The Soft Launch of Adulthood
Ten years ago, looking up the word “adult” in Merriam-Webster yielded two simple results: an adjective and a noun. You wouldn’t think much about the definitions provided, either. “A person above a certain legal age” and “fully developed animals or humans that have reached maturity” are standard, clean, and completely normal definitions of what being an adult entails. But fast-forward to 2023, when the entry was updated to include a new definition: “adult” as a verb and to adult is to “attend to the ordinary tasks required of a responsible adult.” This reflects a shift in the way the new generation thinks about growing up.
The term “adulting” was widely popularized in the mid-2010s by young adults who found that their road to adulthood was far less set in stone than the paths of the generations before them. The stepping-stones that used to define adulthood, moving out, getting a driver’s license, getting married, owning a house, and having children, now feel more like mirages on the horizon, almost impossible to reach. Nowadays, these traditional markers are increasingly being removed from the definition of adulthood, turning it into a delayed, gradual, and ambiguous process that can follow many storylines. But what does this shift mean for those of us just starting to adult? And what can we do to inspire a fulfilling adulthood for years to come?
Finding Yourself
To live the life of a young adult is to live a life full of uncertainty. It is a fundamental fact of nature that, in the rocky uncertainty of your early twenties, you will need to work to define and redefine yourself at least half a dozen times over.
The stepping-stones of adulthood used to act as crutches in this process. They offered a way to put yourself in a box and build the foundations of your identity. Being married with two children and a house in the suburbs makes you a wife, a mother, and a homeowner, giving you the chance to identify and connect with other wives, mothers, and homeowners. These milestones therefore played a much larger role than mere life events; they shaped the major pillars of our parents’ identities and communities.
To a certain extent, they also informed the way people thought and acted. Being a “good wife” comes with a bundle of expectations that dictate how one should act, think, or feel, just as being a “good mother” or a “good homeowner” does.
These milestones also provided direction. A twenty-year-old in the 1950s could look at a thirty-five-year-old with the stability of a nine-to-five job and the happiness of a picket-fence family and see a dream worth pursuing. They could also see all the plot points they needed to reach that dream: get a job, find a partner, get married, have children, and work toward retirement. It was simple. The milestones told you not only who you were but also who you were going to be, or who you could be if you followed the script.
When these milestones disappear, it is not simply a matter of carving your own path in life. Their disappearance also removes much of the structure that used to define the foundations of a person’s identity. Now, without these clear markers, we are free to invent our identities from the ground up. This, of course, comes with its ups and downs.
On the upside, we now have greater freedom to carve out lives that actually feel true to us. The “adulthood special” that was sold to our parents’ generation came with stability and security for those who wanted to follow it, but life was much more difficult for those who did not. Many people followed the adulthood roadmap simply because there were few other options, and deviating from it came with very real socioeconomic consequences, especially for women, queer people, and anyone who wanted a life that did not fit the mold.
The erosion of these expectations now allows us to question what we actually want in life and make decisions that prioritize our happiness. Some people are delaying marriage, settling down, or having children simply because they can choose to do so. These are not failures of adulthood; they are proof that life does not have to be defined by capitalist pressures but can instead be shaped into whatever form you see fit.
But this freedom comes with very real costs. Our generation’s coming of age reeks of uncertainty. “I genuinely have no idea what I’m doing with my life” is a sentiment heard around the world as young adults everywhere grapple with a future that seems more uncertain by the minute.
This instability is exhausting to live with and can lead to arrested development. While some people delay the milestones of adulthood by choice, many others do so because they simply cannot reach them, do not know how to reach them, or feel that they are out of reach. We are part of the most information-rich generation of all time, yet it feels like everything is beyond our control. How is it possible to build a life on such shaky foundations?
The problem is worse than simply not having a blueprint or roadmap to follow. For many young people today, there is no future they can even imagine. Whether political, economic, or environmental, an overwhelming number of catastrophes have been predicted for the coming decades.
Committing to a career, a partner, or a neighborhood in which to own a house requires trust in a future that is similar to or better than the present. But when the entire world reinvents itself every few months, when new technologies create and destroy jobs every day, and when wars can destabilize the economy overnight, why would long-term planning seem like a logical decision?
This pushes many young people not to think long-term and instead to live their lives “seeing where things go.” After all, when your entire life has been marked by the world reinventing itself over and over again, until you physically cannot imagine what the world will look like five years from now, what else is there to do?
A Return to Our Roots
That said, in these dire times, I think the greatest solution to this problem is to return to our roots. Not the roots of 100 years ago, with their marriages and pristine picket-fence ideals, but the roots that run deeper than that. The ones that have followed us for millennia and still seep into our bones today: the innate human desire to overcome.
It is so easy, within this wretched political and economic climate, for us to lie on our backs and wave the white flag, accept our helplessness, submit to unfulfilling lives, and believe that we are simply incapable of being adults. But as humans have done for the past three hundred thousand years, we must continue to persevere despite everything.
The redefinition of “adult” from an adjective and noun to a verb gives us the freedom to shape our adulthoods into lives that fulfill us from the inside out. But we have to try to do so. We cannot succumb to the pitfalls of arrested development and simply watch as the prime years of our lives pass us by.
There are no more milestones and no more roadmaps, so it is up to us now to write our own rules and build our own stories. And yes, it is hard! The odds are stacked against us. But we cannot lose the belief that we can rise above them and carve out lives that are rewarding and gratifying, whatever shape those lives might take.