Dear Fellow Recent Graduates, or How to Adult

“Even in this world of course it is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.”

C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (1953)

 

They definitely should not have let this kid graduate. He is totally not ready to start adulting. Thanks to sattva at freedigitialphotos.net.

Dear Fellow Recent Graduates,

Well, look at that! We made it! Actually graduating was, in the end, a rather anticlimactic moment, don’t you think? All that poring over books and furiously scribbling lecture notes and staring at blank screens desperately trying to arrange raw brain matter into something resembling a coherent argument as the deadline ticks nearer, and its culmination is the opportunity to don a silly hat and walk across a stage. All credit to my university’s Chancellor; he must have shaken hundreds of other graduands’ hands before mine, and yet he managed not only to avoid giving off an impression of being thoroughly entombed in tedium, but even to look genuinely pleased with me for my achievement as he congratulated me on having finished my degree. And nobody tripped over, either, so I suppose we can call the ceremony a success.

And now, friends, we enter the brave new world of Actual Adulthood.

Cue groans, gasps, grimaces, and perhaps an occasional bursting into tears or hiding under the nearest table.¹ Isn’t it simply loathsome, this idea of adulthood? Taking responsibility for one’s actions, having some level of competence demanded of one, making one’s own decisions – goodness gracious, could there be anything more detestable?

You may, bristling at my sarcastic tone, protest something to the effect of, “But I don’t know how to adult!” Your textbook example of the linguistic phenomenon known – rather pleasingly, in my opinion – as ‘verbing’,² articulates a familiar complaint. I’ve lost count of the occasions over the last few years when peers of mine have expressed a feeling of severe inadequacy to properly conduct themselves as fully-grown, of-age human beings. They have, they bemoan, a woefully insufficient understanding of the ins and outs of managing an income, a career, a home. Actual Adults prove their Actual Adulthood by knowing all about how to pay a bill, defrost a freezer, vote, uncork a bottle of wine, fill in a tax form, maintain a garden, decide on an outfit for an event pitched as smart-casual, and so forth. We studenty types, by contrast, are poor incompetent fools not ready for the big bad world of dealing with such responsibilities. In fact, I’m pretty sure I used to express some of the same sentiments myself, until it hit me that Actual Adults don’t know exactly what they’re doing either.

Contrary to what we may wish, my friends, there is no magic moment at which a knowledge of how to adult miraculously plants itself in a human brain. Just as shaking hands with the Chancellor and receiving a pretty certificate earlier this week didn’t immediately fit me for full participation in all aspects of the adult world, neither will any milestone so fit any of us, be it marriage, childbirth, home ownership, whatever. The way people figure out how to adult is through the practice of adulting. I think a lot of us have it in our heads that it’s somehow shameful to ask our parents how to do things like pay bills and defrost freezers and so on, that having to ask is merely proof of our dreadful, childish incompetence – but you can bet that the very parents we’re ashamed to ask (even though we always do) probably asked their own parents for the same information however many years ago, that that’s how they learned to do the thing in question. And then they practised, and over the years got better at it. Indeed, we these days are even better placed than our forebears for discovering basic principles of adulting: we have that whole repository of collective wisdom that we call the Internet at our fingertips.

“What, Google? But that’s cheating.” Is it? “An Actual Adult wouldn’t have to use Google. He or she would know without Googling.” Well, tell you what, Google the thing just the once, and then you’ll know how to do it, won’t have to Google it again, and, hey presto, will have attained to Actual Adulthood, in that particular sphere at least. After all, we’re only just starting out as adults. We can’t expect to be absolute pros just yet. We should be willing to receive knowledge from whatever sources it is forthcoming, instead of vainly yearning for our minds to spontaneously generate it.

It seems pretty evident that our real problem isn’t that we have no opportunity to learn to adult, but rather that we just don’t really want to try. Adulting is scary, and the fact is that we’ve found ourselves pretty well able to get away with not adulting for a very long time indeed. Almost every previous era of humanity, if not every (I can’t think of any exceptions off the top of my head, but that doesn’t prove there haven’t been any) would have had a good number, most likely a majority, of us married with children by now, and most of us would probably have been working for a living for years. But as life expectancy has skyrocketed, so has the plausible length of life’s childhood component. And so here we all are fooling around, dragging our feet, complaining at having to do what, if we’d had the misfortune to be born at an earlier stage of history, we’d probably have been forced to do a good while ago –doing away with childish things³ and taking up the mantle of the Actual Adult.⁴

My point is not, just to be clear, that anyone who has yet to tick off two or three life milestones of the marriage/childbirth/home ownership type is clearly Failing at Life; that would be rather hypocritical of me, to say the least. Nor is it that the world was a better place when child labour and child marriage were the norm.⁵ My point is that we should bite the bullet and come to terms with reality: we, my friends, already are actual adults, and we’ll get more out of being such if we start behaving like it, rather than shirking all major responsibility as we cling to the vestiges of a childhood we’ve frankly been privileged to have hung on to for this long.

