Successful Adulting for Grown Up Kids
Adulting is not about following a pre-conceived timeline of milestones. It’s about living a fully-aware, responsible life in the context of social and personal responsibility.
I left for college at 15.
Living alone for the first time, I learned to take care of “adult” things — staying sane, buying groceries, doing laundry, making tight ends meet.
It wasn’t easy. I sobbed and I longed for my mother’s arms. Daily survival was a challenge, and it was aggravated by my being a stupid teenager.
Once, I was walking hand-in-hand with a secret boyfriend who attempted to take my virginity a few nights before. It felt like I was in a wrong place on earth.
Fast-forward to the present: I’m turning 24 in less than two weeks. I’ve been adulting for quite some time. I have a steady job in an office, life insurance, government numbers. I’m renting a furnished apartment. I am holding on pretty tightly.
“Pre-adulting” in my teens and “officially adulting” in my twenties aren’t essentially different — I’m still naive to some degree, I still make awful mistakes, and I still don’t know what I’m doing sometimes.
What separates the two from another (or what makes a person a considerably responsible adult and not just some post-adolescent human being with money to burn) is a profound awareness of the pillars of adulthood, namely: financial independence, physical independence, emotional independence, and self-actualization.
Let me break it down.
Money: The Survival Currency
In the wee hours of the morning, at about 1 or 2 in the morning, a round of applause roars in the production floor — salary has been credited to our bank accounts. Unlike most people I do not participate. I keep to myself and log in to my payroll account to see how much I earned.
I open a spreadsheet, which was recently created for budgeting purposes, and input salary from office work. I have a breakdown of “deductibles” with labels such as: rent, savings, insurance, daily expenses, weekend trips, some “thing” I want to buy, family support, and so on.
In a different time in my life, I would take salary from the ATM right away and and spend as much as 70% of it in one week. I would then make ends meet by living off cheap meals that you feed to the poorest of the poor and cut down my cigarette consumption. On some occasions, I would ask a friend for lunch money because it didn’t make it to payday hour. I was living paycheck to paycheck; partly because I wasn’t earning much to begin with.
There was also this one time when I spent what was supposedly food money on alcohol, because I was extremely upset that my boyfriend didn’t sent me a message for an entire day.
You’re adulting in a smart way when you know the value of the money you spend.
I know of people who spend ridiculous amounts of money on transportation because they’re disgusted by public vehicles. For them, it’s smart spending because the money is put to “good use” for their own “comfort”. The same goes for those who apply for auto loans because they just want their own ride and prefer not to sit in traffic with common people during commute. I understand and respect them as we all perceive the value of money in different ways, so we spend it in different ways, too.
What we’re aiming at here is financial independence. Knowing that you’re in control of the way money goes through your hands is a good sign that you’re adulting the right way. It’s not about how much you earn but how you spend. The key here is control.
If you feel like money is just “slipping out of your hands” every payday, there’s two things you need to do to help it: 1) Earn more money, 2) Live within your means.
Adult Territories: Physical Independence
Imagine being thirty years old and still living and being fed by your parents/guardians/friends. Unless you were born with a disability or a special condition that’s preventing you from contributing to society or to your household as a full-fledged adult, you’re excused.
Don’t get me wrong: It isn’t bad to live in a shared household with friends, co-workers, or even family. I’m also not saying that getting your own apartment or buying a house/condo makes you “officially” an adult. It is your perception of and responsibility for your physical independence that marks a genuine entrance to adulthood.
Let me tell you another story.
I rented my first apartment when I was twenty-one. At the time, I was seeing someone who lived in the city, so I was like, “I’m gonna get an apartment in the city so we can see each other more often. Also, so I can go to rock concerts and gigs regularly.”
I strategically chose a location near his area. The location of my job and ultimately the company I chose to work followed after this. To cut the story short, he was ever in my apartment only once before our affair ended. I lived with another person after this affair, and in two more apartments, but that’s for another story.
Not every twenty-somethings who “has their own place” is in fact an adult with brimming wisdom and courageous independence to solely do laundry and clean bathroom floors filled with grime over the weekend. Sometimes they just need a place to conduct totally shitty pseudo-adult stuff like sex, drugs, and pizza.
If you’re getting a place of your own, let it just be a mark that you are independent and you aren’t anybody’s burden but yourself.
