A friend of mine once said something that stuck with me:
"There's a dearth of people who will do what's necessary without complaining."
To me it's all about realising that there's work which needs to be done regularly, that no one else will do for you and also no one will thank you for doing.
I think it is this indeed, it’s something decidedly different between me and my kids.
I’d add that I myself had a brief period during which I went from thinking “this is hard because I’m dumb” to “this is hard because it is indeed hard”. I felt like I grew up a little in those years as well (~35-ish?). I realized that grown ups and management are all just doing “something”. There is no grander scheme, no deeper understanding behind it. Like the veil was lifted and what was behind it was a bit disappointing, but I also felt that it could not have been any other way.
Somehow this realization also made me happier. It’s all something that you could have told me before but I would have never really felt it. All these lessons need to land in fertile soil. It takes some time and experiences for the soil to be ready.
People learn this at different rates and for wildly different reasons. When I was out of college working at Amazon, I would be amazed that my colleagues seemed to lack skills like doing the laundry.
But I got kicked out of my home at 18 and it was made abundantly clear from the age of 16 onward that this would be the case. Remaining a child is a luxury that I wish everyone can experience for as long as possible
I draw the line at the point when someone has a stable job that allows them to pay rent. I've seen people who basically had "two youths" and they were generally unhappy.
we had to help with housework as soon as we were teens. laundry, shopping, cooking, dishes, cleaning the house. i didn't live alone until i was 27, but i had all the skills needed to take care of myself. staying at home was not laziness, but simply economical. i moved out when i got a job in a distant location.
No theoretical life stage partitions are correct. Some are useful.
Every five years, my life and context have changed profoundly in ways I could never have predicted.
I feel like I have lived many lifetimes.
I am not sure how I would measure growing up. I could never stay at one level long enough to get effortlessly good at it. My head is too far into the clouds. The stars are so inviting.
So I experience a lot of in-too-deep pressure, trying not to screw things up while working to achieve more than anyone might think is reasonable. With a regular remedial/recovery interval, after I screw things up.
If I do grow up in any way, it is the accumulation of resilience and loss of fear that repeatedly digging myself out of my own craters provides. I have internalized that nothing can stop me. Nothing at all. Not even me, and that is saying a lot.
I have been a parent since I was 15. Officially married and moved on our own at 19. Graduated from the university at 22. Struggled hard-core until about 30 when my career changed and finally kicked off. My wife became an at home mom for our now three kids. It was my 40s when I realized, "oh, others see me as the adult in the room." I joke and say, "i have always been in my 30s," but I do feel a change recently. Very much facing forest dweller stage already with my oldest getting married.
What makes an adult? I think accepting responsibility for your (and often someone else's) condition is a big part of it. I did that at 15. I double downed at 30 when I became our sole provider. But it was my 40s when I started to feel like an adult.
I see many "adult" children and many more adults acting like children. The difference seems to be a combination of self-awareness, social awareness, and responsibility taking.
how did you experience becoming a parent so early?
coming from europe i find that having kids so early is really looked down upon, but then i moved to china and found that people there get married much earlier than i am used to.
but chinese culture has a great support system. having children in your 20s means that grandparents are in their 40s and 50s, and they help you raise your children.
combined with my own experience of getting married only in my 30s i realized that the older people get, the less adaptable/flexible they become. they are set in their ways, and i concluded that the big benefit of getting married early is that you are more adaptable. you don't need to find a fully compatible partner as you are developing together with your partner. what you do need though, is support from your parents and from society.
i find this model so much better than the western one where you are left to your own devices once you leave the house, and where society doesn't at all support young parents. they are looked down upon as having messed up and not being ready.
I had a physics undergrad dad of a toddler as a roommate at my college dorm in Europe. Probably not as young as 15 but more like 16-17 when he had the child.
At the time it felt like culture shock to my own 17yo self —almost as much as the party creatures— but now I see it as the healthy life strategy that it is.
This has been where my thoughts seem to converge in the last few years too. I'm days away from 40 now, a parent for 17 years and a week or so.
The things that distinguish the adults from the children in my life tends to be age less and less, and responsibility and accountability more.
Your ability to be of service to people in your family, your circle of friends, and your community is such a great measure of how you've become an adult. It isn't a perfect measure, but the best proxy I've found. It's very difficult to spoof it.
People who have aged but failed to mature tend to struggle on all or several of these metrics. Their attention, actions, and overall lives are very inwardly oriented in many ways.
It isn't to say they're bad people. My rough framework is that as social animals, we need to figure things out before we can fully integrate into our social systems as a fully functioning member. A big step in this process is figuring ourselves out. That's why kids are doing legitimate work when they play, make mistakes, struggle, and so on. They're doing those difficult steps of self discovery. Then, we need to figure out how we fit into the social layers and meshes around us. It's all very complex. It's understandable that we never fully figure it out or optimize, and that some people get hung up on early steps without the right help to be guided through. If the foundations are poor, you're going to struggle.
In effect being an adult is just being a well adjusted, integrated member of a community who functions as a generative, supportive, all around positive contributor.
That's an over simplification of course. It's a proxy I use to help guide myself, really. What can I do right now that would land me in that rough category? It's helpful to not have to overthink it.
