I conceded I had become an adult when I started scheduling regular dental checkups as opposed to waiting for something to start hurting, so, I vote for the pile of sampler-sized dental care products I’ve accrued over repeated visits.
A diaper bag. Having progeny doesn’t require maturity. However, planning for every likely and unlikely mishap, mess, and meltdown and then somehow fitting it in a bag and actually transporting one or more said progeny* is an art and a worthy exercise in attempted maturity. Even more so if progeny, diaper bag and you complete the trip in one piece and no one requires counseling in 15 years.
The exercise is still valid if you are borrowing someone else’s progeny.
I’ve modified my definition of adulthood so often and so much, I quit caring. Whether or not someone thinks I am an adult says more about them than me.
Are any of us ever really mature? What is an adult, anyway, when it comes down to it?
I posit that adulting doesn’t really exist, not because of some linguistic argument, but rather because we’re all pretending and no one is really an adult in the first place.
Who that you know would be a good choice to take care of things that require steadiness and responsibility and the ability to make good choices and act with intelligence and foresight while under continuous stress?
Who will accept a reasonable job, and be there and do it when required? Who will take care of things that need maintenance (including finances, families, relationships, careers, work)?
Who can both be open, and yet protect themselves?
Who has learned to walk away from, or walk out of, a bad situation, or defuse it and make itore positive?
Who can be honest and not get taken advantage of?
Who has learned to neither be a victim nor a hard ass?
Who do you want to have in your life when nothing is fun, nothing is gonna be very much fun for a long time, when your plans have crashed and caved in, when you blame yourself or everyone else blames you, when you have to start over, when you could use some help and bucking up?
Who can evaluate what’s going on and act in ways make things better?
Who has learned to defend themselves and theirs, when necessary, but not to over-react?
Who can do that, and yet not be closed off?
Who can keep going, taking care of themselves, and helping others, when everything is hell? When everything might be hell for a long time?
Who had learned to avoid being triggered or manipulated? Who can keep their head?
Who can do all that and carry some optimism, even in dark times, and still be good company?
Who doesn’t quit?
Who has excellent long term judgment and acts on it?
Who very rarely has to be excused or forgiven or tiptoed around or tolerated in spite of their conduct?
Who takes care of themselves and of things so well that their flaws don’t even move the scale (the scale on how competent and decent and honorable they are)?
Who ought you probably to thank (tho most of us probably haven’t thanked these persons enough), even tho what they have done for you and yours (and will do for you) is mundane and boring?
There is likely no such thing IRL as absolutely pure adulthood. Even the best of us only get part of the way.
But in general terms:. If you look around you with these filters, you know who the “effective adults” in your life are.
Not exactly fun, looking at self thru these filters. I kinda flunk a lot.
Ouch.
Well, hell.
It’s morning. Perhaps I can do something with today.
@f00l I correlate genuine empathy and the capacity for seflessness with emotional maturity, and consistently doing what you should do rather than what you want to do as psychological maturity. Everyone fails at these sometimes, and most people succeed at them at least occasionally. But I know lots of people who are biologically adults but can’t meet these criteria on a regular and reliable basis.
I thought the capacity for empathy, compassion, and selflessness were included under the “taking care of relationships” listing, but I could have been more explicit.
To me, taking care of oneself and one’s family/familiars/friends/community includes empathy and a great degree of selflessness, or it’s fake and hollow, or mechanical, or authoritarian. Good acts then may become defined as GOOD because an authority says so.
Persons and relationships that lack empathetic intuition are likely to be shallow, or dogmatic, or habitual, or greatly avoidant of intimacy. Often likely to include little deep knowledge of each other. Likely to include and rest upon many surface assumptions. Without empathy, people’s horizons and perspectives don’t get.challenged to expand and transform; or they do so only in theoretical or habitual, and often in rigid or simplistic ways.
I think the need for empathy and responsible dedication to giving of oneself are kinda a “goes without saying” act, as the necessity for emotional reaching out is or ought to be so deep a human imperative.
