How to Be an Adult

When you google “how to be an adult,” most of the results focus on preparing for job interviews, managing your finances, cleaning up after yourself, and not being a total asshole.

These things are all great, and indeed, they are all things that adults are expected to do. But I would argue that, by themselves, they do not make you an adult. They simply prevent you from being a child, which is not the same thing.

That’s because most people who do these things do them because they are rule-and transaction-based. They are a means to some superficial end. You prepare for a job interview because you want to get a good job. You learn how to clean your house because its level of cleanliness has direct consequences on what people think of you.

You manage your finances because if you don’t, you will be royally fucked one day down the road. Bargaining with rules and the social order allows us to be well-functioning human beings in the world.

Eventually, though, we realize that the most important things in life cannot be gained through bargaining. You don’t want to bargain with your father for love, or your friends for companionship, or your boss for respect.

Bargaining with people into loving or respecting you feels shitty. It undermines the whole project. If you have to convince someone to love you, then they don’t love you. If you have to cajole someone into respecting you, then they will never respect you. If you have to convince someone to trust you, then they won’t actually trust you.

The most precious and important things in life are, by definition, nontransactional. And to try to bargain for them is to immediately destroy them. You cannot conspire for happiness; it is impossible. But this is often what people try to do, especially when they seek out self-help and other personal development advice—they are essentially saying, “Show me the rules of the game I have to play, and I’ll play it,” not realizing that it’s the very fact that they think there are rules to happiness that is preventing them from being happy.

While people who navigate life through bargaining and rules can get far in the material world, they remain crippled and alone in their emotional world. This is because transactional values create relationships that are built upon manipulation.

Adulthood is the realization that sometimes an abstract principle is right and good for its own sake, that even if it hurts you today, even if it hurts others, being honest is still the right thing to do. In the same way that the adolescent realizes there’s more to the world than the child’s pleasure or pain, the adult realizes that there’s more to the world than the adolescent’s constant bargaining for validation, approval, and satisfaction. Becoming an adult is therefore developing the ability to do what is right for the simple reason that it is right.

An adolescent will say that she values honesty only because she has learned that saying so produces good results. But when confronted with difficult conversations, she will tell white lies, exaggerate the truth, and become passive-aggressive. An adult will be honest for the simple sake that honesty is more important than her own pleasure or pain. Honesty is more important than getting what you want or achieving a goal. Honesty is inherently good and valuable, in and of itself. Honesty is therefore an end, not a means to some other end.

An adolescent will say he loves you, but his conception of love is that he is getting something in return, that love is merely an emotional swap meet, where you each bring everything you have to offer and haggle with each other for the best deal. An adult will love freely without expecting anything in return because an adult understands that that is the only thing that can make love real. An adult will give without seeking anything in return because to do so defeats the purpose of a gift in the first place.

The principled values of adulthood are unconditional—that is, they cannot be reached through any other means. They are ends in and of themselves.

There are plenty of grown-ass children in the world. And there are a lot of ageing adolescents. Hell, there are even some young adults out there. That’s because, past a certain point, maturity has nothing to do with age. What matters are a person’s intentions.

The difference between a child, an adolescent, and an adult is not how old they are or what they do, but why they do something. The child steals the ice cream because it feels good, and he is oblivious or indifferent to the consequences. The adolescent doesn’t steal because he knows it will create worse consequences in the future, but his decision is ultimately a bargain with his future self: I’ll forgo some pleasure now to prevent greater future pain. But it’s only the adult who doesn’t steal for the simple principle that stealing is wrong. And to steal, even if she gets away with it, would make her feel worse about herself.

Excerpt from Subtle Art of not giving A f*ck By Mark Mason