The Reason Why I Feel Adulthood Is A Lie

I make it a point to trust no one who claim they have it all figured out. I really don’t- and that maybe why it’s a defining part of why I feel like I am somehow not an adult, still, at 25. Instead of that promised and lauded magical moment of arrival, the last few years of my twenties have resulted in a deepening sense of confusion and uncertainty in what lies ahead as a millennial adult.

Of course, there are adult aspects to my life - I have been in a steady relationship for the past five years, I hold down a steady job - I send Christmas cards… occasionally, but there is that numbing uncertainty I cannot shake, and to be very frank and honest I’m not sure, me nor my generation ever will. The world is just simply too weird now.

Compared to the baby boomer generation our parents belonged to, it seems as if many millennials are moving in slow motion. We are certainly marrying late, only half as likely to own homes as young adults back in 1975. Unfortunately, we haven’t just fallen behind the preceding generation. It’s about that relentless economics in which we came of age in, and that skepticism that economics has instilled in us. Does that refrain make no sense?

We have been sold on the idea, that getting a so-called ‘’good education’’ will set us up for success in the world. We could have everything our baby boomer parents had, if only we followed their example, and just pulled up our socks and got to work at it. They gave us the map to financial freedom, and many of us followed if only blindly, almost like mindless sheep led to slaughter.

It might have worked, if the price of that education didn’t become completely unaffordable, at the very same time unemployment rose from 5 to 10 percent.

Our income potential steadily declines yet our basic living experience don’t, and it is setting out generation back years from where we should ideally be in, from where our parents told us we would have been.

Recently, I met a girlfriend whom I haven’t seen since 2018, when we were both impressionable 18-year olds, and somehow everything and nothing has changed. Sure outwardly, everything seemed honkey dory, but that terrifying feeling of stagnation was everywhere.

With nothing where we would have imagined ourselves to be at professionally and in terms of personal growth, which was the hardest knock of all. We were both hustling for cash and side projects, while holding down seemingly good jobs- still waiting idealistically to ‘’arrive’’ whatever this means.

But what if this sense of adulthood, does not exist. It couldn’t be just the lone two of us who feel this way. We cannot be the only two people drifting in a hazy pre-adulthood mist. It’s my honest belief that a majority of us millennials feels as if that this fragile concept of adulthood is eluding us. As if, we are floating somewhere and nowhere between adolescence and adulthood.

‘’When do you think you will feel like an adult?‘’ I asked my friend hopefully, looking for some clarity.

‘’I don’t know‘’, she said. ‘’Maybe when I am like 40?’’

It was an arbitrary number, an open-ended question, because that is all it can be…