My age says I’m an adult but sometimes I think other people know more about being an adult than me.
Well I mean, we’re all just mostly LARPing this whole adult thing, right?
I’m in my 50s and actually still LARPing, and playing TTRPGs, and MMORPGs. No need to grow up for anyone else’s sake as long as you’re not harming others.
When I was little, I thought I would grow out of playing video games, as in I have a very specific memory of sitting in my 1st grade math class and just making that observation to myself. I was a 90s kid surrounded by baby boomer adults who largely were not gamers, so I just assumed one day I’d grow out of it.
On the positive side, I learned that you don’t have to give up your imagination when you grow up. I came up with elaborate make-believe worlds as kids are wont to do, and merely started adding lore and continuity and documentation when I got older. You don’t need to be writing a sci-fi novel or DMing a homebrew D&D campaign to do it, either. I worldbuild for the mere joy of pretending, or to dignify it with Tolkien’s words sub-creation.
I’ve been GMing “Tales from the Loop” lately and having an absolute blast with it! Everyone in the group is 40s-50s, but totally gets into it. Never stop “playing,” whatever that means to you.
Lightning bolt, lightning bolt!
I’m out of mana!
Pretty sure I was born LARPing being a kid too. I never made the very common presumption, when most(?) people are young, that adults (or my parents for that matter, religious indoctrination immunity) knew what they were doing. Perhaps I came across older than I was, and now the opposite is happening the more grey hair I get!
“When do I start feeling like an adult?”
That’s the neat part! You don’t!
Our parents were faking knowing what they were doing, just like we are.
Yup, everyone in the world is just winging it. Everyone.
I’m in my 40s and I still don’t get it. I keep asking myself when my life as an independent adult who has my own place to live and access to decent transportation will begin.
I feel like I came at this from another direction. In my twenties I cut my foot pretty bad on a rusty screw so I went to the hospital and got stitches. The doctor didn’t prescribe me an antibiotic and I foolishly thought “oh they’re a doctor, I must not need one!” I of course got a pretty bad infection within a few days that required me to be on IV antibiotics for several days. I’m lucky I didn’t need any debridement or worse. I learned through that experience that nobody knows what the fuck is going on and you cannot count on “adults” because we generally know fuck-all.
i strongly believe we have deluded ourselves as a society to associate natural human feelings with youth when they are simply how humans perceive and feel regardless of age. every single older person i ask if they feel their age says no. they all tell me they feel like they’re in their 20s at the oldest, some still teenagers. your body ages, you get wiser due to life experiences, but you don’t “become an adult” ever, because what we consider adulthood is a Western lie built upon capitalist standards and strict American individualism (if you’re in the US).
i don’t feel 36. i don’t know what that would even entail. i feel “younger,” but i don’t see it that way. i feel like a human being connected to his actual existence and acknowledging it rather than allowing it to be repressed because i’m too old for x y z. we are all young-minded permanently. that’s just how humans are. it isn’t reserved for the physically young.
Perhaps its because we assume a proportional relationship between ignorance and youth. But because its impossible to know everything we are doomed to feel ignorant frequently and therefore perpetually stuck in a state before the imaginary line between young and old
Nobody knows how to be an adult. Everyone is posing.
Adults are just large children. Accept this and move on. You will never understand anything, really. Those that seem to are just pretending.
There’s a reason terms like “man child” exist. And sayings like “boys never grow up”. 😂
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I feel like adding a positive experience to contrast the more negative comments (including my own). The summer I graduated high school was perhaps one of the best times in my life. I really, truly felt that I had my whole life ahead of me.
I spent all of June training with my first guide dog. The clearest memory I have of realizing I was finally an adult was when we were flying home after training. I was sitting at the gate, my new dog lying quietly under my chair, my feet resting slightly forward into the walkway to accommodate her, my head filled with future plans and possibilities. I thought about how I would provide a loving home for this carefully bred, meticulously vetted, and rigorously trained canine that this organization had entrusted me with. I imagined our first semester of college together. I hadn’t gotten into my first choice school or major but that was OK; I had a backup plan and was looking forward to it. A kid ran past me, pulling me out of my thoughts, then I heard his mother say “Watch out for that man’s foot.” That’s it. I was a “man” not a “boy” or a “kid” or a “child”. The world saw me as an adult. The future may not have turned out how I thought, but in that moment, I was exactly who I wanted to be, doing exactly what I wanted to do, exactly where I was supposed to be, and man it felt good.
It’s right around the time that you realize your parents were just doing the best they could and didn’t know how to “adult” either that you start to understand that you’re destined to do the same thing. We’re all just making it up as we go and hoping to do better than the previous generation. Generation after generation built upon the knowledge of iteration.
So yeah, mentally, I don’t feel significantly different than I have at any other time in the past twenty years, aside from knowledge and experience, but I also realize that I’m viewed significantly different by others, so you kind of have to act the part and fake it till you make it.
I’ve always felt like a kid and told myself I wouldn’t grow up.
Still the same. I think having a somewhat traumatized childhood also makes you want to live as a child freely again.
Also not having kids helps. I can do anything I want and make my own schedule.
I never understood boring old people. Ill be doing projects and having adventures until im 80.
I think having a somewhat traumatized childhood also makes you want to live as a child freely again
I call this the “very mature for your age” to “youthful energy” pipeline.
Totally, never had friends my age, they were always all older too. Always got along with adults when I was young.
You don’t have an insight into other people’s minds so you attribute their behavior and decisions to some knowledge you don’t have but they do.
This is a fake feeling caused by lack of information. Everyone is improvising life.Some reading as introduction to the cause of the phenomenon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_biasThis is a good and a bad thing.
There is no dividing line between when you’re young/middle aged/old. It doesn’t exist. I remember being 10. I remember being 20. I remember being 30. I remember being 40. I am still the same sentient entity I was at all those ages.
There is no reason to assign any “age group” to yourself. Be the age you feel inside.
Being an adult in the sense of being responsible, feel pretty good about. Pay the bills. Feed myself. Go to work.
Being an adult in the sense of having no fun, or tightly restricted fun, not so much. Still go see live music and play video games.
