Millennials have essentially been forced into a perpetual teenagerhood by socioeconomic circumstance, we desperately want to grow up, and we’re worried that we’re running out of time to do so
interestingly, i feel like the opposite - i’ve grown up, unwillingly and unprepared to do so, and i want more time to figure my shit out before i’m ready to be seen as an adult. i’m almost 36.
Oh man, I know that feeling.
I’ve seen a lot of older people scoff at the word “adulting”, but pretty much everyone my age or younger that I’ve talked to about it knows exactly what it means and feels it keenly, and I wonder if on some level this is because many older people think of “adult” as just an age category - one you’re in your twenties you’re an adult, by definition, and so anything you do is “adulting”, also by definition. But to our generation and younger ones, there are a bunch of things we associate with adulthood; it varies based on culture, socioeconomic status, etc. but everyone I know seems to have at least one thing that they think of as an “adult” thing - maybe having a steady job, or owning a car, or having time to go big with your hobbies, or having the energy for activism, or raising 2.5 kids in a nuclear family with a white picket fence in the suburbs, or even just going grocery shopping regularly instead of “in a panic because you’re out of toilet paper” - that they not only don’t have, but can’t even really imagine having.
And so we need the word “adulting” so we can separate “doing the things adults are supposed to do” from “being old enough to be an adult”, because by age we’re obviously all adults as nouns but most of us can’t fully adult as a verb, so maybe we’re not actually adults? Or maybe we’re “fake” adults, because a REAL adult would have organized their life by now and would be adulting all the time with ease, because adulting is just, by definition, all the things you’d do if you were a real adult.