At 40 I'd say I've begun becoming an adult but have a lot of work left to do. I think the efforts need to be ongoing because we never stop teaching the young ones, too. Complacency in some contexts can be totally fine, but in a social context I think it can be quite corrosive. We always need to care and strive for something better for each other. It's what we're here for.
Also, nice work, genuinely. Parenting at 23 was a shock to me. People thought I was handling it gracefully but it was totally ad-hoc and incredibly difficult at times. And that's with a disproportionately advantageous tech career supporting us. I can't imagine what would have happened at 15. That's admirable. I didn't even make it through school without a kid. I'm regularly amazed by what people can accomplish, including this.
"If I don't take care of this, my family will suffer."
In other words: when you accept responsibility and become willing to do what's necessary to uphold your responsibilities (to your family, to yourself, and if you wish your community).
I'm 51 now and I feel like I will never be an adult. Looking around I see a lot of broken people, each in their own peculiar ways. Everyone has some coping mechanisms, triggers, and behaviours rooted in childhood. I don't see it in a bad light, I think it is just humanity.
It's not just "broken people", everybody has their cross to bear. Some are outwardly visible, but many are not.
As a high schooler, there was a girl in my class who seemed to have it all: smart, gorgeous, popular, you name it. Then one day, she confided in me her deepest, darkest secret: at the age of 17, she had gone to a neighboring country to get liposuction on her thighs, because she was deeply distressed about not having the "thigh gap" demanded by beauty standards at the time. (This was also the first time I had heard of the existence of such a thing.) Now it's easy to dismiss this as shallow, but to her this was debilitating to the extent that she was willing to put up with the cost and pain of surgery to get it fixed.
Child abuse might be a large driver behind dysfunctionality in adulthood, with disability or early retirement as a consequence. There were some big child neglect cases around the millennium, since them, the topic got more attention from researchers.
It used to be that traumatised kids got slapped with a ADHD, autism and/or borderline diagnosis and it got called a day. These are "that's just how you are" style diagnoses. Since 2018 there is CPTSD which finally connects the symptoms to how you got treated as a child. The denial phase is over.
Lawmakers are a bit behind, as usual, but at this point the scale of the problems can't be denied anymore. Its too late for you and me, but I'm optimistic for future generations.
We're in the over-correcting phase, where every person alive is an abuse survivor of varying seriousness.
For what it's worth I'm not a cynical person against psychology, and I read both the DSM and the ICD front to back every time a revision comes out. But with every revision, especially for the DSM, I become more concerned that we're creeping towards the "everybody suffers from a multitude of disorders therefore nobody does" territory which will bring us right back to ignoring people who need help.
> where every person alive is an abuse survivor of varying seriousness
An odd way to frame it but probably true.
> which will bring us right back to ignoring people who need help
That does not follow - if the environmental sources are known, people (especially teachers and social workers) can look out for them and take measures to improve the outcome for the child. And this is what I'm seeing right now.
See it on a societal scale - for the same effort put into raising kids, you get more functional adults.
ADHD and other mental issues are under-diagnosed in dysfunctional or toxic families, and of course exist in very stable caring families, so I would be very curious in which data link the very different symptoms you cite directly to trauma. It feels like going back to the era of shaming mothers for autism.
This is not ruling out a causal link in the opposite direction, that autism increases vulnerability to traumata.
And while researching case reports on child abuse, i couldn't help to notice that many cases do - indeed - start with an autism diagnosis and only escalate later, example: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11886450/
While its true that parents don't cause autism... they can surely cause the diagnosis. Extra bad because it delays appropriate treatment.
I think a lot of people feel this, they just stop saying it out loud.
At some point I realized “adults” aren’t people who figured things out, they’re just people who got used to not knowing — which is both kind of freeing and a little unsettling.
I've seen some definitions that include a few basic requirements, such as:
- A basic level of emotional stability and self-control
- Some ability to model consequences accurately
- Some ability to negotiate and handle imperfections and challenges in social situations, including relationships and work
- Some ability to accurately locate the line between internal and external responsibility, and to act accordingly
On that basis it's not at all about age or life stages, but about social and emotional competence.
This culture has a superficial understanding of social competence - more or less defined by "socially competent people get what they want."
I don't think there's much understanding of emotional competence. The default framing seems to be "You're probably damaged and so is your partner (which is why you're not getting what you want)" and not so much "This is what a functional adult looks like."
Work is even worse, with emotional competence being defined almost entirely by its relationship to profit and shareholder value, and not by any intrinsic human standard.
I feel that so much. I'm a first generation vietnamese american (born and raised in america) and it's very disappointing to see my own family lash out (at each other or even strangers) when there is some issue where the answer is unknown.
It's also very frustrating when there's such a strong emphasis on the idea that
elders always know best and anybody younger cannot question them.
Discipline, wisdom, and maturity are probably the main aspects that I think define how "adult" somebody is.
Labels like "adult", and "successful" etc are all for other peoples benefit rather than our own. It's all a facade.
I'd probably measure maturity in terms of how one navigates relationships.
When it comes to my partner, being vulnerable, knowing when it's ok to share that I don't feel like an adult, that i'm scared or lack confidence, and when to put on a strong front and say it's all going to be ok, to make her feel safe, is the essence of what I consider to be a "grown ass man".
But we're also planning a trip to the Lego House, Denmark together and we don't have kids. So there's that.
