The crux of graduating from child to adult mentality

Table of Contents

Adulthood, where art thou? #

Somehow evolving into a budding old fart has started to creep up on you. By now, you've lost all your student and young adult discounts, but the bills and taxes keep piling up. You don't look forward to birthdays anymore. After the 25th, you've started reconsidering whether your age really needs to keep incrementing. On second thought, it's fine as it is now.

The list of shits-you're-getting-too-old-for is expanding steadily. Your peers have started quipping and complaining about suffering the emerging consequences of the turpitudes their heretofore lifestyle has inflicted upon their bodies.

You're now pretty thoroughly out of the loop with the latest references, memes, and trends from the young'uns. Hopefully, you don't mind that much, because you're not quite that desperate to deny the inexorable passage of time and evolution of your tastes and priorities💡Speaking for myself, and to be frank, I've liked slippers, quietude, and minding my own business since I was a kid — and I was never cool to start with.. You've cozily started to settle into has-been infancy. Ain't got the time nor energy to vainly invest in trying to butter up whippersnappers into thinking you're cool.

All the same, you still don't feel "ready" for life. You've comfortably exceeded the age your parents had you at, and yet you don't feel remotely equipped to bring and nurture life into this world any time soon. You don't "feel like an adult". Whatever the hell that's even supposed to mean in the first place. Having all your shit tightly together and knowing the answer to every single question in existence? When's that supposed to happen exactly?

On my end, my first attempt at solving this quandary was to unenthusiastically grab the first, easy, obvious answer. Namely, there's no such thing as adulthood, everyone is just winging it.

Is "adulthood" merely a scam? #

I know you're all fighting because you're scared and confused. I confused too. All day, I don't know what the heck is going on. But somehow, this feels like it's all my fault.

– Waymond in Everything Everywhere All at Once by the Daniels (2022)

This theory goes as follows: the concept of psychological adulthood is a Santa Claus-type scam. It's a myth born from faulty inferences developed as a gullible kid. To be fair, your parents worked hard in getting you to buy they had a tight grip on what was going on when in reality they were just clueless, hapless goobers like the rest of us. After all, they were terrified the gig would be up once you realized the dismal truth, leaving them strapped with only tenuous justifications as to why they get to lord it over you all the time.

These so-called "adults" sure seemed to be much more descriptively and prescriptively knowledgeable than you were. They left you dazed and confused by slapping you back and forth with delectable aldultisms such as the inept "Because I said so", the blustery "Children should be seen and not heard", or the pernicious "You'll understand when you're older", to only name a few.

This first answer does a sufficient job of resolving this apparent inconsistency between theory and lived experience, but it leaves us fairly dejected and unsatisfied. For a while it tepidly served its job for me, but over time and faced with new life experiences, a new answer started percolating to the surface.

What if there's more to it? #

In early 2025, I started working as a night receptionist for hotels. This was my first time experiencing a customer-facing job. Before that I worked in web development, which is quite distinctly different.

In my personal experience, the latter mostly consisted in spending far too much time trying to identify and fix bugs you can't reproduce, in a Kafkaesque application you do not understand, by combing through a antagonistically repulsive codebase you do not understand, under mostly arbitrary deadlines that get repeatedly postponed, in order to carry out a company strategy that cannot be understood — because it makes no sense, during the fleeting fragments of time you can glean in between contemplating the futility of existence and hours-long meetings that barely serve any purpose aside from sometimes trying to forward information between departments that do not understand each other and don't really want to in the first place.

I must admit it wasn't near the top of my favorite ways to burn through my lifespan.

I got into that line of work because I enjoyed tinkering with fun little code problems, but it turns out that's only a very negligible portion of the actual job. Most of the problems you end up having to deal with happen to be of the protracted and unfun variety when they're not completely inscrutable. That's why I eventually changed career paths.

All that to say, direct customer service comes with many particularities that are new to me when contrasted with desk jobs.

For the most part, there is now a straightforward and graspable rationale behind the presence of most of the tasks assigned to me. You clean up so the premises don't look like trash when customers come in. You audit inconsistencies between the receipts, the cash register, and the software reports to spot potential mistakes. You prepare breakfast so people can eat what they paid for when they wake up in the morning. And so on and so forth. The proportion of things I have no idea why I must carry out has gone down from about 90% to a reasonable 15% or so.

You can mostly understand whatever the fuck it is your colleagues actually do (and conversely). You largely interface in the same reality as them, and so does your direct manager, which helps build solidarity in the team and reduces the number of arbitrary, eldritch directives you must comply with.

Your actions produce concrete, tangible feedback. You're not operating in a contextless vacuum where, by the time you suffer the consequence of your choices, you've long forgotten about making them.

