Grow up!
Karina Lübke As a child, she thought being an adult meant drinking coffee in the morning, alcohol in the evening, and deciding for yourself when to go to bed. Today, she considers water the most adult drink and dreams of going to bed early. A few thoughts on adulthood and growing up.
By Karina Lübke
I've been tall for decades, but never so grown-up as to immediately open a school-toilet-paper-gray letter from the tax office. Routinely, I put it in the back left drawer of the dresser and hope it will be dealt with on time without being looked at. If it were something important, a reminder would come anyway. Yes, of course this behavior is childish! After a brief relief, I then also feel ashamed in an age-appropriate way. Do I always have to feel like a life skills impostor? Would I ever embody the ideal of a real adult who, without crying, efficiently – yes, even with joy! – organizes the best internet providers, tariffs, and holiday homes, reads contracts completely before signing, schedules preventive appointments and even goes to them, manages her accounts and ETF funds profitably via app? Unfortunately, no one teaches you that in time: We learned not for life, but for school.
No, maybe not everything was better in the past, but growing up happened more inevitably. It was not yet a lifestyle that could be chosen or rejected at will, but a natural progression of biological adolescence. Being addressed formally was considered a social status symbol, makeup was meant to make you look older, not younger. By the age of 21 at the latest, there was no turning back until you got so old you became childish again. For their life path, the young adult at least still had fixed role models and verifiable developmental stages as a walking aid: education, permanent job, building savings contract, car, marriage, apartment, children, home ownership, retirement. Professionals helped carry the responsibility – the savings bank employee handled the banking, the post office the telephone connection. You didn't have to decide, do, and know everything yourself. Being an adult was indeed an extremely static status, but one with many securities.
Today, however, it seems like something you have to learn and practice constantly, like yoga: You can do it - but you don't have to. A lifelong second degree with constantly changing and increasing demands and challenges of the digital age. Viennese psychotherapist Katja Gley confirms: "One reason why young people today don't like to grow up or even show regressive behavior is that there are no longer linear biographies and role models. Nothing is predetermined anymore, for example, that as a man you have to be the breadwinner and as a woman a mother because society dictates it. This allows great freedom – but it also causes fear. This fear of 'which person am I, how do I want to be' leads to the normal separation aggression in puberty being prevented, which is needed to detach from the parents."
"Because adulthood is nice, but it takes an insane amount of work."
Because adulthood is nice, but it takes an insane amount of work. Americans have the untranslatable verb "adulting" (from adult), and it's something you consciously do rather than just being or at least behaving your age. On social media, #adulting is a popular hashtag: "I adulted so hard!" means, for example, having cooked your own food instead of buying a snack. Or renting your own apartment and even paying the rent yourself. Making your bed, cleaning your bathroom. Basically, feeling responsible for your life instead of just attaching a stable full of scapegoats to your inner child's room.
Thanks to better nutrition and living conditions, children reach puberty earlier but become adults much later than their parents and grandparents. The official age of majority is no longer the blind date with the seriousness of life: According to surveys, today's millennials worldwide only feel "truly adult" around the age of 25, as found in 2018 by an Australian research team led by scientist Susan Sawyer. The main reason is that the brain, especially the development of the prefrontal cortex, is only truly complete after about 25 years. It plays an important role in social decision-making processes and self-development, which is crucial for our actions and behavior—and thus the most important characteristic to call a person "adult." Accordingly, young people today marry later, move out of their parents' house later, and start their own families later than previous generations.
But you also have fewer and fewer reasons for it. I once longed for adulthood as a possibility of ultimate self-determination, but at home I didn't have the freedoms that teenagers today consider normal. Hardly anyone has to run away anymore to secretly make out or have sex: "Just bring her/him along, honey! I'll make you a nice breakfast in the morning." Parties, movie nights, or spontaneous overnight stays from friends? Doable! And of course, kids get the nicest rooms for that, bigger than the 12 square meters once considered child-friendly. Back then, only a desk and a single bed fit in, often bunked with a brother or sister. Those who wanted more physical and mental privacy had to move out. But who wants to voluntarily take on the responsibility of their own household and internet provider in today's uncertain world when you can conveniently enjoy the best parts of adulthood for free?
