Why I feel adulthood is a lie

Aparna Lay
Nov 8 · 3 min read

I make it a point to trust no one who claim they have it all figured out. I really don’t- and that maybe why it’s a defining part of why I feel like I am somehow not an adult, still, at 25. Instead of that promised and lauded magical moment of arrival, the last few years of my twenties have resulted in a deepening sense of confusion and uncertainty in what lies ahead as a millennial adult.

Of course, there are adult aspects to my life — I have been in a steady relationship for the past five years, I hold down a steady job — I send Christmas cards… occasionally, but there is that numbing uncertainty I cannot shake, and to be very frank and honest I’m not sure, me nor my generation ever will. The world is just simply too weird now.

Compared to the baby boomer generation our parents belonged to, it seems as if many millennials are moving in slow motion. We are certainly marrying late, and only half as likely to own homes as young adults back in 1975. Unfortunately, we haven’t just fallen behind the preceding generation. It’s also about that relentless economics in which we came of age in; and the skepticism that those economics have instilled in us.

We have been sold on the idea, that getting a so -called ‘’good education’’ will set us up for success in the working world. We could have everything our baby boomer parents had. If only we followed their example, and just pulled up our bootstraps and went to work at it. They handed us the map to financial freedom, and many of us followed if only blindly, almost like mindless sheep led to slaughter.

It might have worked too, if the price of that education didn’t become completely unaffordable, at the exact time unemployment levels rose from 5 to 10 percent. Our income potential too steadily declines while our basic living experiences don’t, and this is what is setting our generation back years from where we should ideally be in; especially from where our parents told us we would have been.

Recently, I met a girlfriend whom I haven’t seen since 2018, when we were both impressionable 18-year olds, and somehow everything and nothing has changed. Sure outwardly, everything seemed honky dory, but that terrifying feeling of stagnation was everywhere. With nothing at, where we would have imagined ourselves to be, in terms of professionalism and personal growth, which was the hardest knock of all. We were both hustling for more cash and side projects, while holding down seemingly ‘’respectable’’ jobs — still waiting idealistically to ‘’arrive’’ whatever this means.

But what if this sense of adulthood, does not exist? It couldn’t be just the lone two of us, who feel this way. We cannot be the only two people drifting in a hazy pre-adulthood mist. Its my honest belief that a majority of us millennials feel as if, this fragile concept of adulthood is eluding us. As if, we are simply floating somewhere and nowhere between adolescence and adulthood.

‘’When do you think you will feel like an adult? ‘’ I asked my friend hopefully, looking for some clarity.

‘’I don’t know, ‘’she said. ‘’ Maybe when I am like 40?’’

It was an arbitrary number, an open-ended question, because that is all it can be…