I suppose, as long as I was going to pontificate, I should not have left it as a mere included assumption, tho.
(Since so much current public conduct carries deep empathy; and also, unfortunately, so much public conduct appears to lack empathy or decency, and appears to sneer at the very imperative of prerequisite empathy toward others.)
To me. without empathy, there is little in the way of genuine intellectual or emotional honesty or honor; and little in the way of good conduct that can be as sure if itself as humans can be in their choices.
And there are internal risks to oneself, for any who do not seek to extend their own capacities for empathy. Risks for the “soul”, so to speak.
Risks of thinking one knows and understands things; when one actually might exist, by choice, but without self-acknowledgment, emotionally and intellectually, within a “closed loop” of assumption/conclusion-stasis and confirmation-bias-driven worldviews.
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Atticus Finch, To Kill A Mockingbird
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”
Obvious source.
(use of this quote does not imply commitment to any particular religious POV)
@f00l My post wasn’t in conflict with your post, just my own synopsis of how I define these things. I came to that belief that empathy is a measure of maturity when I was a kid, it seemed to me to be a defining characteristic of those who were on the path to becoming adults versus those who seemed stalled in kid-dom. Half a century of observing human behavior has not disabused me of the notion. My measure of psychological maturity only came into focus when I observed how different my own perspectives were from those of my peers in my early 20s. I’ve always been the practical, planning type, an ant in a sea of grasshoppers. But I have friends and acquaintances pressing on 60 who’ve never had a more concrete or secure job than driving pizza or day labor, who still rent under the table month to month and couch surf between places, who live on food stamps and the kindness of friends and family, who have no savings and no kind of provision for the future. They are one misadventure from homelessness, have been thus their whole lives, and despite having all the resources necessary to carve themselves a safe harbor, have simply slacked and stumbled their way through their whole lives. It’s genuinely confounding to me.
“As long as we’re being semi-serious”. I’m not very good at being anything else, lol.
Planty of successful people who plan and strategize have empathy and compassion and generosity, but some successful think-ahead types notably do not.
Even some who self-advertise or self-present as having empathy appear to actually barely possess it.
(A few televangelists and persons of public “moral” renown who are, In their own versions of themselves, the final authorities on all, come to mind. These are often willing to say publicly that they are ethical authoriIties on everyone luves, to say it without embarrassment.)
Other successful people simply have publicly laudible personas; and nasty, bullying, manipulative private selves that those close to them tiptoe around.
OTOH, the irresponsible friends such as those you describe, tho they may be delightful, often do lack empathy.
Or are so crippled or disordered in some other way (anxiety or depression or a severe dissociative disorder? Or lack of impulse control?) that they may possess empathy min-to-min at times, and be terribly generous in some ways, but they can’t pull themselves together, and they can’t bear to bring themselves to terms with the costs they impose in others.
So they may avoid empathy because they feel so hopelessly incompetent and unable to change that they fear they cannot afford to face the truth.
Or they may simply not want to know.
Hard so say. And I’m no psychologist or social worker. Zero training.
But I suspect that lack of empathy is coupled in those people with other issues a psychologist or social worker might get a handle on. I don’t know if there is effective treatment. And if the is, it depends on the individual really wanting it and wanting the result.
I know of some people so crippled by fear/anxiety that they can’t get close to people, can’t get close to themselves either (ie little insight).
They pretend. They make excuses. They know they are doing this. They don’t knows how to stop. Or do things another way.
Some of them are very responsible. Others are far closer to being barely competent. None are at ease with themselves. None know how to escape the fear, anxiety, misery. All have huge issues.
Our species is a complex pile of possibities, good and not so good.
Where are you finding the complete series of Once and Again on DVD? As far as I know the third season was never released. But it was a really good show.
