On Embracing Adulthood
By: Diego Contreras
Tags: Politics, Adulthood, Culture, Values, Growing Up

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I’ve realized that you can be old without being mature, and that you can be old without being an adult

Your age isn’t an indication of how you’ve developed as a person. It might actually be misleading. It doesn’t imply whether you’re able to shoulder the responsibilities that are ideally asked of adults in the world.

I haven’t quite understood some of my peers for this reason. (I’m talking about the people my age and younger who seem to own most anti-adulthood hashtags on Twitter. My friends and real life acquaintances have indeed embraced adulthood and are moving forward with their lives). The general theme with these people online seems to be that adulthood is something worth delaying, that we shouldn’t embrace the responsibilities of older age.

This turns any minor adult task into a burden, and everything becomes a joke that fits under the umbrella of #AdultProbs. It’s strange, really. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes along with adulthood, but having the independence and freedom to make decisions for yourself, and knowing that you can support yourself through a career and intelligent decision making should feel empowering, not limiting or worth denouncing.

I won’t pretend that I’m fully matured, or that I came to my senses as quickly as I should have. I spent too much time partying in college and definitely could have been more intentional, but I’m not sure how the sentiment lingers for so many people. There’s a beauty that we get to contribute to our societies and communities through the responsibility of maturation, starting families, raising children, and contributing to those around us in ways only healthy adults can. I want to make sure I’m doing all I can to grow on track for these things.

Senator Ben Sasse wrote The Vanishing American Adult, which I haven’t read but have ordered. He’s a senator, but the book’s issues aren’t about politics. They’re about the aspects of adulthood that are non-partisan and surely we can all get behind. According to a reviewer on Amazon, he says there are five ways to make a claim on adulthood:

Overcome peer culture. Work hard. Resist consumption. Travel to experience the difference between need and want. Become truly literate.

They all seem rather obvious, but they’re a practical starting point for how to inch closer toward maturation. All these tips could apply to people of any age. Numbers three and five are especially useful when we think about how we conduct ourselves.

Consumption often leads to debt or addiction, and being truly literate isn’t as common in our society as it once was. It only takes a few viewings of a man on the street from Jimmy Kimmel or a news outlets to realize how little Americans know about our world and history. The odds that many of us have read the classics are even slimmer.

It of course isn’t the case that all young people aren’t maturing sufficiently enough. There are many that are. And it is fair that we all have different timelines. Some of us are more prepared to be married or have children than others, and some of us wait. I’m not against that waiting. I think parenting is the greatest responsibility we’ll likely ever have and we should be absolutely mature enough for the job when we start it. (That includes picking the right spouse.)

But I am against not actively working toward maturation and not actively cleaning up the areas of our lives that will make us better adults and citizens. How many of our problems could be solved and how many less fights would we have on Twitter if people had their homes in perfect order before they criticized the world? How much more principled would most of our elected officials be if they too were adults?

For this reason I appreciate the premise of Sasse’s book. Young or old, our society is often aimed at consumption, a lack of being truly literate, and we use peer culture (popular culture in this instance) as our example for how we should conduct ourselves. Those five ideas for how to make a claim on adulthood are spot on.

I’m not the first person to point out that the classical virtues of ancient societies and philosophers aren’t as present in us, and I surely won’t be the last. It’s also fair that there will always be a part of society that embody them and a part that don’t. But I do agree with what seems to be something Sasse is getting at, that as a culture we can do better at promoting the classical values. It’s a much better solution than spending our time fighting online.