"In real life, therefore, it is the most boring and annoying thing to be a person who never wants to grow up"
Moreover, adulthood has a massive image problem. With today's youth cult, it is equated with old, clueless, unsexy, and boring. Hard to place on both the dating and job markets. "Don't grow up, it's a trap" is a highly liked meme. The fun generation fears that "responsible" is synonymous with "adult": The adult woman always carries a tissue. Takes apples, bread, and hard-boiled eggs on trips instead of buying something greasy by the roadside. Buys "responsible" functional shoes and jackets. Yuck! Better to emulate role models like Pippi Longstocking and Peter Pan, who never wanted to grow up. But they also didn't have to earn money. In real life, therefore, it is the most boring and annoying thing to be a person who never wants to grow up—especially for those around them. "Grow up!" women shout at men who once again "failed" to clean the kitchen or pick up the child from daycare. Not forever young, but forever childish.
The Viennese psychotherapist Katja Beran explains: "Not age, but the assumption of self-responsibility is an essential marker of adult behavior. Defiance, sulking, throwing oneself on the ground in a tantrum, blaming others for one's own misconduct, we rightly associate with immaturity." Also typically immature would be to remain stuck in childhood patterns in relationships instead of developing one's own adult role models: "For example, forever daddy's princess, who wants to be cared for and idealized, and withdraws hurt when that eventually no longer works."
So when is one at least adult enough? When one has moved out of the parental home? Earns one's own money? When one becomes a mother oneself? Or when the parents die, and no generation stands watch between one's own and death? When statistically one has more years behind than ahead? Or is the average human maturity enough, so that one does unfun things simply because they have to be done and one can do them? As a child, I was sure that adults had the big plan, the magical map with all secret paths through the crisis areas of life. And now I suspect: Not even that is true. Life is as uncertain as retirement, and adulthood is not an official end to childhood, like finishing school with a certificate at some point. We are all often clueless part-time old sages who nevertheless bravely get up day after day and do their job as adults, often without ever having the right qualification for it. Most only become eternal interns in that job, but hey, did one even apply for it?
The psychologist Pasqualina Perrig-Chiello from Bern has researched middle age: "Scientifically, middle age was a black box until a few decades ago; adulthood was considered a plateau of uneventfulness in terms of developmental potential." Just a hundred years ago, people would have lived to an average age of 48, and only the distinction between young and old was made. Today, middle age still leaves plenty of time for further development and self-reflection. That is a precious gift. For me, it now means increasingly reclaiming the authority to interpret one's own personality and life story. Becoming aware of it and then growing out of childhood conditioning and others' expectations. I am free to no longer confuse love with neediness, longing for security, or fear of being alone. Experienced and mature enough to take myself seriously but never too seriously. Self-determination does not simply come with age; it must be experienced and worked for. By now, I even think: Yes, I am an adult, and that's a good thing! For example, because no one can forbid you from binge-watching Netflix series, the modern form of "watching TV until your eyes get square." And some time ago, I was even mature enough to hire an even more mature tax advisor who opens my mail from the tax office for me.
Karina first studied design, earned a diploma in fashion, and then completed the Hamburg journalism school with Wolf Schneider. She then became an editor and columnist at TEMPO and later wrote freelance for several magazines. Her monthly column "Please Be Quite Hostile" in the magazine BARBARA has a large fan base and has been published as a book. In between, she got married and raised a daughter and a son. You can learn more here.
Her new book "Please Be Quite Hostile" is now available in bookstores. It's about guys and kids and childish guys, about politics, society, money, and good words. And about love – despite everything. This book compiles her best columns from the magazine BARBARA and contains new, previously unpublished texts.