How None of Us Are Really Adults Until We Turn 36
Drawing on 500,000 interviews across age groups, this psychologist and author reveals the fits and turns that many of us take on the road of life
By Andrew Fuller
Once when I was conducting a workshop in Darwin, Australia, on life stages, an Indigenous elder solemnly informed me, “You won’t know your backside is on fire until you are 30 and you’ll have no idea how to put it out until you are 36.” I nodded sagely in an attempt to show I knew what she was talking about. It took me five years and another 500,000 interviews to figure out what she meant.
My book, Your Best Life At Any Age, distils 500,000 people’s life experiences into a roadmap of human life. What became clear during all my interviews was that different stages of life ask different things of us, and living a great life requires adaptability. Resilience is the improvisational art of integrating whatever life throws your way. One of the challenges presented to us, though less generally acknowledged, is our own development. We are substantially different people at different stages of our lives.
Most people spend a lot of their 20s flipping about trying to get a grip on life and forming fledgling ideas of who they are and what…