It’s not as if being an adult is a particularly lame gig or anything. For one thing, childishness doesn’t have to go totally out of the window, as is evident enough from every time you’ve ever seen an adult playing with a small child, among other things – a marker, I think, of true maturity is the ability to gauge when childishness is appropriate (as per my opening quote) – but we get to ditch those annoying aspects like how horrible children can be to one another because they simply haven’t developed a social filter, and how excruciatingly much everything matters when you’re a child.⁶ On top of that, the benefits of adulthood are startling: we can manage our own lives now, set our own rules based on our own values. Certain factors, admittedly, will always be outside our control, but even though we can’t dictate, say, how much we earn, or who our boss is, it’s entirely up to us what we do with that money, and whether we want to continue working for that boss or would rather look for other opportunities elsewhere.

“Well, that’s all very well for you to say. You’re going to swan around as a perpetual student for the next four years. Most of us are confronted with rather less luck and certainty than that when we graduate, you know.” Granted. I’ll hold my hands up to the fact that I have been extremely fortunate indeed, quite extraordinarily so, in securing the opportunities I have – but I’m not trying to have a go at you from atop some imagined moral high ground; I just genuinely believe you’ll have a nicer time as an Actual Adult if you take the decision to admit that you are one and get on with learning how to perform adult-esque tasks as they are demanded of you, rather than hanging around in an odd sort of post-adolescent limbo because you don’t feel prepared for Actual Adulthood.

In short, we’ll never learn to adult unless we start actually trying. Want to know how to pay a bill? Ask your parents! Want to know how to defrost a freezer? Google it! Intentionally pursue the enviable status of Actual Adulthood that you imagine others to have achieved, rather than waiting for it to spontaneously befall you. Much as we’re human, and the making of mistakes comes with the job, there are, as any Actual Adult knows, many, many worse things out there than the following of an incorrect procedure for the defrosting of a freezer.

Friends, I really do wish you the absolute best in all your future endeavours. Happy adulting!

Yours sincerely,

Your Fellow Recent Graduate

Footnotes

¹ OK, so I’ve never actually encountered either of those last two reactions upon mentioning someone’s impending Actual Adulthood to him or her, but I sometimes think they’re not completely beyond the realms of possibility.

² The best thing about verbing is that the term is a result of itself: the noun ‘verb’ was verbed to create the verb ‘verb’, whence the gerund ‘verbing’. A fuller discussion of the use of verbing may be found here: http://grammar.about.com/od/grammarfaq/f/verbingfaq.htm.

³ I here allude to 1 Corinthians 13: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+13&version=NASB. (I’ve given you the NASB just because I preferred its phrasing of the particular few words I referenced; feel free to switch translations to something a bit less clunky.) It would be improper of me to use the section in question to back up the point of this post, because Paul is using the difference between childhood and adulthood as a metaphor for the difference between our current existence and the glorious existence to come, but it’s still a great chapter.

⁴ See also Just Do Something by Kevin DeYoung, which I talked about a bit last month in ‘Life in Tutorial Mode’ (box on the right-hand side if you fancy a look). Mr DeYoung argues that our generation are defined by being ‘tinkerers’, toying with this and that but unwilling to step up, take responsibility, and commit to something. I once again take the opportunity to highly recommend this book to any of you with decisions to make; 10ofthose, as usual, would seem to have the most competitive pricing one can get without lining the pockets of Amazon: https://www.10ofthose.com/products/642/Just-Do-Something.

⁵ As is still the case in some places: http://www.girlsnotbrides.org/.

⁶ Probably my favourite portrayal of this latter quality comes in the 1991 Studio Ghibli film Only Yesterday, recently re-released in an English-dubbed version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0ZrjocXVJ4. It’s a slow burn, granted, but a very beautiful one.