A adult is a person poisoned by experience. The poison makes you capable to navigate the world easier, but the poison that is knowledge also inhibits and limits you. If you know more about the world or the future, you are less likely to have children. The more knowledge you have the more it limits your ability to move of the rails, do novel scientific discovery, etc. An adult is thus the most information poisoned person in the room, all others are in degrees lesser adult thsn him or her.
I would say that’s the teenage phase, infected by nihilism. The adult moves past that, finds that life is an acquired taste, and finds joy in the everyday.
There's a tautology encoded in the question. You become an adult when you behave like the people who most people consider to be adults, behave.
What is an adult? Like most words, "adult" encodes a cluster of related behaviors and it's a probabilistic judgment as to whether any individual counts. And it's also shaped by the circumstances of the day. The roles and responsibilities of adulthood change over time, with different social expectations, and those roles may become achievable or less expected to be achievable, depending.
It's unsurprising that the article doesn't really come to any conclusion. The question doesn't admit a hard answer. A better question might be, what is the good life of today, and what transitions and when might make sense in our time.
Our lives are less structured by tradition than times past. But some biological truths can't be denied. A good life, today, might require one to be countercultural, if our ad-ridden culture over-venerates individualism and youth.
I suspect most people only realize these things in retrospect. You don't really know what doors have closed until you find yourself ignored, knocking outside.
Maturity is a value judgment. At best. At worst it's simply a power move. There's no objective way to measure your brain juices and say now you're "fully developed" or whatever.
People eager to define other people as insufficiently adult adults, should be viewed with the same skepticism as people who want to put their political opponents in an asylum.
If you think it's a problem that young adults today play too much video games or whatever, take the ball and not the man. The problem then is in the behavior, not in people's essence. The youth are as bad as every generation complains that they are, no more, no less.
By far the best response here so far. But since we don't have clear definition and my threshold may be vastly different than yours, its anyone's guess.
it's a dynamic system where we feel less able to see ourselves as adults each time we gain therapy language to articulate trauma. something is gained with this language, but something is lost too
Claiming that Talmudic adulthood begins simply "after age 20" completely misses the profound philosophical depth of the Jewish tradition!
Judaism is fundamentally, as Levinas puts it a "religion of adults". It has nothing to do with biological age, but is instead a state where one rejects the immature desire to endlessly test the waters, keep a safe distance, and leave your options open without ever making a definitive choice.
Adulthood, in the Jewish perspective (according to me ;)), is a commitment to receiving the Law directly as an ethical obligation to "the other" without fully understanding what that means. It's a commitment to becoming "hostage" to the other, taking on an infinite, non-negotiable burden to answer for circumstances and suffering you did not even cause.
In every generation, the mountain of desolation hangs over us like an asteroid, and in every generation we must make the adult effort to accept the Law and commit unconditionally to the Good.
Or something like that. At any rate, it's not simply "starting after age 20."
I don't think this holds any water. Plenty of orphan children. Also, my parents are alive and I firmly count myself in the adult camp.
Like the article, I think much of what makes you an adult is taking responsibility. For some, the first time that happens may be when their parents die I suppose.
When a relative in the generation before me lost the last person in the generation before them, they surprised me by saying, 'I'm all alone now; it's just me'. There were no parents, aunts/uncles, etc. to advise them, support them, guide them. They faced the wilderness on their own.
Another way of looking at it is, when you switch roles with your parents, and you become their caregiver, their source of strength, their guide through the world. When they can no longer help you. One example is the Godfather, when Al Pacino's character starts caring for Marlon Brando's.
(Other commenters are taking this idea far too literally, looking for exceptions.)
I believe an adult is someone who can take care of themselves and those that depend on them without undue imposition on others.
Some never make it.
It has nothing to do with age.
You could argue that a 10-year-old who is pulling hens weight in the family is an adult by my definition since they are not imposing on others in the family.
reminds me a bit of a kine from scroobius pip. something along the lines of 'we're all just bigger kids raising smaller kids'. Some spiritual lines consider humans to be all around 13 or 14 years old, in the mental plane.
I dont think most people are very far apart from around that age anyway. Depending ofc on how one gets raised you might get to that maturity more or less quickly in life.
(it has nothing to do with skills, eloquance or such things. More to do with how well a person can adapt and respond to stimuli of the nervous system (consciousness), and in my further opinion, how well someone can take and understand the perspective of others. (understanding without judgement).
As the article hints at the idea of an "adult" is closely tied to the structured, 'on rails' lifestyle of the industrial age. In rich societies people live on a linear track: vocation/uni, job, marriage etc.
When I lived in China I met a (physically) older guy in his 60s at the time who had lived through the cultural revolution, spent 8 years on a farm, went back to school when the universities opened up, started a business, then lost the business after various reforms during the Deng era, and had started work as a programmer in his 50s. He always said "when you're younger than 60 you can just start over" when he heard young adults having existential panics.
The guy had restarted his life so often he genuinely seemed like a curious kid, and I think that has a lot to do with just how chaotic and cyclical everything was, he was just used to it. You reinvented yourself every 10-15 years because the world changed.
And I think that's an important lesson because the stable environment that convinced people they're finished adults by the time they're 25 is about to be over everywhere. The whole house, golden retriever, 9-5 Truman show thing isn't coming back and having a childish spirit might very well be a big advantage.
That stable environment was always more or less a myth.