@cranky1950 do you mean the undergarments I buy for my dad when they go on sale at Costco? Hey, how come I never see Depends here on meh.com? Now that would be a coup!
i chose the tools, but only because for me that means i am staying somewhere long enough where i’ll at least need a screwdriver to put something together and/or repair something at some point. the times where i didn’t have tools and/or wasn’t concerned about getting some, were definitely not examples of me living life as an adult.
that said, that’s only my metric. i don’t necessarily think someone without any tools isn’t an adult. i also couldn’t think of any other good answer. i don’t plan on having kids, so that’s out. neither do we plan to get married. having our own house would be nice, but unlikely to ever happen. i have ‘real’ glassware and dishes, but i have adult friends who don’t cook and just eat food out of take out containers or on a paper towel once the food is produced from the toaster or microwave. they’re still adults. i was going to say paying your rent and/or mortgage on time, but not every adult has a home, and even those with homes get kicked in the balls by life sometimes, and are still adults. no clue what ‘once and again’ is.
@jerk_nugget I chose tools for the same reason, but truly think the IRA probably wins… the whole planning ahead thing seems “adultish”. (FTR I don’t have a Roth IRA, just a 401a)
@IWUJackson i agree, planning for the future - even if it’s just later this week vs. solely being “in the moment” is definitely a mark of “adulting.” i shied away from financially related stuff though as i don’t care for the stigma that those without money must have acted frivolously/immaturely.
In the maternity ward where my eldest was born, there was a poster that said “only a baby can turn his father into a man and his grandfather back into a child”
Looking back, it was having to care for a helpless child where I first really noticed how selfish I had been and how responsible I now had to be.
(And now that child is getting married next month. Yikes!)
@f00l I have on good authority from my mom that old isn’t until you are 104 (she had, several years ago, made the comment she couldn’t believe she was old enough to have kids as old as we all are so I asked her how old do you have to be to be old) thus @rockblossom may have as many as 40 more years to go before being old, thus adulthood just setting in seems about right (grin).
Just because one is an adult does not mean they are psychologically mature…
@mflassy i often say “they can make me be an adult, but they can’t make me be a grown-up”
Never using “adulting” in a sentence.
@oppodude
Can I use it in a fragment or run-on, then? /s
@oppodude
+1
Never uttering the syllables “a”, “dul”, and “ting” in series is a pretty good start.
@InnocuousFarmer
So you’re taking all the fun out of making fun of “adulting”?
Nice adulting there, buddy.
@f00l I wouldn’t say all the fun. business is fun.
/giphy vincent business
Never speak of this again.
Would any of us actually know?
Who among us has actual experience?
@f00l I saw a tweet about it once
@f00l
@kittysprinkles would know.
Keeping stuff charged.
@thismyusername especially all your Bluetooth speakers…
I conceded I had become an adult when I started scheduling regular dental checkups as opposed to waiting for something to start hurting, so, I vote for the pile of sampler-sized dental care products I’ve accrued over repeated visits.
A diaper bag. Having progeny doesn’t require maturity. However, planning for every likely and unlikely mishap, mess, and meltdown and then somehow fitting it in a bag and actually transporting one or more said progeny* is an art and a worthy exercise in attempted maturity. Even more so if progeny, diaper bag and you complete the trip in one piece and no one requires counseling in 15 years.
Got most of those things. Don’t call me mature pls. Nanny nanny boo boo, I can’t hear you!
I’ve modified my definition of adulthood so often and so much, I quit caring. Whether or not someone thinks I am an adult says more about them than me.
A dolt may drive an old vehicle, but always has good TIRES.
Adulting seems like such an odd word.
Just kidding.
Are any of us ever really mature? What is an adult, anyway, when it comes down to it?
I posit that adulting doesn’t really exist, not because of some linguistic argument, but rather because we’re all pretending and no one is really an adult in the first place.
@Durago
Who that you know would be a good choice to take care of things that require steadiness and responsibility and the ability to make good choices and act with intelligence and foresight while under continuous stress?
Who will accept a reasonable job, and be there and do it when required? Who will take care of things that need maintenance (including finances, families, relationships, careers, work)?
Who can both be open, and yet protect themselves?
