Ask Lemmy

I often think of this SMBC comic. It left a deep mark for me and it came out over 13 years ago.

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

We are all faking it, we don't have a clue what we are doing. Some are aware of it, some are not.

Just pretend you know what you're doing. Eventually you'll forget you're pretending.

I’ve felt like an adult since I was a child.

For me it was after both of my parents had passed away. There's something about losing the people who could still see and treat you as their child, no matter how old you had become, that changes things. I do still feel like I'm waiting to be a grow up sometimes. My great grandfather lived to 101, and still often felt that way. But once the "adults" who raised you are gone, you find yourself out in the open and may have to admit that you're the adult now.

I don't know how to be an adult, but I know how to be a person.

I'm almost 30 and just starting to feel like a kid.

I've had to be an adult since I was 10 but getting sober and having my first kid really brought me back to life. We play with a hotwheels track that we call car thing, we wrestle everyday, we have jam sessions where we switch instruments so for half of it I'm playing a tiny piano. When I buy clothes I let him help me pick stuff out and most of it's from thrift stores so my outfits have gotten very funky.

He also makes doing adult things more fun, we do everything together so he helps me with house work. There's the shark vacuum, the carpet cleaner turns the floor into lava, laundry basketball, we cook dinner together. My favorite is making pizza dough with him, it takes longer to clean up than it does to make the pizza but it's a blast.

When I started saying "I can't do that, I'm an important guy with shit to lose" I became an adult.

Well I mean, we're all just mostly LARPing this whole adult thing, right?

I know I'm mature. I know I'm put into positions of responsibility. I still feel like a teenager.

Our parents were faking knowing what they were doing, just like we are.

I just realized the other day that one sure fire mark of adulthood is buying a vacuum. Nobody makes you buy a vacuum and you're not going to die without one. Nobody really wants to buy a vacuum. It's just something you have to do at some point. It's a willful decision to spend your hard earned money on something that's essentially a chore. Because that's what a responsible adult does.

"When do I start feeling like an adult?"

That's the neat part! You don't!

I have kids myself, but I don't feel ashamed of letting them know that I don't always have the answers or that sometimes I like to jump the trampoline for fun.

Adults who seem like they know everything and act responsible all the time actually seem "juvenile" in my opinion.

They don't really get it, you know? Like they got to that level of life by following expectations and then stopped developing past that and just keep trotting along. Some people get stuck there while others "soften up" when they get grandchildren and less responsibility or whatever.

People mature in different paces, but the whole "being grown up" is definitely just an optional phase.

I worked for a guy in his 90s who felt this way.

I started feeling like an adult at about age 30. But 20 years later I still don't feel that different than I did in my 20s.

Im not quite there yet, but literally everyone feels this. You know what you know and you don't know what you don't know. Being an adult is figuring out how to distinguish between the two. If you're able to recognize that something isn't in your breadth of knowledge and you're able to consult with someone else who is more educated on the subject matter OR you're able to self-educate before applying your ignorance, then that makes you an adult in my eyes. Or at least is a large part of the bigger picture.

Adults are just large children. Accept this and move on. You will never understand anything, really. Those that seem to are just pretending.

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.

No, I still feel like an adult. I just feel like I'm still 24 (I'm 50)

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.

Yes, definitely

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.

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.

When I turned 18 and my grandmother was in her 80s, she told me, "I still feel exactly like I did when I was your age."

I asked if that meant she was frustrated by how slowly she moved (she used a rollator by that point), and she confirmed it did.

You'll never really feel like an adult, but your body will keep on aging anyway. And you'll never really get used to that, either.

Nobody knows how to be an adult. Everyone is posing.

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.

This 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.

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.

Many of the traits of childhood are wonderful and you should cling to them. Sense of wonder and curiosity, goofiness, don't take yourself too seriousky, adventure, physicality, etc.

I think I get what you're saying, that sometimes one wonders if relative to some of your peers of you're "achieving" enough. That's a trickier question because some introspection from this is good.

• Are you truly content?
• Is your future somewhat secured? (forward-thinking with finances, career, health). Or are you doing the more reckless Yolo teenage thing? (this aspect of being a child, especially if one has kids, I'd say isn't good lol).

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.

No, I don't feel like a real adult 😅

But I suppose I try to remember lessons I've learned and avoid the same mistakes where possible.

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_bias

I'm almost 50 and had to look up DAE 🤷 It turns out that it is an abbreviation for 48 meanings!

I figured it stands for Does Anyone Else but what has clearly changed as I grew older is, how tired I am of abbreviations