Modern Adulting

I know I wrote about adulting a couple of years ago, but there’s a recent trend of blaming your parents for everything that’s wrong with you, so I thought I’d look at modern adulting.

I had to look it up again… According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Adulting is

the act or practice of attending to the ordinary tasks required of a responsible adult.

Some people might look at my gray hair, old fashioned sense of style, and devil may care attitude, and assume I know what I’m doing. That I have, as we say, got my shit together. That I am successfully adulting…

But, you know what?

The truth is, I’m just making this shit up as I go.

The truth is, my mother was making it up as well.

And her mother too. And so on down the ancestral line.

Every generation faces different life events which shape the way they approach raising their children.

My grandparent’s version of modern adulting

My grandparents lived through the First World War and the Spanish Flu epidemic. Just when things were looking up. along came the Great Depression.

I can’t say they thought of it as adulting, but their key focus was finding work, so they could put a roof over their heads, food on the table, and buy medicines as required. They set their stiff upper lips, and just got on with the issues that faced them.

My parents version of modern adulting

My parents grew up in the shadow of the Lost Generation. Post Traumatic Stress, the great man drought, and the Great Depression. Followed by the Second World War, and eventually their own version of stiff upper lips.

For Dad, drunkenness, and for Mum, the need to protect me by knowing where I was, who I was with, and what I was doing all the (bloody) time.

My version of modern adulting

My parents dealt with their past trauma by literally moving away from it. We lived in what at the time was a semi-rural location. My childhood was sheltered; we didn’t have a TV, the bus service wasn’t good, and there was next to nowhere to go anyway.

When I was a kid, I wanted the freedom to do what I wanted, when I wanted. Which was mainly to stay up late, eat shop cakes and biscuits, and buy new clothes.

Now, I’m a grown up, and I still want to stay up late, I don’t really care about shop cakes, though I still like to buy new clothes.

Modern adulting per se

So, to go back to the definition; doing the “ordinary” tasks of a “responsible” adult.

The obvious (to me) are tasks like buying proper food, paying the mortgage, doing some half-arsed sanitation.

But, there are a tasks a modern adult takes care of that were unimaginable in my youth.

For example, paying your bills and getting letters electronically, checking in with your international friends on social media, trying to decide what’s true in advertising and what’s not.

We’re all working that out at the same time, and I don’t think it’ll be that long before I get left behind. I’ll become a cautionary tale about what not to do. How embarrassing.

Then there are some life changes we couldn’t conceive of either, like the near impossibility of finding full-time, permanent work, affordable housing you don’t have to share, and “real” nutritious food.

It’s hard, and it’s not fair, but now there are more younger people than older, so they’re in the best position to change the political agenda for their benefit.

Anyway, we can’t teach younger generations to do things we don’t understand. All we can do, is teach them the resilience and critical thinking to work it out for themselves.

Though it seems we haven’t exactly done a very good job of that either.

Future Adulting

Young people aren’t the only ones wondering what’s to come. Or kicking at the every day stagnation of a daily life that seems more like a laps in the rat race than a fulfilling life.

Are we all doing when we should be being?

Are we moving too fast when we don’t know which direction we ought to be heading in?

Perhaps young people are more comfortable sharing their feelings for a global audience (don’t want to see my upcoming YouTube recommendations) than us with our stiff upper lips. But do they talk too much when they should be acting?

Or thinking?

And do we think too much, or too little? Or are we so enmeshed in our ruts we can’t even think anymore?

So, I’ll say it again. I’m not sure any of us know anything about modern adulting. We’re all just making it up as we go along.