for the most part.

I’m half-trolling of course but really getting (rather than merely reading) Derrida also makes you an adult.

tryin to catch you riding derrida

We already call manchildren "adults" because they have attained the legal age of majority. I haven't noticed this nomenclature having any effect when it comes to their self-excusing their own childish or irresponsible behavior.

nb: in my view, the act of making excuses for oneself should be viewed as grounds for immediate exclusion from adulthood. We can explain our motives, but only those you let down can excuse us. Grasping this distinction is a key adult concept.

in my view, the act of making excuses for oneself should be viewed as grounds for immediate exclusion from adulthood

Indeed. As should use of the verbal abomination that is 'adulting'.

When I was a young man, age of sixteen or thereabouts, I had a very memorable conversation with my father, who was a very tough and strong man, a Vietnam veteran, a small business owner, a devout Republican and Christian, loyal father and husband, a man of many responsibilities. He took me out hunting one weekend, showed me how to use his Guns, how to clean them, how to care for them and store them safely. He had me drink my first beer and smoke my first cigarette, under his watchful fatherly supervision, the way God intended. He shared these adult pleasures with me, as we gazed upon the landscape and bonded over a mostly unspoken ritual, as using as few words as possible was known intrinsically among our bloodline to be a manly, adult trait, and it was hammered into the minds of our clan's foolish, childlike children as early as possible.

After shooting the wildlife with our bullet guns and while processing the game meat with our knives, my father took a sip from his Beer and told me something about becoming a man that I will never forget. And that is thus. He said to me, "son, there are many animals to kill in this world, and I wish for you to kill a great many of them. But there are only two true ways to truly become an Adult Man: either to have sexual intercourse with a woman by inserting your penis into her vagina, or kill me, your adult father."

I said to him, "father, I am not yet prepared to kill you, and I am too intimidated by the females among the church youth group to penetrate them with my erect penis. I do not know which to do!" And upon saying this, as he finished removing the innards from the dead animal splayed upon the rock at which we stood, flinging them into a nearby bush, he said to me, "well, is it your wish to become a Man? A true Adult?" I replied, "yes father, I do indeed want very much for this."

and the agent said "what do you call your act?"

"Big Jim Swells and the Socks."

My answer is "other", but this comes from a position of what I observe as happening, rather than an ideal position of "what should happen". I don't advocate what I'm about to say.

I think, in capitalist societies, the passage to adulthood is mostly marked by Taking On Debt.

I think it's an accident that most of the 'markers of adulthood' in this list involve debt of some kind:
-living independently of one's parents means taking on debt in the form of a mortgage or a lease
-having a child in the US involves contracting insurance or taking on medical debt
-ditto US experiences of chronic illness and surgery

I think there's another big marker of the passage to adulthood (at least for people of some economic classes) which is attaining some level of tertiary education - in the US and the UK, going to university usually involves taking on a substantial amount of debt.

People often struggle to document their legal and political existence without a credit record or credit report - major forms of ID and proof of address are... credit cards and bills. To exist as a recognised adult in society means proving your connection to a form of financial obligation.

The more money one has, the longer one can put off adulthood, in the form of taking responsibility for one's actions. That's the mark of adulthood - learning to take responsibility for one's actions, and one's future obligations. The most common way of doing so, in capitalist societies, is taking on financial debt, because money has such primacy and importance.

Again, I'm not saying this is how it *should* be. It actually strikes me as deeply philosophically flawed, and inherently unjust. But as far as I can see, taking on debt is how our societies seem to mark 'this person is an adult now'.

For me adulthood has been characterised by the constant sense that no matter what I'm doing there is always something else I could or should be doing

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