What "Growing Up" Really Means

"Growing up" is a process without a destination and it doesn't happen on accident.

Read time: ~10 minutes

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When I was a kid and I looked at any adult in my life, I always had the idea that they were smart and had things fully figured out. As I age and approach what is deemed by society as “adulthood” I realize that I do not feel nearly as well put together or knowledgable as the adults from my childhood seemed. At first, this gave me great anxiety. When I was 18 and saw people who were 27 I thought they had it all sorted out and were able to handle every challenge in life with ease. As I approach my 28th birthday I certainly don’t feel that competent but that no longer worries me. The reason I’m at peace now is the realization that a) no one has it all figured out and b) you being a “Grown-up” isn’t somewhere you arrive at but rather a continual journey throughout life.

Our Ideas About Grown-Ups

When we are growing up, our perception of what an adult is is shaped through a number of experiences. We see movies of adults handling situations we’ve never experienced and watch them navigate them flawlessly. Or we see them fail but in a humorous manner with no devastating consequences.

We watch our parents handle countless situations we couldn’t dream of solving ourselves. Not only that but they also seem to speak a language foreign to our developing minds. They talk at dinner parties to their friends about topics that defy our understanding (and their interest in those topics seems strange as well). These adults shepherded us around and never seemed (at least to me) to lack an answer or show an inability to resolve any given scenario. Some of us didn’t get the experience of competent parental role models, but I imagine most of us can think of someone you thought of as a “Grown-Up” and know what I’m referring to.

There are countless examples of situations that I couldn’t resolve that seemed like a piece of cake for my parents. They always seemed to know how to take care of me when I was sick. They also seemed to know how to fix everything around the house. Whether that was by their own hand or knowing who to call when the situation required more assistance. They knew who to speak with when something was wrong with the car. They understood finances (to whatever degree they did which was still way beyond my comprehension).

The examples of omniscient Grown-Ups don’t just stop with your parents. Your teachers also seemed to have all of the answers. At least up until a certain age. If you were religious your pastor or rabbi knew how to navigate moral issues and had concrete visions of what the right and wrong actions were in any given situation. These “Grown Ups” helped build the narrative that at some point (whenever that would be) you would be just like them and you would have all of the know-how you needed to function fully without fail.

If you were like me, you wondered when that was going to happen to you. I just assumed that at some point I was going to be handed a thick manual for how to be an adult from which I learned all that I needed to know. From there it was a simple task of reading from the manual and executing the task at hand. Now that I’m a full-fledged adult I know that is not the case. This information is both alarming and deeply comforting. Alarming because I now know that there are a LOT of answers that I’ll have to find for myself and comforting because I know that I’m not alone in my state of trying to figure it all out.

This is not to say that you have to learn it all on your own. Far from it. You can learn a lot about how to fix a car from someone who knows a lot about cars. You can learn about how to manage your finances by speaking with your parents or some other knowledgeable source about how they manage money. You can learn loads from your teachers and professors on any given subject if you pay attention in class and strive to learn and internalize the material.

These are all useful pieces of knowledge to gain but they can only help you in specific situations. The big things, the ones that I felt the adults really had figured out but. now realize they didn’t, were those open-ended questions that have no concrete answers. A pastor can tell you what the moral thing to do in a situation based on the Bible and Christian teachings, but he can’t tell you how to live a meaningful life. Your parents can help you choose your major in college but they can’t tell you what job you would get satisfaction from doing for 40 years. Your friends may be able to provide you with some surface-level relationship advice, but they can’t tell you who you would be happy spending the rest of your life with.

It is these questions, the big ones, that you have to find the answers to for yourself. Not only do you have to find the answers for yourself but for many of these there may not be a right answer or there could be many right answers. In the real world, there is no certainty. Your judgment must be a combination of what you have come to understand as true, what you know about yourself, and how you are able to match the information you do and don’t have with the situations that you are facing. This is the process of Growing Up™️. The realization that no one is going to give you all the answers and accepting the responsibility of doing the work yourself.

The Work You Have To Do Yourself

Grown-Ups provide a framework for what an adult life can be, not necessarily what it should be. With that in mind, as you go through the process of growing up it is critical to separate what you can learn from others (both your elders and your peers) and what you have to figure out for yourself. This sorting out is the critical step you have to take to evolve into a self-sufficient adult in the modern world. Determine where you can rely on experts, mentors, and your friends, and where you simply have to grit down and do the work yourself.

