Adulting isn’t real - or - Adults aren’t real.
Your Inner Child Called. They Wants a Refund.
Upfront: the contract you never read
Here’s the pitch: adulthood is sold to us like a fine leather briefcase. You’re told: Check the boxes—graduate, get a “real” job, marry or partner up, buy a house, maybe spawn offspring—and poof, curated, curated: you’re officially an adult. But that’s the deluxe edition, the “terms and conditions apply” fine print we skipped reading. In fact, modern psychology says that adulthood is far less definitive than the marketing. According to Megan Wright, Ph.D., the feeling of “being an adult” is “a psychological state, more subjective than ‘spouse’ or ‘parent’—and always in flux.” And according to R.A. Settersten Jr. et al., building an adult identity “is a process, not a discrete event. No single experience renders one an adult.”
So the leather briefcase? It’s paper-thin, maybe empty. The flame ethos of adulting? A poster on a cube-farm wall.
The Illusion: Where you are, and you’re still not “there”
This is where it gets deliciously pessimistic: We think once we’ve hit the boxes, adulthood happens. But research shows many adults still feel in limbo. From the Psychology Today article: “while older people felt more like adults on average … there were some participants in the older-adulthood group (60 years + ) who reported that they still didn’t feel like an adult all of the time.” Psychology Today
In other words: You might have the job, the rent, the taxes, the existential dread—but lots of us are still Google-searching “how to adult”.
What we have here is basically the classic “end-of-history illusion” in adult form: you think you did all the growing up, you think “this is it” and then… you’re still evolving. From the long study by Margie E. Lachman et al., younger and middle-aged adults showed greater illusion when projecting their future wellbeing than older adults did.
You expected adulthood to hit like an Uber confirmation—ding, you’re grown. Instead it arrives as an email you ignore.
Terms and Conditions: The hidden clauses
Clause 1 — “You’ll feel like an adult when…”
You’ll feel like an adult when you own property. When you hold full-time employment. When you stop crying over pickup trucks with other people’s names painted on the side. Guess what: none of these guarantee the feeling. The markers are outdated: marriage, parenthood, stable career—they’re delayed, rejected, or reinvented. The research says young people now use more “indeterminate and individualistic criteria” to frame their own adulthood. College of Health+1
So the contract’s clause is vague: “Adulting → feeling adult → eventually maybe.”
Clause 2 — “You’ll decide independently”
Great tagline until you realize: independence is a marketing myth. Financial dependence, emotional dependence, micro-decisions hinge on algorithms, rent prices, parental bailout checks, whatever. According to Settersten et al., “the quest for complete independence seems an illusion at best, and potentially destructive at worst.” College of Health
Translation: We’re sold self-sufficiency like a protein bar, but most of us are still stuck re-ordering battery apps.
Clause 3 — “No refunds. No returns.”
The fine-print: Once you step across the threshold, you think you’re in a one-way trip. But adulthood is not a destination—it’s an ongoing beta test. As one writer put it: “There is no grand transformation. No singular moment where you suddenly feel like the capital-A ‘Adult’.” Medium
In short: you signed up for “adult” and you’re still unpacking.
Why we keep buying the ticket
Because marketing never sleeps.
From cartoons, sitcoms, greeting cards: you reach 18, you’re an adult. The script is simple. But life rewrites the script into an all-weekend improv set.
Because it comforts us.
We want to believe we’ve arrived. Adulthood promises clarity, authority, direction. But as the Lachman study suggests, the more realistic we are about change, the more adaptive we become; the illusion of constant improvement may actually harm functioning. MIDUS - Midlife in the United States
So maybe we buy the briefcase hoping for satisfaction—and get a receipt for unresolved growth.
Because scanning the barcode is easier than reading the whole contract.
We click “I Accept” (metaphorically) and move on. But what we don’t read is that the vendor is you. The service contract is ongoing.
In other words: adulthood isn’t a download, it’s a subscription.
The dark humor of it all
Picture this: You're 32, you have a credit card, you picked “adult” as your meme tag. You’ve filled out the insurance form, you maintain your “responsibilities” (those little flaming demons). You tell yourself, “Okay, now I’ll feel it.”
And you don’t. Instead you feel the same petty anxieties you had at 17, but with a different font on the Camry.
Because the joke is: adulthood isn’t what you thought it would be. You thought you’d get a badge and now you get recurring bills, unexpected existential panic, and a subscription to “what the hell am I doing”.
You thought you were going to be the hero of your novel. Instead you’re the manager of the failing store of your own life.
I mean—here’s 2025: we’ve got folks with Ph.D.’s living with their parents, Internet fame and micro-influencing, and kids who declare never-marriage their new adulthood. The plot twist is: adulting isn’t real. Not in the way we pitched it. It’s just responsibility, yes—but unlatched from the “I’m grown now” moment.
As Wright points out: “Getting older doesn’t necessarily make you feel like an adult.” Psychology Today
Reframing: Maybe adulting is the joke we tell ourselves
What if we stop waiting for the “grown-up moment” and instead embrace the absurdity?
– Let’s recognise that adulting is more performance than ontology.
– Let’s acknowledge that the leap from “not adult” to “adult” is a mythic curve, fuzzy edges, footnotes.
– Let’s re-write the terms: your adult status comes with perpetual training-mode.
Because if you accept that adulthood is a process—not a point—you liberate yourself from the shame of not “arriving”.
You allow yourself to be flawed, alive, evolving—and maybe that’s the real adult move.
Final act: Terms & Conditions Apply (And You Haven’t Read Them Anyway)
You agreed to adulthood but didn’t read:
Clause: You will still Google “how to fold a fitted sheet” at 45.
Clause: You will multitask mortgage payments and existential dread in the same breath.
Clause: You will still feel like the universe’s intern even when you’re the hiring manager.
Clause: Your “adult self” might still party like your 21-year-old self-except now there’s leftover-pizza guilt.
So when you tell yourself: “I should feel like an adult by now,” remember: that’s the marketing line. The real truth? You’ll maybe feel like an adult when you stop checking the “am I an adult?” box—but when you do, you’ll discover adulting never ends.
The fine print in the bottom of that contract reads: Welcome to adulthood. Subject to change, updates, and existential audits.
And the only person you’ll call when the server’s down is—surprise—you.
So you might as well laugh. Because if you can’t laugh at your own Adult Fiesta, you’ll cry into the spreadsheet of your life.