What Millennials Really Mean by “Adulting”
This past weekend my wife and I spent half our Saturday procuring and laying down mulch in our yard. As I covered up last year’s dry and faded mulch with its moist, deep black replacement, I had two thoughts. The first was that all these hours of work were making what seemed to me a merely marginal improvement in the lawn’s appearance. The second was to ask myself, is this “adulting?”
Merriam-Webster’s contains no definition for “adulting,” but according to Urban Dictionary (my go to for all slang terms), it means “to carry out one or more of the duties and responsibilities expected of fully developed individuals (paying off that credit card debt, settling beef without blasting social media, etc).”
But it seems to me that this definition is missing something of the word’s nuances, in particular I’m thinking of the connotation that we are adulting not just when we are acting like adults, but when we are performing certain actions primarily because we think that is what is expected of adults, regardless of whether we actually value the action in question, or the ends it aims to produce. Do I really care about how neat the mulch looks in my yard, or am I simply going through the motions of a performance that is primarily for the sake of others, that serves to perpetuate a convention for no other reason that that I have internalized the belief that it is expected, not just of me but of everyone similarly situated to me?
This performative sense of “adulting” calls to mind the concepts of authenticity and bad faith employed by existentialist philosophers like Heidegger and Sartre. Authenticity, or to use Heidegger’s term, eigentlichkeit, refers to the way that, as human beings, we do not merely exist the way a physical object does, but are always coming into being, always defining ourselves, and always concerned with the meaning of our actions for our identity. Ultimately, no one else can make our lives mean something. That responsibility is entirely our own.
Bad faith, on the other hand, involves a kind of abdication of this responsibility. We are engaged in bad faith when we let others define us, when we adopt too ceremoniously the stereotypical behaviors associated with a particular role, like the waiter in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness whose stiff and mechanical actions suggest he is simply “play acting” at being a waiter, thus reducing himself from a free human being to the mere bearer of a label designed for others’ consumption.
To be free, we must avoid letting ourselves be reduced in this way. But the cost of such freedom is the anxiety that comes from having to remain agnostic about the meaning of our lives. We can certainly throw ourselves wholeheartedly into any number of endeavors, and defining ourselves, at least in part, by reference to those efforts is, in my opinion, perfectly consistent with the idea of authenticity.
But the real danger for most of us is that between all the conflicting demands of everyday life we have little time left over for the kinds of things that seem to us genuinely and transcendantly meaningful. So we fall back on familiar roles and patterns. “Adulting” typically concerns short, bite-sized behaviors that allow us to picture ourselves living up to certain societal expectations. There is little risk involved, but also little reward. One gets the sense that “adulting” is something done with a sense, now of irony, now of resignation, like the people slowly becoming their parents in the Progressive Insurance commercials.
I think most millennials are perfectly aware of the irony. When they append #adulting! to their social media posts, they betray an awareness that, on some level, the whole thing is a joke. Whether they are also aware that habits can remain even after the humor has worn off, is another question.