Some people live the 'on rails' lifestyle, others never find the tracks, some get kicked off after a few years.
At its best it's a tool for helping make sense of life and society, but it can also be a destructive myth that leads to resentment and anger in those who end up somewhere else, like they're entitled to this outcome that just wasn't in their cards. Easy to get lost in that darkness and fail to actually make something of life.
This is really fine article. I agree with its overall sentiment that it's difficult to draw hard lines.
Answering the question posed in title - I have no idea.
When I was a kid, I thought that person becomes adult in the day of their 18 birthdays.
But being 18 years old, I didn't feel so mature. "Maybe when I finish university", I thought. But nope, it didn't feel like being adult.
Maybe when I have a stable, "real" job? Nope.
Maybe after I leave my parents home? Still not.
Maybe after marriage? It's still not that.
I suppose I still consider being adult with being serious, busy, and in total control of their lives. And I don't feel that yet, probably I will never will.
I feel that this view of adulthood is a bit childish. And most likely I never will feel adult in this specific way. We never are in a total control of our lives.
But - do I feel more mature than in my 20'? Of course I do. I have much more responsibilities. My decisions and my actions are much more deliberate than they used to be.
But I just feel that I still have a long way to go...
I'm ~30 years old and would like to plea to others in my generation: Please take the mantle of adulthood, whether you feel ready or not. If you do not, those who who have no 2nd thoughts about this will run our world into the ground while you sit on the sidelines pretending to still be an innocent child.
* corporate billionaires don't think to themselves "am I really an adult?"
* religious zealots do not ask these questions
* Putin does not wake up and wonder that
* Donald trump does not wake up and wonder that
* netanyahu does not wake up and wonder that
You have power in this world, whether you realize it or not. You can vote and talk to people and ask them to vote. You have money. You are big and strong and can move things in the physical world.
With that power also comes responsibility. I'm not asking you to shoulder the entire world on just your own - but do your part.
If we assume, this is a indicator 'maturity', then the answer should be around 26-35, depending on the individual. It seems that the founding fathers were into something when the made the minimal age for a president at 35.
There is a reversal at 75+, but this is due to age related issues. And my experience from the older folks in my life, it seems people start reverting to a 'teenage' like state at 75+.
Yes. When you don't have kids you can always quit the game/rat race one way or another if it gets too much. With kids - it is different. Kids are the only burden you can't easily shrug off in this life.
I assume you grew up in different circles than me. I have seen countless kids shrugged off growing up poor and around drug addiction. I have heard the rich shrug them off to boarding school sometimes.
I have seen of course. But the point is - if you abandon everything in life right now while childless you are not a failure as human being. It is your right to say fuck it all at any moment. If you abandon your kids you are.
When there is no more physical development? A couple of years after sexuality has been stabilized physically.
Why is that so clear in other animals but not in humans? Every other social construct is just mental gymnastics. We believe we are special and need to do these gymnastics to keep the importance up.
This is an interesting question. Neoteny is the preservation of juvenile features into adulthood and is a hallmark of domestication. Humans have been undergoing self-domestication so features like rounder faces and softer jaw lines are persisting past sexual maturity.
We _know_ the human brain is finishing its development in our early to mid twenties, maybe 10 years post puberty. This extra brain development likely needed for our advanced social and tool needs, and is a unique niche for humans. Our hidden brain development does make a difference. Other primates don't display this.
But we know that nobody really does that - it's just too hard and lonely to accept all responsibility solely to ourselves, even as an adult. That's why we learn to rely on each other sometimes, and I don't think that's a childish or irresponsible act!
I never liked the idea of dividing life into segments since you can't really quantify or rather classify the circumstances. Libertarians are praising the idea of equal opportunity and reject the idea of equal outcome. I personally reject both conceptually. No one will ever or can ever have an equal opportunity because our opportunities don't necessarily mean they are all good. In practice, an opportunity is often choosing the lesser evil and in many cases that's a decision that will follow you throughout your life and will have life-long side effects. I've had to take difficult decisions and even though I undeniably took the right ones, I understand that some of those completely derailed some aspects of my life and I've accepted it. Some of those had to happen pretty early on to no fault of my own mind you, but to me, realizing that some things are outside your control and you have to accept reality, even if you hate it, is the day you become an adult. Of course, there are people who face no consequences no matter what they do and they die of old age with the mindset of a 4 year old. Especially if they were raised to be egomaniacal, self-obsessed, spoiled brats, of which there are a lot.
This may be an unpopular opinion but everyone needs to face a critical mass of unfortunate events at some part of their life. The earlier it happens the easier it is down the road.
Age 12-14, pick a number in between that works for your group's culture and stick with it. Everything else is pseudo-scientific horseshit, and artificially raising the number past this range causes more harm than good.
I think what the parent comment was hinting at is that there is no absolute separator between a non-adult and an adult. It is a thousand different things and the type of game you enjoy playing is not necessarily a good indicator on its own.
At least no one can accuse you of not living up to your username.
We understand where your line is.
Maybe consider that whatever has made you so “salty” is really just trauma that has made you callous, inconsiderate, and closed off.
You accuse people of not being as much of a man as presumably you are, but regardless of the negatives of video games, could it just be that those you have disdain for are just victims of a different type of abuse you were subjected to that made you such a man?
