• As a teenager, I used to imagine that being in is 20s are when one would begin to be as adult as possible
• But I am in my mid-twenties now and that feeling has not registered yet
Image: PIXABAY
Do you know what I would pay a lot of money for? A manual. A manual for adulting in this day and age.
Just think about it.
A step-by-step guide to living in the 21st century as an adult who has to pay their own rent and buy their own food and other necessities.
We could say that that is the job of our parents and guardians.
We can learn from watching how they navigated being adults, or they could also tell us how they did it and offer advice.
As the name suggests, their work is merely to parent and guide us. The rest is up to us.
And that is the hardest part because sometimes, you really just want someone to hand you a book or very clear directions and guidelines that say you should be doing this at this point of your life, in this part of your story or journey.
The best we can hope for from our elders is advice.
Which is great because you can go very far with great advice in your life.
What I actually need is a manual that can be attuned to fit any situation that may arise in future.
I don’t mean to sound like some spoilt, slightly privileged millennial child, but my goodness, it is rough out here, and I do not know what in the world I am doing.
When I was a teenager, I used to imagine that being in one’s twenties is the time of your life, when one would begin to be as adult as possible.
But I am in my mid-twenties and that feeling has not registered yet.
In fact, the feeling that I get is that I am still a child pretending to be an adult.
Is that the general feeling of being an adult, or am I (and a few people I know) missing something vital that I should know?
Did our parents feel like that at any time when they were stepping into more serious roles in their lives?
Like husband or wife, or father and mother? I should probably ask them.
But I cannot imagine that my parents at any point in their adult lives felt ill-prepared for what is inevitably waiting for all of us young folk as we step further into our futures.
They just seem to have had a better grip or understanding of things they were supposed to do or be as they entered their adult lives.
I was ranting to a friend of mine (just like I am ranting to you in this article), whom I consider to be a little wiser than me, about this very topic, and she said the funniest thing I could imagine.
She said that a lot of us (I’m guessing our generation) are better at being adults in theory.
She said we have always had the privilege of being in the digital age, where we can find information on anything at our fingertips, on the Internet.
Not to mention that we were still a part of the 8-4-4 education system.
“What does 8-4-4 have to do with anything?” I asked.
“Well, most of what we did in 8-4-4 was cram theories so we could pass exams. Maybe that's why we feel unprepared for such practical things," she said.
And maybe she has a point there.