There are tasks and chores my parents used to do on my behalf that I now do myself, like making money, paying taxes, handling health insurance, etc. I guess those make me feel like an adult.

But then there are milestones I thought I would have hit by now that I have not, mainly concerning family life. No kids, no partner, nobody to take care of but myself. If I wanna go out and party, or stay in and play video games all weekend, there’s not really much to stop me. That makes me feel immature.

I had to borrow money from the bank this year to buy a car. That made me feel too adult and kind of drove me into a crisis.

Congratulations, that worry is you being an adult

In my experience, pretending you know what you’re doing is what being an adult is.

School/experience is getting enough background to fake it without blowing anyone up in the process.

Being a good adult is taking responsibility for the things you did without knowing what you were doing.

What finally made me feel like an adult was raising a teenager. Any last semblance of youthful energy and optimism I had was destroyed between 15 and 18 years old.

Feel like? Maybe not. Accepted? Maybe.

More often than not now, I find myself having to be the adult in the room. My father recently died, and while my parents both have wills sorted, they didn’t have other things like power of attorney sorted, or a real discussion of what his funeral arrangements he would like. It was not a sudden death. That was a turning point for me.

I guess that’s where I’m at, I’ve accepted I’m an adult. I’m losing backstops, but also becoming other people’s backstop.

I don’t feel like an actual adult. I feel like I’m pretending to know what I’m doing.

That’s the first step. The next step is looking back on your “mundane” adult accomplishments:

• Finding and negotiating your housing
• Making sure you (and possibly your family) are maintaining basic nutrition
• Managing your finances well enough that the first two are not in imminent danger
• Navigating though various “adult” BS such as contacting a bank or merchant about a process or payment in error, and chasing it through various channels until its resolved.
• Identifying your next need and the starting point for how to go about getting it resolved.

Then you glance to your left and your right and see some of your peers doing magically better, but more importantly you see a chunk of your peers not able to accomplish anything in the list above. You see what you now recognize is your growth and maturing and their lack of it.

The second step is to realize that you are indeed an adult. This is what being an adult is. The situations change, the difficulty in scope or scale increases, but its variations on what you’ve done before and the second, third, fourth…hundredth iteration aren’t as hard as your first attempt in your early adulthood.

You realize that there isn’t a single defining threshold you crossed at some point in the past where you went from “kid” to “adult”. You also realize that some people make it all the way into their 60s and 70s without ever becoming an adult.

i stopped growing at around 24 years of age

Depends on the point of view I’d say.

• I pay bills
• I deal with requirements and assumptions the society puts on me as a grown-up citizen who brings better tomorrow closer through hard work
• I deal with hardships of my life through thinking, writing about them, cooperation, diplomacy, listening and discussing even difficult topics - also within my relationships
• I embrace the consequences that my actions may bring
• I try to rationalize my thoughts of the world
• i try to be a decent example to kids and other folks

.

• I’m goofy, playful and childlike (you should see my behavior with my girlfriend)!
• I enjoy small, “nonsense” things and they cheer me easily up
• I’m generally relaxed of life
• I get easily (over-)excited
• I am an energetic person
• People assume I’m younger via my habitus

.

So I guess I am and am not, in certain ways.

Nope. Not at all. I have just a vague Idea what Im doing.

Yes. I’m 43, married to my college sweetheart, we have three boys, a house in the suburbs, own a business, take care of my family, and am responsible for everything. Becoming completely independent of any outside help is part of it. Having others that depend on you to handle anything that comes along is the next part. Becoming an adult isn’t a switch, it’s a gradient. Having kids definitely catapults you along, though. I don’t know how grown up I would be right now if I were unmarried and childless, but I’m guessing less so. Above all else, becoming responsible for an entire family is the thing that did it for me, and even that was a gradient.

Not once in my 45 years.

Just turned 30. I have a house, a kid and a wife. I still don’t feel like an “Adult”

Me (41yo) asked my dad (74yo) Me: Dad, when does that adult thing of knowing what you are doing kicks in? Dad: When I find out, I will let you know.

Feeling like an actual adult is feeling the way you always have, but going to bed earlier and waking up with a pressing need to pee, but having to oil your joints like the tin man before you can move.