Are you a man because you killed people in foreign countries for a ruling class that hated you and has destroyed and plundered your country and community to enrich themselves maybe?
Or maybe you just support those who have done that due to the ruling class TV/Hollywood propaganda about how “manly” it is to kill people and die for the ruling class and how virtuous it is to support them?
Your generation may have just been abused with propaganda about being a man, going to kill and die for the ruling class aristocrats; this generation may have just been propagandized that “video games and drugs” are the best way to manage the peasantry, as Yuval Noah Harari said about what the ruling class would do with all the people who become obsolete due to AI and robotics.
I ask you may consider redirecting your ire towards the abusers, not other abused in your international disdain. You do after all also forget, if you’re the old man, then as the elder you are in one way or another responsible for the world you created and left behind. The parent is always responsible for the child, especially when the parent has caused, brought about all the damage the child must deal with.
Sure, but then the issue would be in the kind of content, not the medium. There are plenty of non-violent video games, and plenty of violent hobbies that aren't video games.
I don't see any consistent argument to single out video games.
A large number of people spent much of the early 2010s playing angry birds. Did they regress from being adults in the 00s to children in the 10s and then back to adults when they started doomscrolling instead?
So people who play games for a living are not adults? There are many people who create videos in Minecraft with complex builds, drawing inspiration from things like architecture, nature, etc.
And there are many adults who play video games to unwind after work.
And it's not just men who play video games. There are a lot of women who play video games including Minecraft and other games, including a huge range of more casual games.
Video games are indeed a child like activity, same way as other child like activities it remains fun forever and has many positives. But hackernews in general gets very triggered whenever you say that spending any less than 100% of your free time playing and thinking about games is childish.
I don’t believe anyone here suggests or hints at the extremes(100%) you are referring to.
Mockery for the “i don’t play games so games are childish” argument is fine tho
I expected the inevitable parade of what about this and what about that.
When someone else is paying your way, you are not an adult. Or at least not acting like one.
As for subsidies, a colleague of mine years ago bought some farmland. He had no intention of farming it, he made money off of the federal subsidy paying him to not farm.
A friend of mine grew up on a farm. He said the usual pattern was 4 years of losses and 1 year of a bumper crop that paid for it.
Nobody is entitled to be a farmer. If you cannot make money farming, it's not the responsibility of others to pay for it.
There is a rationale for maintaining an agricultural base that can feed the country as a national security thing. Make of that what you want.
A pension is an earned benefit, part of one's pay package, not a free goodie. Welfare is a free goodie. It's a big difference.
Your "free" health care is paid for by you and others. It's so expensive because of that. Healthcare wasn't particularly expensive before the government got involved in it.
Modern governments do indeed treat the citizens like children.
yea I would rather have the insane amounts of money I pay in taxes go to department of defense and I’ll spend X% of my income to pay for my own insurance - totally makes me feel like an adult each 1st of the month when the payment is processed. this is what makes america unique, there are no adults living anywhere else in the universe, just us :)
The problem with the defense budget is if it wasn't enough, losing a war would be far more costly. The pragmatic thing is to overspend on defense, because one doesn't really know where the "enough" is.
I've paid for my own health insurance ever since I became an adult.
If you don't have an HSA (Health Savings Account), consider setting one up. It's a very good deal.
I remember the day I phoned my dad and told him I didn't need any more support (I was in college at the time). It felt good to do that, it sure felt like I'd gone through a door. Interestingly, at that moment my dad switched from telling me what to do to advising me, and became my most trusted advisor.
"There's a dearth of people who will do what's necessary without complaining."
To me it's all about realising that there's work which needs to be done regularly, that no one else will do for you and also no one will thank you for doing.
I've been happier since I realised this myself.
I’d add that I myself had a brief period during which I went from thinking “this is hard because I’m dumb” to “this is hard because it is indeed hard”. I felt like I grew up a little in those years as well (~35-ish?). I realized that grown ups and management are all just doing “something”. There is no grander scheme, no deeper understanding behind it. Like the veil was lifted and what was behind it was a bit disappointing, but I also felt that it could not have been any other way.
Somehow this realization also made me happier. It’s all something that you could have told me before but I would have never really felt it. All these lessons need to land in fertile soil. It takes some time and experiences for the soil to be ready.
But I got kicked out of my home at 18 and it was made abundantly clear from the age of 16 onward that this would be the case. Remaining a child is a luxury that I wish everyone can experience for as long as possible
Every five years, my life and context have changed profoundly in ways I could never have predicted.
I feel like I have lived many lifetimes.
I am not sure how I would measure growing up. I could never stay at one level long enough to get effortlessly good at it. My head is too far into the clouds. The stars are so inviting.
So I experience a lot of in-too-deep pressure, trying not to screw things up while working to achieve more than anyone might think is reasonable. With a regular remedial/recovery interval, after I screw things up.
If I do grow up in any way, it is the accumulation of resilience and loss of fear that repeatedly digging myself out of my own craters provides. I have internalized that nothing can stop me. Nothing at all. Not even me, and that is saying a lot.
What makes an adult? I think accepting responsibility for your (and often someone else's) condition is a big part of it. I did that at 15. I double downed at 30 when I became our sole provider. But it was my 40s when I started to feel like an adult.
