When do we become adults, really?
newyorker.com48 points by benbreen 4 days ago
48 points by benbreen 4 days ago
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'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.
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.
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.
I'm not saying these 3 linked issues are caused by childhood trauma, but that they are diagnosed because of the overlap of symptoms.
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.
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 think that definition of adulthood that requires you to be perfect healthy person who has it all figured out is just wrong and also useless.
Adult means grown up. Grown up does not mean perfect or without issues.
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.
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 needs 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.
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.
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.
> social and emotional competence
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.
> On that basis it's not at all about age or life stages, but about social and emotional competence.
I like that. And because humans are (sometimes poor) pattern matchers, we are confusing that for the proxy of age.
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.
[Personal View] No, we never. We just learn to act in public.
I can't access the article so I will respond to only the title.
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.
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.
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.
Aside from the obvious legal definition, it's just a label meant to control you. Don't worry about it too much.
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
You become adult when your parents die
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.
By this metric my uncle, who died in his 70s, never became an adult. My grandmother lived to 93.
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.
when one of your parents dies
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).
When you realize where you stand in the political hierarchy
I don't know, haven't really seen an adult in a long, long time.
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...
When we become parents
I know many people who have children and are not adults. And someone who never have kids will never be adult ?
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.
So you’ve never seen parents quit and neglect their kids ? That does not exists ?
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.
Agreed, but it proves the point that having kids does not makes you an adult
So people without children never become adults? Strange rule.
Also not quite what the article is about.
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.
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.
When you grow your wisdom teeth
They say women are old by 30. And men are young till 60
There are 3 stages in life - when they care for you, when you care for yourself, when you are forced to care for someone else.
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.
We become adults when we accept ultimate responsibility for everything.
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.
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Video games are bad, but what about board games?
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!
you're falling down the slippery slope, my line is specifically at Video Games.
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.
So according to you, playing a shooter game makes one a man-kid but watching an action movie doesn't? And if so, why?
There's a fairly solid argument you can make that both of these are man-child indicators. (Essentially, violent power phantasies as escapism).
But "violent power phantasies as escapism" can definitely take some very undisputedly adult themes. I do not see how these are "man-child indicators"?
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 all the employees of companies that work in this industry are not adults if they play ? You are targeting a specific fringe of people too broadly.
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