ost children tend to idealize adulthood, imagining what they’ll be when they get older and the freedom that they’ll have with their own money and time. Most of us now probably know that that’s not the case. But as young adults in their late teens growing into their early twenties get older, many of them feel the small, hopeful child within them withered and scared. Because despite them now being legally adults, they still feel like children at their core.
Even with jobs and internships and high level academia there’s some internal conflict that they are not quite adults yet. It’s a form of imposter syndrome: You look like an adult, you sound like an adult, you act like one– and there’s still some disconnect. Why? Well, there’s a lot of ways to look at it. All of these people have various reasons and moments where they felt like an adult, and there are some common threads, but in all they’re mostly different. So, when do you start feeling like an adult?
Well, the answer we end up coming to is intent. But we’ll get to that later. For now, let’s go through a number of possible answers.
Adult is a word that is semantically similar to mature. They often share meaning when said, so it stands to reason that maturity makes you an adult. But it’s not from a stance of physical maturity. It certainly might help, but seeing as young adults and teens mostly suffer from feeling this way, it’s probably not entirely that. And feeling is mostly a mental thing, so as much as being physically mature might contribute, it can’t possibly be the main reason.
There’s also a state of emotional maturity. That’s harder to define in a few words, but experts generally agree that emotional maturity is when you are in control of your emotions, rather than them being in control of you. It also involves empathy, a generally human trait that children tend to lack until they get old enough to understand that other people actually exist. There’s definitely a better argument to be made here, but young people are as capable of being empathetic as adults, and there are certainly many cases of adults in our lives who we might not describe as ‘emotionally mature,’ so it can’t be argued exactly. Just like physicality, it probably contributes as your brain grows but it’s not the primary reason why.
There’s also the matter of cultural status. Adults are, obviously, treated differently in society than children are. As many of us may have realized to our collective dismay, being an adult is generally harder than being a kid. You’ve got taxes, bills, responsibilities, there are probably people that depend on you in one way or another and (in the West, primarily) you have got to work for a lot of your time in exchange for money. And having money sure is great! But the rest of your responsibilities that were unknown to you when you were young catch up to you, so unfortunately you can’t just stay in bed all day and eat ice cream for dinner. Tragic. The point is, culturally, adults are simply different from children. But the thing is, we discussed how not feeling like an adult is something of an imposter syndrome emotion. So despite how society might treat you differently, it could still not be the main reason. Imposter syndrome is inherently irrational, so there has got to be something that ties these ideas together. Fortunately, there is.
The word intent, it shorthand for the understanding that you can inflict your will upon the world. A lot of children literally just go to school and play, they lack the understanding that adults have that your actions have consequences and the things you do (assuming you do the right things) can have a material impact on the world around you. And so with intent, you can exert your will and make your life the way you want it to be. Modern society has barriers to this kind of freedom, but for the most part you can, in theory, hop on a bus and move to a new city and then your life is just different because of that. When you realize that you are an active member of the world and not simply an observer of how everything changes around you. There’s a lesson in here somewhere about democracy and being an active citizen can actually help materially change your country, but put that to the side for now.
If you go back through those stories linked earlier, you can see that they all have a sort of intent in common. They realize that they are participating in the world, doing work and caring for people and making a change for themselves or others and then they feel like an adult.
So, that’s it, right? Well, no.
A lot of people, despite realizing their intent and participating in the world, still do not feel like an adult for a variety of reasons in today’s society. Some of this comes down to how the world feels when you’re a child compared to how it is now, but a lot of it is your youthful understanding of adults has not changed. When you’re young, your parents are adults and they basically know everything. They are your entire world, for better or for worse. And so in your mind, adults have everything and know everything and are somewhat inscrutable to you. And now that you’re grown, that idea might not have been unrooted from your head, and because you’re not all knowing and incredibly powerful, you don’t seem like an adult for yourself. This notion is false, informed by your childhood brain when adults were the whole world. Now that you’re grown up and seem to be unable to become the whole world, you fail to meet your own impossible expectations.
And this isn’t a bad thing! It’s impossible to control what notions your mind may have formed when you were young. The thing is, the earlier you learn something fundamental about the world the harder it is to unlearn it.
One thing to remember is that simply, younger you was wrong. Adults have all the problems that you have now and probably many more and you just didn’t know it because you were too young to understand. Ninety-nine percent of adults in your life are in fact, not all knowing and in fact know much less than you think they do. The more experiences you have, the more likely that you end up expanding yourself beyond the horizons of your parents and other adults in your life and learn the terrible truth: You are already an adult, you just don’t know it yet.
Being an adult is not a bad thing, though! Sure, it comes with stresses and responsibilities but you do have that freedom that child you wished for. Some of it, at least.
And, even then, you may never end up feeling like an adult. But so what, right? As long as you are living your life in a way that makes you happy and you’re working to improve yourself and the world around you in any way, shape, or form, then you’re all good. Feeling a certain way about yourself shouldn’t get in the way of your path to fulfillment and success, whatever that looks like for you. So go and get it! Don’t let these little worries bog you down. You can succeed as long as you are trying to.
So being an adult is probably a variety of feelings about the world around you combined with your perspective on life, but ultimately it should not matter because as long as you look like an adult and act like an adult then you are, even if you don’t feel like it. Embrace that.
If you wanna know more about being an adult, here’s an article about important professional skills to improve your life. And if you take the idea of hopping on a bus to a brand new city for very little reason, then here’s an article about how to move to a new city alone.