I see many "adult" children and many more adults acting like children. The difference seems to be a combination of self-awareness, social awareness, and responsibility taking.
how did you experience becoming a parent so early?
coming from europe i find that having kids so early is really looked down upon, but then i moved to china and found that people there get married much earlier than i am used to.
but chinese culture has a great support system. having children in your 20s means that grandparents are in their 40s and 50s, and they help you raise your children.
combined with my own experience of getting married only in my 30s i realized that the older people get, the less adaptable/flexible they become. they are set in their ways, and i concluded that the big benefit of getting married early is that you are more adaptable. you don't need to find a fully compatible partner as you are developing together with your partner. what you do need though, is support from your parents and from society.
i find this model so much better than the western one where you are left to your own devices once you leave the house, and where society doesn't at all support young parents. they are looked down upon as having messed up and not being ready.
At the time it felt like culture shock to my own 17yo self —almost as much as the party creatures— but now I see it as the healthy life strategy that it is.
The things that distinguish the adults from the children in my life tends to be age less and less, and responsibility and accountability more.
Your ability to be of service to people in your family, your circle of friends, and your community is such a great measure of how you've become an adult. It isn't a perfect measure, but the best proxy I've found. It's very difficult to spoof it.
People who have aged but failed to mature tend to struggle on all or several of these metrics. Their attention, actions, and overall lives are very inwardly oriented in many ways.
It isn't to say they're bad people. My rough framework is that as social animals, we need to figure things out before we can fully integrate into our social systems as a fully functioning member. A big step in this process is figuring ourselves out. That's why kids are doing legitimate work when they play, make mistakes, struggle, and so on. They're doing those difficult steps of self discovery. Then, we need to figure out how we fit into the social layers and meshes around us. It's all very complex. It's understandable that we never fully figure it out or optimize, and that some people get hung up on early steps without the right help to be guided through. If the foundations are poor, you're going to struggle.
In effect being an adult is just being a well adjusted, integrated member of a community who functions as a generative, supportive, all around positive contributor.
That's an over simplification of course. It's a proxy I use to help guide myself, really. What can I do right now that would land me in that rough category? It's helpful to not have to overthink it.
At 40 I'd say I've begun becoming an adult but have a lot of work left to do. I think the efforts need to be ongoing because we never stop teaching the young ones, too. Complacency in some contexts can be totally fine, but in a social context I think it can be quite corrosive. We always need to care and strive for something better for each other. It's what we're here for.
Also, nice work, genuinely. Parenting at 23 was a shock to me. People thought I was handling it gracefully but it was totally ad-hoc and incredibly difficult at times. And that's with a disproportionately advantageous tech career supporting us. I can't imagine what would have happened at 15. That's admirable. I didn't even make it through school without a kid. I'm regularly amazed by what people can accomplish, including this.
In other words: when you accept responsibility and become willing to do what's necessary to uphold your responsibilities (to your family, to yourself, and if you wish your community).
As a high schooler, there was a girl in my class who seemed to have it all: smart, gorgeous, popular, you name it. Then one day, she confided in me her deepest, darkest secret: at the age of 17, she had gone to a neighboring country to get liposuction on her thighs, because she was deeply distressed about not having the "thigh gap" demanded by beauty standards at the time. (This was also the first time I had heard of the existence of such a thing.) Now it's easy to dismiss this as shallow, but to her this was debilitating to the extent that she was willing to put up with the cost and pain of surgery to get it fixed.
It used to be that traumatised kids got slapped with a ADHD, autism and/or borderline diagnosis and it got called a day. These are "that's just how you are" style diagnoses. Since 2018 there is CPTSD which finally connects the symptoms to how you got treated as a child. The denial phase is over.
Lawmakers are a bit behind, as usual, but at this point the scale of the problems can't be denied anymore. Its too late for you and me, but I'm optimistic for future generations.
We're in the over-correcting phase, where every person alive is an abuse survivor of varying seriousness.
For what it's worth I'm not a cynical person against psychology, and I read both the DSM and the ICD front to back every time a revision comes out. But with every revision, especially for the DSM, I become more concerned that we're creeping towards the "everybody suffers from a multitude of disorders therefore nobody does" territory which will bring us right back to ignoring people who need help.
An odd way to frame it but probably true.
> which will bring us right back to ignoring people who need help
That does not follow - if the environmental sources are known, people (especially teachers and social workers) can look out for them and take measures to improve the outcome for the child. And this is what I'm seeing right now.
See it on a societal scale - for the same effort put into raising kids, you get more functional adults.
This is vaguely among experts (for autism and emotional instability): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11724683
This is not ruling out a causal link in the opposite direction, that autism increases vulnerability to traumata.
And while researching case reports on child abuse, i couldn't help to notice that many cases do - indeed - start with an autism diagnosis and only escalate later, example: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11886450/
While its true that parents don't cause autism... they can surely cause the diagnosis. Extra bad because it delays appropriate treatment.
At some point I realized “adults” aren’t people who figured things out, they’re just people who got used to not knowing — which is both kind of freeing and a little unsettling.
Adult means grown up. Grown up does not mean perfect or without issues.
- A basic level of emotional stability and self-control
- Some ability to model consequences accurately
- Some ability to negotiate and handle imperfections and challenges in social situations, including relationships and work
- Some ability to accurately locate the line between internal and external responsibility, and to act accordingly
On that basis it's not at all about age or life stages, but about social and emotional competence.