Deadlines don't merely derive from speculative contractual paperwork and exist beyond the need to fill up Excel sheets and graphs to give off the impression things are progressing along. There are genuinely time-sensitive tasks where failing to finish on time will lead to real, tangible problems. And you're the one who has to deal with the impatient, entitled, indignant, and angry customers for the duration of your shift.

Essentially, consequences, urgency, and stakes are all much more concrete and therefore vivid. When shit hits the fan, you can't afford nearly as much procrastination gambling that by waiting long enough this distasteful hassle will decay into obsolescence and take care of itself.

To make things more concrete, here are a few examples of lived experiences to illustrate what I'm talking about:

Four seniors who speak neither a lick of the local language nor English pop in with printed reservations for your hotel and the current date, except they cannot be found in your software nor anywhere in your email inbox. To make matters worse, the hotel is already fully booked, and so are all the others in a citywide radius.
Various pieces of software that either control important equipment or are required to finish the setup before the next shift stop working properly and/or refuse to come back onlineKarma from my past work life?.
You suddenly realize you're out of room key cards when there are still a dozen check-ins left and there's a group of tired flight attendants expectantly standing in front of you, eager to hit the sack.
Some chick prefers to ram the fire emergency button to force the front door open rather than simply ringing the reception. So now the sliding panes categorically refuse to shut and remain wide open, letting anyone and anything free to come and leave, including the chilly early morning winter air.

Accordingly, the urge to call a more experienced colleague for help in the hope they'll magically make the problem and its accompanying stress go away by handling it for you only intensifies. Except now, with the smaller teams and asymmetrical shift schedules, doing so requires waking them up in the middle of the night. So, assuming you've got a shred of decency and consideration, you're also forced to become more self-reliant.

And after a while, with repeated exposure to these types of situations from both points of view, either as the one who starts sinking into panic and perceived helplessness, desperately looking around for an external savior, or the one called to the rescue when training newcomers, that's when it finally hit me.

Child vs adult mentality #

"Feeling like" an adult is indeed mostly a myth. However, being an adult doesn't have to be.

No matter our individual life circumstances, although they may well alleviate or worsen this predicament, we must all face the fact that the universe is basically just a big mortar-like machine, raining unpredictable and distressing complications we initially don't have the foggiest idea how to handle down into our lives. On this basis, we can delineate childhood from adulthood at the level of the outlook we choose to deal with this onslaught.

The child mindset consists in shrugging, "Someone else will know what to do and take care of this". It's declining responsibility and letting others deal with the repercussions of your actions or lack thereof. It's a normal stance to hold for actual kids (within reason), but not great when it comes to overgrown teenagers with real-life responsibilities.

In contrast, the adult mindset says, "Well if no one seems to have this under control, I guess I'd better work on figuring it out". It's doing your best to deal with bullshit when it ineluctably comes your way next and accepting that reality as gracefully as you can.

Nobody knows everything, and at some point everyone has to start winging it. Adulthood is not possessing all the answers, thus overruling the necessity of winging it. It is accepting and embracing having to wing it and doing the best job of it you can manage with the best attitude you can muster. Not in the hope of gleaning some form of external gratification, although doing so will build up your self-efficacy over time and reduce the proliferation of festering, unresolved problems in your life, but for the beauty of the gesture, in the name of Robert Pirsig’s Quality.

The reward is contentment, being at peace with yourself, knowing you did all you could and letting the rest lay in the hands of the godsA reference to Robert Pirsig and Daniel Quinn within the span of two sentences. I'm proud of myself. where it belongs, rather than pointlessly worrying about it. As the Serenity Prayer goes, "Give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other".

The alternative is to keep shirking back problems down the responsibility chain until someone steps up or the former end up ballooning to catastrophic proportions.

It's easy to think, "Why me? It's not my fault! I didn't do anything to deserve this. This is someone else's problem." Regardless, in truth, whenever the last person of the shirking chain tosses the hot potato down your lap, whether fair or not, it has now also become your problem, and by passing it down the line, you're also contributing to shirking responsibility. In a few specific cases this can be warranted, but it's probably a lot less often the case than you'd like it to be. Life isn't fair.

The more someone steps up, the more they become competent and self-sufficient. The longer you spend in that type of situation, the more you learn and become comfortable figuring stuff out. Conversely, the more others will start leaning on you to bail them out.

Of course, it's natural to default to the child mindset at first. After all, unknowns and responsibilities are quite spooky. But, at some point, someone does need to step up. If everyone stays a psychological child forever, it won't end well for anyone.

