What Makes You An Adult?

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

The Gift of Death is good not bad Derrida. Geoffrey Bennington's sort of biography 'Interrupting Derrida' is good on this, too. Irvin D. Yalom's 'Staring at the Sun' is a beautiful study of mortality and coming to terms with death (others and one's own).

At a less exalted philosophical level, journalist Miranda Sawyer’s “Out of Time: midlife if you’re still young” is quite an interesting read on some of the issues around being an adult.

* “Out of Time: midlife, if you still think you're young”

probably most of the ways I feel I'm failing to achieve adulthood relate to financial stability and security, and maybe I'll never resolve that, so instead my answer is - receding gums.

endless back pain

Hm, who knows. There are plenty of good answers on this thread and I can only speak for myself. Mainstream adulthood in a 2.5 kid/house/car sense, never happened and honestly wasn't likely to be on the cards, I never felt the full motivation that I *must* do that route -- I did almost become a property owner in the early 2000s and that would have been an interesting alternate world, not sure what kind. A continuous learning process is the better way to consider it in my mind, with a little more patience, wisdom, and hopefully kindness as one goes. As it happens I'm six months out from turning 50, my folks are still with me, and there's me and my sis and neither of us have kids so we've almost been this little bubble over half a century, and likely enough when something inevitable happens that'll be a profoundly felt break, but I think of people I know who never really knew one parent or another or have nothing but very hard, awful memories, and will accept simply that I've been very fortunate.

I forgot an option I should have included: having no idea who any of these so-called "celebrities" are.

A continuous learning process is the better way to consider it in my mind, with a little more patience, wisdom, and hopefully kindness as one goes.

my answer : other.

despite the fact i was a dad, a husband, a worker bee with financial responsibilities, the time i really felt like i had to grow the fuck up and become an Adult, was when my wife died.
she was 48, i was 44.
i had to make sure that my lads, 16 and 8 at the time, had a stable loving life and so had no other option but to get on with it and cope, as opposed to just collapsing in a heap.

Yeah, I've been thinking about this thread quite a bit, and think that the idea of 'being an adult' as a process one is going through continuously is something I can get on board with, though like others, I think that each person begins this process at a different age.

For me, I think I started becoming an adult when I was about ten and my mother was diagnosed with Stage IV ovarian cancer. Then, in rapid succession, my father fell ill with Guillain-Barre syndrome.

Dealing with two very ill and nearly-dying parents at such a young age not only forced me to confront mortality much earlier, but also allowed me to differentiate from my parents and the traditional familial unit much earlier than most people. While this had its obvious and not-so-obvious negative aspects, it also made me value and have faith in my own belief systems, kinship structures, and preferences rather early. I'm grateful, to be honest, though it was immensely difficult at the time.

(I should mention that both of my parents are still around).

Suddenly, we heard a rustling from the nearby bush on which the discarded entrails lay snagged. My father pointed his bullet gun at the bush and pulled me near him. We watched in disbelief as a short, portly, filthy old man with a long white beard and dressed in decaying rags emerged from the base of the bush.

"Who are you! What are you doing here!" my father barked at our campsite intruder with stern, Adult-like gravitas.

The man appeared disoriented, blinking in the sunlight. He had with him only a notebook and a pen.

"Identify yourself, or I shall dispatch you with my bullet gun!" my father commanded.

"Don't shoot," the strange man croaked softly. "I am here to help. I have been crouching in this bush observing people since the 1970s. I understand you are having a very intense coming-of-age ritual, but I have concerns regarding your parenting methods, and I wish to share my opinion with you."

"You have WHAT? You wish to WHAT??" my father cocked his bullet gun and aimed it at the strange man. I tensed up, incredibly frightened, knowing something terrible was about to happen.

"Your way is to control with violence and hate," the man calmly explained. "This is not the way to be a True Adult Man. The way to be a True Adult Man, like me, is to control with intelligence and emotion."

Stunned and caught off guard by the mysterious interloper from the bush, my father stomped and stammered, "who in the hell do you think you are? Give me one reason I shouldn't pump you full of buckshot from my bullet gun, much like how I have dispatched the animal whose corpse lies partially processed here on this rock before me, you fool?"

The man chuckled a wise and insightful chuckle. "Because," he said with a wise and insightful grin, "I am God."

At this moment the man reached up to the top of his forehead, grasped a zipper that had been hidden beneath his receding hairline, and peeled away his human face flesh to reveal a glowing mass of ethereal blue light, much like how Brian Dennehey did in the wonderful 1985 feature film Cocoon.

"Guess you've got a lot to learn about being an Adult, fuckface!" said God as he floated away up into heaven where he lived. My father and I were pretty weirded out, gotta admit. We killed a few more animals that weekend and then drove home, but not really talking about the encounter with God as much as you might think, because we heard on the radio that the Dalles Cowboys had just won their second consecutive Super Bowl victory over the Buffalo Bills that weekend. Emmitt Smith was in his prime, I tell you what.

Anyway, a few years later I told my mom about how my dad tried to get me to either kill him or have sex with a woman to become an Adult. She did not like that, and got pretty upset about it. They eventually got divorced.

taking on debt is how our societies seem to mark 'this person is an adult now'.

this is a really interesting idea! ... like, it also relates to how some of the folks in this thread who aren't "traditionalists" approach life, kinda, or maybe just me? ... like, thinking about the different durations of debt vis a vis responsibility. Also R.I.P. David Graeber, just because y'know, "debt."

There is short-term debt: credit cards being the most common, and residential leases
There is medium-term debt (I'm not using technical terms here, just fyi): student loans are theoretically an example, in that theoretically you are supposed to be able to pay them off in 10 years, I think?
There is long-term debt: mortgages (generally 30-year, though I guess some people do 15 year mortgages, probably less common nowadays)
And there is forever-debt: babbies -- though perhaps this could be long-term -- idk

But as someone that only has short-term debt, I definitely sometimes feel like "less of an adult" than people with mortgages and kids -- long-term debtors. On the other hand, I am pretty secure in my "adulthood" though I don't really see it as being all that aspirational tbh.

n.b. I was raised by parents that at least once every two years gave me a birthday card with some excerpt from "If" by Rudyard Kipling ... so, that aspirational quality of "being a man" (being an adult) was really drilled into me.

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

There is no exclusion from adulthood. One cannot opt out of adult responsibilities. Adult respect perhaps, but if that's what this thread is about, I have no opinion to share.

those creatures jumped the barricade and headed for the sea

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