Who has learned to walk away from, or walk out of, a bad situation, or defuse it and make itore positive?
Who can be honest and not get taken advantage of?
Who has learned to neither be a victim nor a hard ass?
Who do you want to have in your life when nothing is fun, nothing is gonna be very much fun for a long time, when your plans have crashed and caved in, when you blame yourself or everyone else blames you, when you have to start over, when you could use some help and bucking up?
Who can evaluate what’s going on and act in ways make things better?
Who has learned to defend themselves and theirs, when necessary, but not to over-react?
Who can do that, and yet not be closed off?
Who can keep going, taking care of themselves, and helping others, when everything is hell? When everything might be hell for a long time?
Who had learned to avoid being triggered or manipulated? Who can keep their head?
Who can do all that and carry some optimism, even in dark times, and still be good company?
Who doesn’t quit?
Who has excellent long term judgment and acts on it?
Who very rarely has to be excused or forgiven or tiptoed around or tolerated in spite of their conduct?
Who takes care of themselves and of things so well that their flaws don’t even move the scale (the scale on how competent and decent and honorable they are)?
Who ought you probably to thank (tho most of us probably haven’t thanked these persons enough), even tho what they have done for you and yours (and will do for you) is mundane and boring?
There is likely no such thing IRL as absolutely pure adulthood. Even the best of us only get part of the way.
But in general terms:. If you look around you with these filters, you know who the “effective adults” in your life are.
Not exactly fun, looking at self thru these filters. I kinda flunk a lot.
Ouch.
Well, hell.
It’s morning. Perhaps I can do something with today.
@f00l To be honest, I was just playing on the idea that many people often have doubts about their own maturity.
@Durago
(Thought your remarks might be a joke.)
I don’t have doubts.
I have very little adulthood, compared to expectations.
Unfortunately, that’s not entirely a joke.
But I still try at it.
@f00l I correlate genuine empathy and the capacity for seflessness with emotional maturity, and consistently doing what you should do rather than what you want to do as psychological maturity. Everyone fails at these sometimes, and most people succeed at them at least occasionally. But I know lots of people who are biologically adults but can’t meet these criteria on a regular and reliable basis.
@moondrake Try or try not. There is no should.
@moondrake
As long as we’re being semi-serious:
I thought the capacity for empathy, compassion, and selflessness were included under the “taking care of relationships” listing, but I could have been more explicit.
To me, taking care of oneself and one’s family/familiars/friends/community includes empathy and a great degree of selflessness, or it’s fake and hollow, or mechanical, or authoritarian. Good acts then may become defined as GOOD because an authority says so.
Persons and relationships that lack empathetic intuition are likely to be shallow, or dogmatic, or habitual, or greatly avoidant of intimacy. Often likely to include little deep knowledge of each other. Likely to include and rest upon many surface assumptions. Without empathy, people’s horizons and perspectives don’t get.challenged to expand and transform; or they do so only in theoretical or habitual, and often in rigid or simplistic ways.
I think the need for empathy and responsible dedication to giving of oneself are kinda a “goes without saying” act, as the necessity for emotional reaching out is or ought to be so deep a human imperative.
I suppose, as long as I was going to pontificate, I should not have left it as a mere included assumption, tho.
(Since so much current public conduct carries deep empathy; and also, unfortunately, so much public conduct appears to lack empathy or decency, and appears to sneer at the very imperative of prerequisite empathy toward others.)
To me. without empathy, there is little in the way of genuine intellectual or emotional honesty or honor; and little in the way of good conduct that can be as sure if itself as humans can be in their choices.
And there are internal risks to oneself, for any who do not seek to extend their own capacities for empathy. Risks for the “soul”, so to speak.
Risks of thinking one knows and understands things; when one actually might exist, by choice, but without self-acknowledgment, emotionally and intellectually, within a “closed loop” of assumption/conclusion-stasis and confirmation-bias-driven worldviews.
Atticus Finch, To Kill A Mockingbird
Obvious source.
