Adultish Life
(The one where you give yourself permission to create an adult life for the 21st century)
Should we have seen it coming with Friends?
No one told you life was going to be this way.
Your jobs a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s DOA.
That in one to two generations our collective experience of adult life would transform.
The rules of adulting changing without anyone notifying us or naming new rules.
It’s like you’re always stuck in second gear,
When it hasn’t been your day, your week, your month or even your year.
Their insecure jobs and chaotic love lives. The extended adolescence.
How old were they anyway?
We laughed at Ross and Rachel and Phoebe and the gang and loved their loft digs – as hapless grownups they were great comedic value.
But did we think they were giving us a sneak peak of real life?
Friends was a harbinger of an early 2000s adulting zeitgeist - the roommates, multiple jobs, singledom, solo parenting. A version of adult life – once novel - now relatable.
So many people are living with roommates now the Wall Street Journal felt compelled to write about it in an article entitled “What Happens when a Whole Generation never Grows Up?”
Does anyone know what being a “grown up” is supposed to look like anymore?
And is that why Friends keeps finding new audiences in younger generations? The show’s cultural politics are dated but the basic premise of a group of bumbling adult friends not growing up was ahead of its time.
I can’t help but feel like most adults these days walk around feeling like no one told us life was going to be this way.
Like it hasn’t been our year for years.
That hapless-figuring-it-out-as-we-go version of adult life now just feels like standard adult life. Like we’re adult…ish….
Of course real life isn’t like the Hollywood version where you get to live in a loft and work in a coffee shop. People are struggling to create their own life paths and feel good about them. The anxiety and overwhelm associated with modern adulthood is real when so many people feel like they aren’t where they should be or who they’re supposed to be.
The fifty-year-old entrepreneurs. Childless couples. Thirty-five-year-olds who don’t own a home. Wondering if they’re really allowed adult in the way you want to? If they’re losers for not having the house, kids, and car? Or are they liberated?
My take? Yes, you are allowed to create the life you want and more than that you’re required to do adult life today in a way that suits you and serves this moment. Because there’s no going back. No going back to stable, linear life paths where we sit in jobs our whole life and collect pensions.
Radical thought — maybe that’s not such a bad thing? I’m not sure we’re nostalgic for the Boomer lifestyle as much as we want the security it promised. It’s time we create our own security – time we take advantage of the vast possibility this chaotic world offers and create the lives we want.
Because we can. More than any time in human history we’ve got so much room to create rich, satisfying lives. Room to do adult life intentionally – boldly - for the 21st century and ditch the shame and insecurity.
Which means giving ourselves permission to let go of stale visions of adult life and outdated definitions of adult success. Accept that the old adulting rules are broken so we’re writing our own.
You’re not living in your own sitcom. But you are living your own story. Yours.
Summon your best version of Ross or Rachel or whoever you want to be and write that story intentionally, one day at a time. Fill that story with rich experiences and valuable accomplishments and great friends and whatever else fits your definition of a good life. Yours.
I know, I know. No one told you life was going to be this way. So do it your way. You’re allowed.