This culture has a superficial understanding of social competence - more or less defined by "socially competent people get what they want."
I don't think there's much understanding of emotional competence. The default framing seems to be "You're probably damaged and so is your partner (which is why you're not getting what you want)" and not so much "This is what a functional adult looks like."
Work is even worse, with emotional competence being defined almost entirely by its relationship to profit and shareholder value, and not by any intrinsic human standard.
I feel that so much. I'm a first generation vietnamese american (born and raised in america) and it's very disappointing to see my own family lash out (at each other or even strangers) when there is some issue where the answer is unknown.
It's also very frustrating when there's such a strong emphasis on the idea that elders always know best and anybody younger cannot question them.
Discipline, wisdom, and maturity are probably the main aspects that I think define how "adult" somebody is.
I like that. And because humans are (sometimes poor) pattern matchers, we are confusing that for the proxy of age.
I'd probably measure maturity in terms of how one navigates relationships.
When it comes to my partner, being vulnerable, knowing when it's ok to share that I don't feel like an adult, that i'm scared or lack confidence, and when to put on a strong front and say it's all going to be ok, to make her feel safe, is the essence of what I consider to be a "grown ass man".
But we're also planning a trip to the Lego House, Denmark together and we don't have kids. So there's that.
Personally, the older I get the more `adult` just means you have an empathetic understanding of causality.
What is an adult? Like most words, "adult" encodes a cluster of related behaviors and it's a probabilistic judgment as to whether any individual counts. And it's also shaped by the circumstances of the day. The roles and responsibilities of adulthood change over time, with different social expectations, and those roles may become achievable or less expected to be achievable, depending.
It's unsurprising that the article doesn't really come to any conclusion. The question doesn't admit a hard answer. A better question might be, what is the good life of today, and what transitions and when might make sense in our time.
Our lives are less structured by tradition than times past. But some biological truths can't be denied. A good life, today, might require one to be countercultural, if our ad-ridden culture over-venerates individualism and youth.
I suspect most people only realize these things in retrospect. You don't really know what doors have closed until you find yourself ignored, knocking outside.
People eager to define other people as insufficiently adult adults, should be viewed with the same skepticism as people who want to put their political opponents in an asylum.
If you think it's a problem that young adults today play too much video games or whatever, take the ball and not the man. The problem then is in the behavior, not in people's essence. The youth are as bad as every generation complains that they are, no more, no less.
btw, https://archive.ph/g3Bok
I use a rough threshold of how much responsibilities they can, or, have to endure, and manage to take care of in a good enough way.
Claiming that Talmudic adulthood begins simply "after age 20" completely misses the profound philosophical depth of the Jewish tradition!
Judaism is fundamentally, as Levinas puts it a "religion of adults". It has nothing to do with biological age, but is instead a state where one rejects the immature desire to endlessly test the waters, keep a safe distance, and leave your options open without ever making a definitive choice.
Adulthood, in the Jewish perspective (according to me ;)), is a commitment to receiving the Law directly as an ethical obligation to "the other" without fully understanding what that means. It's a commitment to becoming "hostage" to the other, taking on an infinite, non-negotiable burden to answer for circumstances and suffering you did not even cause.
In every generation, the mountain of desolation hangs over us like an asteroid, and in every generation we must make the adult effort to accept the Law and commit unconditionally to the Good.
Or something like that. At any rate, it's not simply "starting after age 20."
Like the article, I think much of what makes you an adult is taking responsibility. For some, the first time that happens may be when their parents die I suppose.
Another way of looking at it is, when you switch roles with your parents, and you become their caregiver, their source of strength, their guide through the world. When they can no longer help you. One example is the Godfather, when Al Pacino's character starts caring for Marlon Brando's.
(Other commenters are taking this idea far too literally, looking for exceptions.)
Some never make it.
It has nothing to do with age.
You could argue that a 10-year-old who is pulling hens weight in the family is an adult by my definition since they are not imposing on others in the family.
I dont think most people are very far apart from around that age anyway. Depending ofc on how one gets raised you might get to that maturity more or less quickly in life.
(it has nothing to do with skills, eloquance or such things. More to do with how well a person can adapt and respond to stimuli of the nervous system (consciousness), and in my further opinion, how well someone can take and understand the perspective of others. (understanding without judgement).
When I lived in China I met a (physically) older guy in his 60s at the time who had lived through the cultural revolution, spent 8 years on a farm, went back to school when the universities opened up, started a business, then lost the business after various reforms during the Deng era, and had started work as a programmer in his 50s. He always said "when you're younger than 60 you can just start over" when he heard young adults having existential panics.
The guy had restarted his life so often he genuinely seemed like a curious kid, and I think that has a lot to do with just how chaotic and cyclical everything was, he was just used to it. You reinvented yourself every 10-15 years because the world changed.
And I think that's an important lesson because the stable environment that convinced people they're finished adults by the time they're 25 is about to be over everywhere. The whole house, golden retriever, 9-5 Truman show thing isn't coming back and having a childish spirit might very well be a big advantage.
Some people live the 'on rails' lifestyle, others never find the tracks, some get kicked off after a few years.
At its best it's a tool for helping make sense of life and society, but it can also be a destructive myth that leads to resentment and anger in those who end up somewhere else, like they're entitled to this outcome that just wasn't in their cards. Easy to get lost in that darkness and fail to actually make something of life.