Emotional Independence: Checking-In Yourself into a Psychiatric Facility as Needed
In my emotional roller coaster as a person diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder, here’s one thing I learned: nobody else is going to help me sort out my emotions except for myself, plus maybe a psychiatrist and some meds.
With all the responsibility that we take as adults — excel in our jobs, manage finances, meet other people’s expectations — getting burnt out isn’t rare. To cope, we tend to overspend, hook up, do drugs, and maybe write a suicide letter.
I came to a point where people basically described me as a black hole that “exhibited negative vibes” and a previous supervisor told me that I was endangering the psychological safety of the workplace.
A concerned friend pointed out that my status posts on social media were “too telling” and beyond what is socially acceptable.
I’d been judged for casually talking about death while I was in the workplace.
Once, I cut my arm, took a bloody picture of it, and sent it to a friend as a means of asking for help, or maybe to exhibit self-pity.
Emotions aren’t just things that we “experience as humans” and wild emotions aren’t just a product of stress.
When you’re adulting, you have to learn how to manage your emotions like you manage time and money. There’s a proper way to react to things on an emotional level.
This one’s pretty easy. Let me talk about psychologically normal people for example. Even if they’re going through something difficult, they can still act professional, not take it on other people, and basically not be assholes or black holes that suck optimism out of people, unlike me.
If you are an emotionally independent person, you have a deep understanding of how your emotions work and you are able to keep control. Going the other way around, it is also important to know how to step back when people provoke you — or seduce you. Not going into great lengths, but yes I’m also talking about sappy romances that don’t really make sense.
Self-Actualization: The End of All Means
If you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, then you must have a good idea of what this is all about.
Self-actualization needs are geared towards self-fulfillment, for you to accomplish as a unique human being with a true, deep understanding of yourself. These include your passions, aspirations, or just plain old hobbies that make you feel like you’re actually living a life.
How does this relate to adulting, you might ask?
Imagine working in your professional career till the age of 65. You have saved up for retirement, you have a three-bedroom home in the suburbs, you have a nice car, your family is financially and emotionally secure, and you have a happy wife and grandchildren on the way.
Now ask yourself a serious question: What have you done for yourself?
If your answer is basically the things that I listed above, there’s good chance that you might have just been no less than a cog in what is called the Capitalist Machinery. Congratulations, you just worked your ass off for the majority of your life for the system.
But don’t get me wrong — some people aspire to establish nothing beyond wealth/family/religious life, and that is fine. There goes self-actualization for them; they knew what they wanted in life, and they got it.
Let’s look at other examples. Some women have an ultimate goal in life to become a housewife and give birth to eight kids — that is fine. There are men and women who work 18 hours a day as company CEO’s and happily die young, knowing that they’ve established a legacy and changed the world — that is fine.
These people have been doing it for themselves all along — and you can only guess how they lived as responsible adults in the first place.
It is easier — and more delightful — to proceed with adulting if you’re geared towards the end of self-actualization. If you’re burnt out at work because you’re doing what you hate, you’re adulting the wrong way. If you’re just going about this world and are turning out okay, externally, but deep inside don’t know what you really want — come on, you can do better than that.
You are not eleven years old. If you are old enough to get a job or rent an apartment, then you are surely old enough to know something about yourself and recognize the things that make you happy — start to build your life from there!
Adulting is not about following a pre-conceived timeline of milestones. It’s about living a fully-aware, responsible life in the context of social and personal responsibility.
A misconception about adulting is that it’s about following a socially prescribed timeline of what you “need” to accomplish and learn at a certain point in life. We even set standards as to how a proper adult is supposed to function within a society. “Adult”, as a word, even connotes certain behaviors and characteristics that are related to pre-conceived notions.
When Robyn Davidson crossed the great Australian desert with her camels just because she felt like it, we couldn’t say that she wasn’t adulting the right way. Same thing goes for starving artists who live for art, basking under the sun and living off small dollar bills (heard of Ed Sheeran’s story?). On the other hand, The Wolf of Wallstreet, Jordan Belfort, would appear to be an awesome adult in terms of establishing the points I mentioned above, but would you consider his adulting style acceptable?
We have our whole lives to figure out this whole adulting thing. It’s a process — no rush, whether you’re a twenty-five year-old entrepreneur building a startup, a thirty-year old woman who’s on her tenth customer service company, or a sixteen-year-old freshman saying farewell to her parents.
