No Stupid Questions

Good for you.

You might, once the back pain sets in. Or other old people's aches and pains?

What would you expect it to feel like? What's keeping you from that?

Now you know why southern men call each other "old boy"

Growing old is mandatory, growing up optional.

My brother told me the first time he truly felt like an adult was when he had to go shopping for a washing machine.

I think for me it was when I suffered a back injury whilst sleeping.

We all just have to do stuff all the time. That's it. Welcome.

I think my wife does. She has to deal with 3 kids and a man child.

You'll feel like an actual adult when you stop chasing after what you think society expects a successful adult to be.

Not only will that mean you yourself have the self-confidence of an adult and the adult ability to set one's own milestones, but modern day society is pretty shallow and immature and not really design for people to be self-driven and independent (look at celebrity culture, look at how politics use Tribalism so that people react very much like they do with sports tribalism were the stakes are nowhere near as high, look at consumer society powered by marketing using manipulation strategies taken from Psychology).

If you're lucky it might happen when you have your middle life crysis (though many, maybe most, just seem to become infantilised) or as result of some life-changing event.

I don’t feel like an actual adult. I feel like I’m pretending to know what I’m doing.

That's the first step. The next step is looking back on your "mundane" adult accomplishments:

• Finding and negotiating your housing
• Making sure you (and possibly your family) are maintaining basic nutrition
• Managing your finances well enough that the first two are not in imminent danger
• Navigating though various "adult" BS such as contacting a bank or merchant about a process or payment in error, and chasing it through various channels until its resolved.
• Identifying your next need and the starting point for how to go about getting it resolved.

Then you glance to your left and your right and see some of your peers doing magically better, but more importantly you see a chunk of your peers not able to accomplish anything in the list above. You see what you now recognize is your growth and maturing and their lack of it.

The second step is to realize that you are indeed an adult. This is what being an adult is. The situations change, the difficulty in scope or scale increases, but its variations on what you've done before and the second, third, fourth...hundredth iteration aren't as hard as your first attempt in your early adulthood.

You realize that there isn't a single defining threshold you crossed at some point in the past where you went from "kid" to "adult". You also realize that some people make it all the way into their 60s and 70s without ever becoming an adult.

We reach adult status when we do all the necessary responsible things for survival without having someone to tell us what we need to do and how to do it.

Relevant SMBC:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-06-24

Same and nope I do not feel like an adult

Definitely not. I still feel like an immature 20 year old trapped in an older body.

Yes, I feel like an adult.

The misconception though is that somehow you just “gain” wisdom and adult smarts and whatever. That’s all bullshit. I don’t feel like a different person than I did at 17, but I know I’m not a child, I know society expects me to be accountable for my own actions. I know I have a whole different set of responsibilities than I had as a teenager.

I'm sitting here procrastinating doing books with stacks of paperwork for the business spread all over the table, but all the bills are paid and I'm in the black so yeah, a little bit.

Oh, I didn't make my bed and the world didn't explode. Seriously, does anyone clean their house to the extreme your parents did? We only do if someone is coming over.

Feel like? Maybe not. Accepted? Maybe.

More often than not now, I find myself having to be the adult in the room. My father recently died, and while my parents both have wills sorted, they didn't have other things like power of attorney sorted, or a real discussion of what his funeral arrangements he would like. It was not a sudden death. That was a turning point for me.

I guess that's where I'm at, I've accepted I'm an adult. I'm losing backstops, but also becoming other people's backstop.

Sometimes when I'm hanging my laundry. God, that makes me feels so adulty

Idk, I feel like an adult. That's not to say I have everything figured out, but I've thought a lot about who I want to be, have done (and continue to do) a lot to get closer to being that person and keep growing, and I've successfully navigated a variety of situations and feel confident in my ability to handle unexpected circumstances going forward. I also have a lot of autonomy and when I want something I can usually figure it out or make it happen

Not trying to brag, this probably comes across that way but idk how else to put it 😅

The only thing you are is you. You are not "something". You will always just feel like you.

Everyone else can be adults or kids or whatever. But you will just be you.

Yes. I'm 43, married to my college sweetheart, we have three boys, a house in the suburbs, own a business, take care of my family, and am responsible for everything. Becoming completely independent of any outside help is part of it. Having others that depend on you to handle anything that comes along is the next part. Becoming an adult isn't a switch, it's a gradient. Having kids definitely catapults you along, though. I don't know how grown up I would be right now if I were unmarried and childless, but I'm guessing less so. Above all else, becoming responsible for an entire family is the thing that did it for me, and even that was a gradient.

Same. I sometimes really feel like I'm faking it.

This question is what an adult feels like.

Nope. Not at all. I have just a vague Idea what Im doing.

I'm 42. I have blue hair, watch cartoons, play board games, wear novelty shirts, no I am not an adult. Until I have to be.

Of course not. No one on earth is really an adult. We do not do things correctly here to foster adulthood, being in the service of "corporations" rather than other actual people. Money - dependence upon money - is the reason.

Here's an example. I brought my car in for service today. In the car service game, they have broken the concept of "service" into itemizable, chargeable subtasks. This is not adult, natural human behaviour, this is marketing. The person you speak to is paid to upsell you on items which should be included in the concept of "getting your car serviced" - wheel alignment, fluids etc. The suggestion this makes is that if you do not pay two or three times for the same job, they will do the work improperly or not at all. We have accepted this behaviour as normal, because it's common and we can't do anything about it, but it's still fundamentally wrong and our lives are absolutely full of insulting, greedy, corporate-mandated childish shit like this. This is done not because the business isn't taking in enough money to be viable, but just to enrich the parasite whom is the head of the organization, and to be able to fund third party parasites like lawyers and the marketing department, out of your pocket.

The falseness, the fakeness that is part of every interaction, is the childishness. The reason for that childishness is money. Money is a child's toy, greed is a childish trait, and "Western" culture which has now taken over the world does everything in its power to hamper the development of grown-up personality.

To the haters, no, I make six figures, I'm not poor, but you are being childish again.

Sure. I mean, I am a adult. I never thought adults had things figured out when I was a kid either, seemed pretty obvious they were just trying their best with what they had to work with.

I started feeling like an adult when I was 28. Throughout my 20s the thought came up every so often but I distinctly remember the first time it happened and I really did feel like an adult was when I was 28.

I had to borrow money from the bank this year to buy a car. That made me feel too adult and kind of drove me into a crisis.

Every time I have to confiscate the book my kid is reading after lights out I feel like an adult.

The rest of the time... fuck no.

(They get it back in the morning -- I'm not a monster!)

I feel like I'm pretending to know what I'm doing.

I guess that explains the observation. As kids, we're fooled by the pretenders. So we grow up with this expectation.