(use of this quote does not imply commitment to any particular religious POV)
Pls forgive.
@f00l Holy Shit
@cranky1950
Please forgive.
It all depends on depends, ya know.
@f00l that’s one of the best adulting descriptions I’ve seen in awhile good sir, I wish I would have seen it earlier.
@seraphimcaduto
I only wrote the longish “part two” an hour or so ago?
If you could have seen it earlier that that, then I wanna learn your technique!
Thx.
I spout drivel sometimes.
I pretend it’s a genetic thing, so I won’t have to cop to zero self-rdiscipline.
Glad someone finds some use in it sometimes.
PS. I suck at adulting. Seriously.
Need to kinda walk the walk.
@f00l My post wasn’t in conflict with your post, just my own synopsis of how I define these things. I came to that belief that empathy is a measure of maturity when I was a kid, it seemed to me to be a defining characteristic of those who were on the path to becoming adults versus those who seemed stalled in kid-dom. Half a century of observing human behavior has not disabused me of the notion. My measure of psychological maturity only came into focus when I observed how different my own perspectives were from those of my peers in my early 20s. I’ve always been the practical, planning type, an ant in a sea of grasshoppers. But I have friends and acquaintances pressing on 60 who’ve never had a more concrete or secure job than driving pizza or day labor, who still rent under the table month to month and couch surf between places, who live on food stamps and the kindness of friends and family, who have no savings and no kind of provision for the future. They are one misadventure from homelessness, have been thus their whole lives, and despite having all the resources necessary to carve themselves a safe harbor, have simply slacked and stumbled their way through their whole lives. It’s genuinely confounding to me.
“As long as we’re being semi-serious”. I’m not very good at being anything else, lol.
@moondrake
Planty of successful people who plan and strategize have empathy and compassion and generosity, but some successful think-ahead types notably do not.
Even some who self-advertise or self-present as having empathy appear to actually barely possess it.
(A few televangelists and persons of public “moral” renown who are, In their own versions of themselves, the final authorities on all, come to mind. These are often willing to say publicly that they are ethical authoriIties on everyone luves, to say it without embarrassment.)
Other successful people simply have publicly laudible personas; and nasty, bullying, manipulative private selves that those close to them tiptoe around.
OTOH, the irresponsible friends such as those you describe, tho they may be delightful, often do lack empathy.
Or are so crippled or disordered in some other way (anxiety or depression or a severe dissociative disorder? Or lack of impulse control?) that they may possess empathy min-to-min at times, and be terribly generous in some ways, but they can’t pull themselves together, and they can’t bear to bring themselves to terms with the costs they impose in others.
So they may avoid empathy because they feel so hopelessly incompetent and unable to change that they fear they cannot afford to face the truth.
Or they may simply not want to know.
Hard so say. And I’m no psychologist or social worker. Zero training.
But I suspect that lack of empathy is coupled in those people with other issues a psychologist or social worker might get a handle on. I don’t know if there is effective treatment. And if the is, it depends on the individual really wanting it and wanting the result.
I know of some people so crippled by fear/anxiety that they can’t get close to people, can’t get close to themselves either (ie little insight).
They pretend. They make excuses. They know they are doing this. They don’t knows how to stop. Or do things another way.
Some of them are very responsible. Others are far closer to being barely competent. None are at ease with themselves. None know how to escape the fear, anxiety, misery. All have huge issues.
Our species is a complex pile of possibities, good and not so good.
Where are you finding the complete series of Once and Again on DVD? As far as I know the third season was never released. But it was a really good show.
A Roth… and spreadsheets. Glorious spreadsheets!
Shoes that are comfort-first, looks second.
Having a can of whipped cream in your fridge that you can take out and spray directly into your mouth and nobody yells at you.
@Kidsandliz I bet your cats give you the hairy eyeball
@duodec They come running at the sound and start that whinny cat demanding meow.
Does having sheets from this site qualify for “decent”?
@wmbarr define decent.
@wmbarr I believe that counts as “descent,” as in the descent into madness.