Answering the question posed in title - I have no idea.
When I was a kid, I thought that person becomes adult in the day of their 18 birthdays.
But being 18 years old, I didn't feel so mature. "Maybe when I finish university", I thought. But nope, it didn't feel like being adult.
Maybe when I have a stable, "real" job? Nope.
Maybe after I leave my parents home? Still not.
Maybe after marriage? It's still not that.
I suppose I still consider being adult with being serious, busy, and in total control of their lives. And I don't feel that yet, probably I will never will.
I feel that this view of adulthood is a bit childish. And most likely I never will feel adult in this specific way. We never are in a total control of our lives.
But - do I feel more mature than in my 20'? Of course I do. I have much more responsibilities. My decisions and my actions are much more deliberate than they used to be.
But I just feel that I still have a long way to go...
* corporate billionaires don't think to themselves "am I really an adult?" * religious zealots do not ask these questions * Putin does not wake up and wonder that * Donald trump does not wake up and wonder that * netanyahu does not wake up and wonder that
You have power in this world, whether you realize it or not. You can vote and talk to people and ask them to vote. You have money. You are big and strong and can move things in the physical world.
With that power also comes responsibility. I'm not asking you to shoulder the entire world on just your own - but do your part.
There are two periods where there are sharp declines: 19, and sometimes after 26, all the way to 35.
https://www.hallandalelaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/IIH...
If we assume, this is a indicator 'maturity', then the answer should be around 26-35, depending on the individual. It seems that the founding fathers were into something when the made the minimal age for a president at 35.
There is a reversal at 75+, but this is due to age related issues. And my experience from the older folks in my life, it seems people start reverting to a 'teenage' like state at 75+.
Also not quite what the article is about.
Why is that so clear in other animals but not in humans? Every other social construct is just mental gymnastics. We believe we are special and need to do these gymnastics to keep the importance up.
We _know_ the human brain is finishing its development in our early to mid twenties, maybe 10 years post puberty. This extra brain development likely needed for our advanced social and tool needs, and is a unique niche for humans. Our hidden brain development does make a difference. Other primates don't display this.
there is indivual agency, which can be found and practiced, and lost and forgoten
for me it's when you realize you do not have to define yourself within a framework of outside expectations.
So i would say that you become adult when you have kids. Due to reasons this is postponed (or missing) to older and older age.
This may be an unpopular opinion but everyone needs to face a critical mass of unfortunate events at some part of their life. The earlier it happens the easier it is down the road.
Are card games also childish?
Sports games?
Perhaps we should stop playing games altogather and tell everyone at the Olympic Games to stop being children!
Bloody chess players, don't they know how much they look like kids!
We understand where your line is.
Maybe consider that whatever has made you so “salty” is really just trauma that has made you callous, inconsiderate, and closed off.
You accuse people of not being as much of a man as presumably you are, but regardless of the negatives of video games, could it just be that those you have disdain for are just victims of a different type of abuse you were subjected to that made you such a man?
Are you a man because you killed people in foreign countries for a ruling class that hated you and has destroyed and plundered your country and community to enrich themselves maybe?
Or maybe you just support those who have done that due to the ruling class TV/Hollywood propaganda about how “manly” it is to kill people and die for the ruling class and how virtuous it is to support them?
Your generation may have just been abused with propaganda about being a man, going to kill and die for the ruling class aristocrats; this generation may have just been propagandized that “video games and drugs” are the best way to manage the peasantry, as Yuval Noah Harari said about what the ruling class would do with all the people who become obsolete due to AI and robotics.
I ask you may consider redirecting your ire towards the abusers, not other abused in your international disdain. You do after all also forget, if you’re the old man, then as the elder you are in one way or another responsible for the world you created and left behind. The parent is always responsible for the child, especially when the parent has caused, brought about all the damage the child must deal with.
I don't see any consistent argument to single out video games.
And there are many adults who play video games to unwind after work.
And it's not just men who play video games. There are a lot of women who play video games including Minecraft and other games, including a huge range of more casual games.
When someone else is paying your way, you are not an adult. Or at least not acting like one.
As for subsidies, a colleague of mine years ago bought some farmland. He had no intention of farming it, he made money off of the federal subsidy paying him to not farm.
A friend of mine grew up on a farm. He said the usual pattern was 4 years of losses and 1 year of a bumper crop that paid for it.
Nobody is entitled to be a farmer. If you cannot make money farming, it's not the responsibility of others to pay for it.
There is a rationale for maintaining an agricultural base that can feed the country as a national security thing. Make of that what you want.
Paying for your own health insurance is insane. I would move out of any country that would force me to do that.
Your "free" health care is paid for by you and others. It's so expensive because of that. Healthcare wasn't particularly expensive before the government got involved in it.
Modern governments do indeed treat the citizens like children.
I've paid for my own health insurance ever since I became an adult.
If you don't have an HSA (Health Savings Account), consider setting one up. It's a very good deal.
I remember the day I phoned my dad and told him I didn't need any more support (I was in college at the time). It felt good to do that, it sure felt like I'd gone through a door. Interestingly, at that moment my dad switched from telling me what to do to advising me, and became my most trusted advisor.
A free market society is a society of adults.
we won a war since WW II??
also if you want to live in free market society and you live in the USA you may want to consider moving