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Comments (93)

• firtoz
  Archive link: https://archive.is/g3Bok
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  Tade0
  A friend of mine once said something that stuck with me:"There's a dearth of people who will do what's necessary without complaining."To me it's all about realising that there's work which needs to be done regularly, that no one else will do for you and also no one will thank you for doing.I've been happier since I realised this myself.
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  Nevermark
  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.
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  sethammons
  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.
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  AltruisticGapHN
  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.
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  cineticdaffodil
  A adult is a person poisoned by experience. The poison makes you capable to navigate the world easier, but the poison that is knowledge also inhibits and limits you. If you know more about the world or the future, you are less likely to have children. The more knowledge you have the more it limits your ability to move of the rails, do novel scientific discovery, etc. An adult is thus the most information poisoned person in the room, all others are in degrees lesser adult thsn him or her.
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  TheOtherHobbes
  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 accordinglyOn 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.
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  nly
  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.
• Barrin92
  As the article hints at the idea of an "adult" is closely tied to the structured, 'on rails' lifestyle of the industrial age. In rich societies people live on a linear track: vocation/uni, job, marriage etc.When I lived in China I met a (physically) older guy in his 60s at the time who had lived through the cultural revolution, spent 8 years on a farm, went back to school when the universities opened back up, started a business, then lost the business after various reforms, and had started work as a programmer in his 50s. He always said "when you're younger than 60 you can just start over" when he heard people in his 20s or 30s having existential angst.The guy had restarted his life over so often he genuinely still seemed like a curious kid, and I think that has a lot to do with just how chaotic and cyclical everything was, he was just used to it.And I think that's a pretty important lesson because the stable environment that makes people think they're finished adults by the time they're 25 is about to be over everywhere
• barrkel
  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.
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  Brajeshwar
  [Personal View] No, we never. We just learn to act in public.btw, https://archive.ph/g3Bok
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  firtoz
  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.
• vintermann
  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.
• whatgoodisaroad
  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
• gretch
  I'm ~30 years old and would like to plea to others in my generation: Please take the mantle of adulthood, whether you feel ready or not. If you do not, those who who have no 2nd thoughts about this will run our world into the ground while you sit on the sidelines pretending to still be an innocent child.* corporate billionaires don't think to themselves "am I really an adult?" * religious zealots do not ask these questions * Putin does not wake up and wonder that * Donald trump does not wake up and wonder that * netanyahu does not wake up and wonder thatYou have power in this world, whether you realize it or not. You can vote and talk to people and ask them to vote. You have money. You are big and strong and can move things in the physical world.With that power also comes responsibility. I'm not asking you to shoulder the entire world on just your own - but do your part.
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  antuneza
  You become adult when your parents die
• readthenotes1
  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.
• umm_sadiya
  In islam it's after the age of puberty.
• metalman
  there is no such thing as an "adult"there is indivual agency, which can be found and practiced, and lost and forgoten
• umm_sadiya
  In islam its when a child hits puberty
• saidnooneever
  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).
• booleandilemma
  Aside from the obvious legal definition, it's just a label meant to control you. Don't worry about it too much.
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  rf15
  I don't know, haven't really seen an adult in a long, long time.
• Vedor
  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...
• ardit33
  Never.... we are always changing, but looking at car accident rates:There are two periods where there are sharp declines: 19, and sometimes after 26, all the way to 35.https://www.hallandalelaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/IIH...If we assume, this is a indicator 'maturity', then the answer should be around 26-35, depending on the individual. It seems that the founding fathers were into something when the made the minimal age for a president at 35.There is a reversal at 75+, but this is due to age related issues. And my experience from the older folks in my life, it seems people start reverting to a 'teenage' like state at 75+.
• pazimzadeh
  when one of your parents dies
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  whattheheckheck
  When you realize where you stand in the political hierarchy
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  hmontazeri
  When we become parents
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  rrgok
  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.
• vswaroop04
  When you grow your wisdom teeth
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  dupaslonia123
  They say women are old by 30. And men are young till 60
• ReptileMan
  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.
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  taneq
  We become adults when we accept ultimate responsibility for everything.
• NoMoreNicksLeft
  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.
• axegon_
  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.
• treysu
  [dead]
• picsao
  [dead]
• hyi96
  [dead]
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  saltyoldman
  [flagged]
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  WalterBright
  You become an adult when you no longer need support from your parents or the government.