Besides, even as a recidivist burden shirker, if you pay attention to how your savior solves your problems for you, you'll notice pretty quickly that big bro/sis isn't an omniscient superhuman. They just figure shit out on the fly through trial and error, just like you would — and could.

In the vast majority of cases, they only moderately surpass you in knowledge and skill and potentially benefit from a slightly more furnished collection of similar experiences to call upon for problem-solving.

Correspondingly, the more you learn how to deal with new situations through practice, the more tricks you add to your toolbelt for a rainy day. Yet, that can only happen by putting in the effort of figuring out a fix the first time around and refining it upon further occurrences.

Initially, when we're put on the spot, trapped inside a panicked "first person" perspective, we're much more likely to start off in child stance. However, we tend to naturally switch to an adult stance when we're helping someone else.

As a bystander, we're less affected by the anxiety and perceived helplessness. Plus, most of us feel a reinvigorated sense of motivation and responsibility when an acquaintance directly asks for our assistance. We don't want to let someone who's personally counting on us down.

Hence, even when unsure about how to proceed, we're more likely to start troubleshooting, "Have you tried this? What about that?" instead of frantically looking for the next person to throw the hot potato to.

So on these occasions when you're thrust into the hot seat and at a loss for a solution, imagining what you'd suggest to someone else (e.g. a colleague) who called for your assistance with the situation at hand could help. This might be a decent trick to keep in your bag when you could use a crutch to snap you out of relapsing into childhood and pull you back into a more grounded and capable adult mind space.

In any case, that was a sizeable serving of theory. Let's wrap it up with a story to illustrate what I'm talking about a bit more concretely.

A song of mop and dookie #

The final spark of inspiration for discharging this post in its finalized written form, the doo-doo💡I promised the people their poop (in the post's description) and the people shall rightfully get their poop. Rejoice, masses! straw that broke this camel's back, you might say, came from stumbling upon a fresh clump of literal crap adorned atop my apartment building's front porch, not once, but twice within the span of a year or two. The second occurrence brought the first back to mind and served as the conclusive catalyst for this conception of adulthood that had been brewing in my noggin for a while.

You might have assumed that this story would feature me in the role of the heroic exemplar, but not so. Alas, I merely played the part of a very secondary character and definitely did not rise up to this occasion by picking up the mantle of adulthoodWhat? Am I expected to practice what I preach? That's not how internet punditry works. Just model your behavior on this other guy I'm about to describe instead. On a more serious note, I've been practicing and improving over the last few months, but this specific story predates these efforts and doesn't count among my best showings..

Instead, upon registering the reality of the situation, I petulantly noped out of there, thinking something along the lines of, "Ugh, I don't have the time nor will to deal with this literal shit".

Unsurprisingly, my neighbors also defaulted to childhood in this instance. So, for a couple of days, the nondescript dung heap was left there to fester, untouched and undisturbed but for the occasional oblivious trampling.

Thus the situation perdured until the day when, upon visiting my apartment, a guest informed me they had run into some dude mopping up soiled footprints in my staircase with a cheerful attitude. I can't remember whether I personally brushed past him shortly after or not, but the man left a bright impression on me regardless. By the time I next crossed the threshold to my abode, the porch and staircase were spick and span.

This anonymous and heretofore unsung hero is one beautiful example of an adult. The lad didn't start bemoaning whichever motherless cur, whether of the human or canine variety, felt comfortable enough pinching a loaf smack in the middle of the symbolical liminal space between this harsh, unforgiving world and my cherished sanctuary. Unlike yours truly, he didn't let the situation inexorably trickle down into somebody else's problem and the crime scene decay and smear with the passage of time (and a few heedless feet). Instead, he just got to fucking work with humble and merry dedication.

This guy probably has a more joyful and fulfilling life than the rest of us. And he's probably great to be around too💡Historical fact check: here the author ventures so far down speculations, driven by childish and quixotic wish-fulfillment fantasies based on some bloke they barely met and secondhand accounts, that this whole section's practically fan fiction.. The chap's got more enlightenment street cred than 90% of renowned spiritual gurus. He ain't got time to lord his wisdom over everybody else. He's too busy enjoying his life and cleaning up other people's shit. That's some Wim Wenders' Perfect Days down-to-earth, unpretentious devotion to Quality, if I've ever seen it. Chop wood, carry water, and you'd better learn to like it, bitch! Cuz it ain't stopping anytime soon.

Conclusion #

Let's sum up. According to Colin Firth's character in Kingsman, "manners maketh man". Well, according to me, graciously embracing responsibility maketh adult.

Adulthood is not automatic. It's not a one-time milestone either. It's a choice, a mindset, a stance, a sustained practice, an art of living. Adulthood is cleaning up the shit left behind by the universe and random motherless curs.