What marks the true boundary between childhood and adulthood? When does a person become a “grown-up”? Is it when they graduate college? When they get their first job? When they move away from home? Maybe when they get married? Or even when they become a parent? Different people mark the transition differently. There are some who seem to never grow up, who retain some irreverence and immaturity to their dying days. Other people grow up young, suckered in by the allure of money and gobbled up by the modern-day corporate machine. Their bank accounts (and more importantly, their lifestyles) grow, but their dreams atrophy. “Life gets in the way,” they might say, as they nurse a drink or binge-watch a show on Netflix.
When you were a child, if you were like most people in the First World, you probably had big dreams, high ambitions, and no patience for the future to arrive. After all, you were going to be (rich/famous/successful/influential/world-changing), and you couldn’t possibly wait! But the days and years did start to slide by, and the dreams stayed firmly in the realm of fantasy. The realm of “possible” shrunk down, down, down towards the path of least resistance. Slowly but surely, you packaged up some of the more extravagant dreams, mothballed them “for after I become financially stable”. And there they sit, right on the border between “someday” and “would be nice”. Squashed by a mortgage or a child’s daycare costs or a car payment or a pending promotion at work, the dream of being an astronaut or a rock star (or heck, even being financially independent) earns less and less mental prime time now that life has become a series of chores. Welcome…to adulthood.
Respectfully, I would like to propose a new definition of what it means to be an adult. Adulthood is that special mental place where a person’s expectations in life have adjusted to match their reality. When a person wishes for no more than a few extra weeks of vacation, or a small cash windfall to offset the credit card debt they’re carrying, or to lose ten pounds to fit in their old jeans, they have reached full-on adulthood. Once a person gets just comfortable enough to be complacent, when their dreams have deteriorated from “I’m going to be the President of the United States” to “I’m on track to be a Senior VP someday!”, then and only then are they truly an adult. Once a person has no fight left in them to change, because reality is too comfortable, and change is too hard, then they become a full-fledged grown-up.
Too often, the anger described in this quote from Fight Club is instead subsumed by a general discontent and ennui among young people in our contemporary society. The theme, however, of unfulfilled expectations rings truer in today’s world than ever before. Adulthood is when human beings “go gentle into that good night”, when they give up the struggle and the growth and the dreams they once held in favor of comfort and predictability. If we are not careful, each and every one of us is susceptible to this disease of the soul, this thing we call adulthood.
But…we do have a choice. Every day, we can commit a small act of childhood. A miserable daily routine (the hallmark of many a self-described “adult”) is just a series of unhealthy habits, and anyone can certainly change those. We can actively move towards accomplishing our deep-seated, innermost goals. We are never completely stuck until we believe that we are. As Dylan Thomas wrote in his oft-quoted poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night”, or in this case, that comfortable dusk where so many lives settle down for an unfulfilling and unexciting denouement. Instead never give up on the dreams of childhood, and “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
My wish for all of you is neverending childhood, where wonder and growth remain the norm all the days of your lives.