I’m a little fixated on what I must look like.
I’m probably a lady these days (gradually approaching 30) but I don’t think I’ve mentally aged since 18. I rent a mouldy flat, have a car full of satsuma peels and can’t work out how many jobs I have. My most recent attempt at gardening involved digging a big hole and sometimes I accidentally dress head to toe in bright yellow. In my head I look like a fun-loving young person but the team at Tesco have stopped IDing me so I probably just look my age.
When am I going to grow up?
I’m not the only one to ask myself this question, they call Millennials the Peter Pan generation. We do kind of fit the bill: less willing to stay in work when not motivated, a tendency to dabble and a reliance on longshot dreams. Then – when stuff gets difficult or boring – we go on a workaway in the South of France…
But if you see Millennials as a group of big children, you can rest-assured that many of us feel like them too. But we want to grow up, we’re all just wondering when it’s going to happen.
Being a Millennial – I’d like to blame society for how I feel and act. Nah not really; but societal shifts have surely had an impact, namely that traditional signs of adulthood are becoming obsolete.
We typically associate adulthood with indicators of financial success and responsibility: owning a home, having a secure full-time job with a good salary and benefits, dinner parties, getting married, mowing the lawn, saying things like ‘I’ve got to work late this evening’. Like many people my age, it’s years since I graduated and I’m a long way off any of these things (although I did cut the grass the other day).
These indicators are tangible – we can use them to measure where we’re up to. But it’s all to easy to forget that they aren’t what defines being a grown up, just a concrete reflection of qualities associated with adulthood. At the end of the day being an adult is about taking responsibility for stuff and occasionally doing the boring necessary thing rather than the fun thing.
In a time where we’re less likely to own homes and throw dinner parties with the good china, we’re finding new indicators to measure how grown up we are. For me, these fall into the following categories: a) things that my parents do/my sister does; b) boring but necessary tasks; and c) unnecessary things that I want to do and that signify having free time to idle away because I’ve succeeded at life. When I do these little things I feel like J-Lo in a doing-it-for-herself montage in Maid in Manhattan.
The new traditional signals of being a grown up (by me)
- Renting a car abroad and buying separate excess cover.
- Owning a credit card and saying things like ‘I’ll put this on my credit card‘.
- Making an appointment and actually going to it.
- Cutting the lawn (still don’t understand why we do this – it all grows back again!).
- In fact, any form of gardening.
- Dropping something off/picking something up on the way to somewhere. For example, dropping off a cake to someone on your way to work.
- Going through my bank statement (not really sure what I’m looking for).
- Doing anything vaguely DIY-related, such as sawing things, hammering things, drilling things…
- Putting things in the boot of my car rather than on the seats.
- Making spreadsheets (super basic ones).
- Remembering to send birthday/christmas cards.
- Not saying ‘grown up’ all the time.
And failing that, here’s some hope for all of us:
– Hati
Hati Whiteley 