Depends
@cranky1950 on what?
@cranky1950 do you mean the undergarments I buy for my dad when they go on sale at Costco? Hey, how come I never see Depends here on meh.com? Now that would be a coup!
@cranky1950 It’s a purposely ambiguous answer that works any way it is interpreted.
@cranky1950
I knew what you meant.
Depending.
@hac Now that would be a crappy item here. Actually that would be an item for their “casemate” site…
@f00l No, in casual speech it is often left out. Meh I’m explaining, it’s lost any mojo there was, I going for more coffee.
@cranky1950
Dependable coffee.
i chose the tools, but only because for me that means i am staying somewhere long enough where i’ll at least need a screwdriver to put something together and/or repair something at some point. the times where i didn’t have tools and/or wasn’t concerned about getting some, were definitely not examples of me living life as an adult.
that said, that’s only my metric. i don’t necessarily think someone without any tools isn’t an adult. i also couldn’t think of any other good answer. i don’t plan on having kids, so that’s out. neither do we plan to get married. having our own house would be nice, but unlikely to ever happen. i have ‘real’ glassware and dishes, but i have adult friends who don’t cook and just eat food out of take out containers or on a paper towel once the food is produced from the toaster or microwave. they’re still adults. i was going to say paying your rent and/or mortgage on time, but not every adult has a home, and even those with homes get kicked in the balls by life sometimes, and are still adults. no clue what ‘once and again’ is.
@jerk_nugget It was a lousy poll they obviously have a state university communications major intern doing these lately.
@jerk_nugget I chose tools for the same reason, but truly think the IRA probably wins… the whole planning ahead thing seems “adultish”. (FTR I don’t have a Roth IRA, just a 401a)
@IWUJackson i agree, planning for the future - even if it’s just later this week vs. solely being “in the moment” is definitely a mark of “adulting.” i shied away from financially related stuff though as i don’t care for the stigma that those without money must have acted frivolously/immaturely.
A Roth is something I can definitively say I have.
Is a 60-piece computer screwdriver kit reasonably complete? And how about if I have a decent buckwheat pillow, a couple of blankets, and no bed?
Oh well, I’ll always have my Roth.
In the maternity ward where my eldest was born, there was a poster that said “only a baby can turn his father into a man and his grandfather back into a child”
Looking back, it was having to care for a helpless child where I first really noticed how selfish I had been and how responsible I now had to be.
(And now that child is getting married next month. Yikes!)
@smyle The first kid is definitely a slap upside the head. Unless of course it isn’t then child services gets involved eventually.
Paying one’s own bills. Having to shell out for rent/mortgage, car insurance, gas, food, and basically supporting yourself indicates maturity to me.
@Shadow210 And having to deny yourself a purchase that you want in favor of either purchasing a necessity or just flat saving the money for later…
How do I word this
I’d say an apparatus that a female could strap on to assume the male machinations during the act of animal instinct.
Minors or the innocent rarely think of or use such tools.
@meh427 Agreed. That’s what being mature is all about!
One’s own washer and dryer, making laundromat trips unnecessary.
A hook hand and an eyepatch.
@ThomasF
Haha. Nice
being able to eat a chili dog and cake whenever the fuck i want.
@carl669 No, that’s turning 18
@cranky1950
Thought that was “having a part time job or an allowance” plus transportation.
Elementary school for some.
How about a credit score over 700?
Possessions don’t make anyone mature. It might make you an adult, but not mature.
@RiotDemon Well neener neener!
I’m gonna take my possessions and go home then.
a bidet
A Medicare card.
@rockblossom
You are a true optimist about the universal onset of early-appearing adulthood.
@f00l I have on good authority from my mom that old isn’t until you are 104 (she had, several years ago, made the comment she couldn’t believe she was old enough to have kids as old as we all are so I asked her how old do you have to be to be old) thus @rockblossom may have as many as 40 more years to go before being old, thus adulthood just setting in seems about right (grin).
An investment portfolio (not the leather one you carry).