A child knows the adult drink is coffee.
A teenager knows the adult drink is alcohol.
An adult knows the adult drink is water.
I like this and the “when you wish you were young” answers the most
Biologically: After pueberty.
Socially: Around 31.
Realistically: Never.
43, here. Based on anecdotal evidence I’m disputing your second statement, and confirming the third.
By the way, imma be a crane driver when I grow up.
My definition of an adult is simple:
“To be an adult, a person has to understand when it is appropriate to be childish”
Me: like right now! Look at that belly, I’m gonna rub it! Does it tickle, does it tickle? You can’t hold back the laughter forever!
The surgeon: sir please get out of the operating room
It’s a spectrum
When you are at the point where essentially everything in your life is up to you. You make the decisions, you deal with the problems.
Gen X kids were adults at 8.
My Gen X mother still isn’t an adult.
And that’s why many people never ‘grow up’. They refuse to take responsibility for themselves.
Blows my mind how many highly educated professionals in their 30s/40s think they are hapless victims and everyone else is the problem in their life. And they absolutely refuse to believe they have any power over their personal choices. As if the hand of god is forcing them to overspend, drink excessively, and otherwise hate their life.
I think my favorite is when they blame other people for ‘upsetting’ them by merely existing in a different way than they do…
Some never become adults, becoming an adult to me is self-realization. That you have the ability to think and make decisions with input on your own. That you are self-capable of change in your life. It’s accepting you have responsibilities outside of just yourself. I feel hat’s part of it.
Was about to say something similar. There’s no real moment. It’s not turning a certain agem it’s when you realize you are a sum of everything you’ve done, your faults and your wins. When you realize how silly you were as a teenager and are glad you’ve moved on. No date, but you’ll know when you already are.
A hat is definitely part of it!
A good, stylish hat helps certainly.
Never. There is no line to cross, no milestone, nothing.
You will always be the same entity you are now. You should always work to improve yourself, but the stream of consciousness that is “you” is always going to be the same you.
Every day you wake up 1 day older and have 1 more day of accumulated experience. It’s that accumulated experience that makes people think you’re an “adult”.
If you really absolutely need to assign a binary “I’m an adult” label, I think it’s the day you realize that there is no such thing as an adult and all the people you thought were adults and therefore could handle adult responsibilities were actually just making it all up as they went, the same as you are doing right now.
Well said. At this point in my life I can say I am an adult, but I can’t say when it happened. It was just a dawning realization one day, that was oh, “I’m the adult now.”
Apparently it depends on skin colour and the severity of the charges. /s
I think it’s when you decide it, plenty of children walking around in grown bodies paying bills but also letting the whims of the world carry them with their current never taking a stand and steering their own lives. To be an adult is both a choice to be free from undue influence but also to be fully responsible for your own actions.
When they start acting like it.
Which (to me) mostly means taking responsibility for their actions and taking care of the responsibilities they have.
Self-sufficiency, responsibility
I read somewhere that a parent’s job in life was to make themselves unecessary to their children.
Parent does everything for a baby, but as the child gets older a parent teaches them to do more and more stuff for themselves: getting dressed, tying shoelaces, reading, good study habits, time management, relationships, cooking, good financial practice, etc. Eventually the parent has nothing left to teach the child and is no longer necessary (though hopefully their company is still appreciated). That would be the point at which the child becomes an adult.
Or… is that the point when the parent (having now learned what it takes to make someone else independent) finally becomes an adult?
When they decide to
Maybe even a bit more every time they decide to.
Some bits of adulting are harder than other bits
When you are legally considered that in your country’s law. Any other distinction is fuzzy and unlikely to be really useful.
No guarantee that you are gonna be an adult once you reach a certain age treshold, though. There are many children in grown people’s bodies out there.
I’m lucky enough to be in my 30s and still have grandpa and his wife (my grandma by all accounts, but she doesn’t want to be called that because it makes her feel old). I was visiting with them recently and said “I still feel like a stupid teenager. I don’t feel like I’m an adult that knows what they’re doing, I’m just doing the best I can” and my 83 year old grandpa replied “sweetheart, I still feel like I’m in my 20s, I don’t think anyone ever really figures it out, no one knows how to be an adult”.
So i think the answer is: never