To me, these categories are fairly cleanly split between legible problems with concrete solutions, and illegible problems with one or many possible “Right” answers. That is, if it is specific enough of a problem that you could google it for an accurate answer, then you can learn it from someone else. Whether that “someone else” is an expert, your parents, a pastor, or even a close friend if your question is specific enough that it can be asked to the world’s largest search engine, then you don’t have to solve that problem on your own. While googling before asking someone is probably still a best practice, there isn’t an inherent need to find your own answer, provided you trust the source from which the answer is coming.

What you can’t gain from someone else’s experience are answers to opened-ended questions. Those types of problems take self-awareness and personal reflection to solve. Take for example the question, “What job should I take?” Sure, there are plenty of guides on the internet about how to pick a career that’s right for you. There are also countless “career counselors” who can try to match you with a position that is fulfilling and gets the best use of your skills and desires. But at the end of the day, it is only you know will know if the employment you have selected is a good fit or not. It is only you who can think hard about your past experiences, your likes, and dislikes, what you’re good at, and what you struggle with, to give yourself hope of picking a job that is right for you.

These types of questions appear all over the landscape of your typical adult life. You have to figure out who you want to spend your life with, where should you live, what kind of hobbies you should take up, how to best spend your time to live a fulfilling life, etc… The list goes on and on. While other people can provide you with a sounding board for your ideas and can share some frameworks that you can use to help make your decisions, at the end of the day the work must be done by you and you alone.

Becoming An “Grown-Up”

When I was a kid I thought at some age you just became an adult and that was it. There were gates of course. You first become a teenager, then you go to college, and then magically as if overnight the second you graduated college you became a “Grown-Up” and with that came all of the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate the real world. Now, I have a different opinion. Becoming an adult, or someone who could be reasonably described as a “Grown-Up” doesn’t mean the things I thought it meant when I was younger.

Instead, it means becoming self-sufficient in chasing your own answers. It means that you know where to get information and develop some sort of filter for what is false and what might be true. It means relying on people who know more than you when the time is right, and following your own path when it’s not. It means that you take responsibility for yourself, your actions, your behavior, and your overall lot in life. This doesn’t mean that you don’t act silly anymore. Or that you can’t have fun. Or even that you must become this person who is solely obsessed with chasing fulfillment and success (whatever that means to you). It simply means that you step up and take responsibility for your life and do the work that you need to do to live the kind of life you will be proud of. That’s what “Growing Up” is all about.

This process never really ends. As you age your opinions and ideas about the world will calcify and it is your job to temper that process as much as possible. Part of growing up is remembering that you don’t have all the answers and despite the ever-growing years of experience that largely remains true on a number of topics. The process of growing up means you get to know yourself better and start to be able to answer questions like “What is important to me” and “Who do I want to be spending my time with?” with even more accuracy.

Becoming an adult means that you accept your agency in life as the main factor driving your behavior. The ironic thing about this way of looking at it is that there are plenty of “adults” that never actually grow up. That don’t accept responsibility for their behavior. That don’t take charge of their own life and blame everything that happens to them on some outside force. Certainly, there are things that you can’t control but growing up means that you take what you can’t control and refuse to let it define you. You change when you need to change. You improve yourself because you want to become a better person (whatever that means to you) and know that it will positively impact those around you. Growing up means that you accept that you are in the driver’s seat of your own life. While scary, this should feel liberating. This truth lets you seize the reigns and own your outcome.

To ten-year-old me hearing that you never fully become a “Grown-Up” would be a terrifying proposition. To hear that there is no manual is scary. Realizing that you never arrive is an uncomfortable feeling, especially for those of us who grew up with clear formats for evaluation and measures of success. To me now, on the cusp of 28, this is a liberating realization. The fact that I never have to be “done” means that my current form, behaviors, hobbies, friends, job, etc… are never the final destination. It means that if I want to become a better person, friend, or significant other, I can. I can switch careers whenever I want. I can get into something that I never considered myself interested in. I can learn more about the world and realize how little I know for sure. This knowledge that my journey is never complete is about the most optimistic realization I’ve had in a while. It means that while I’m an adult, I still have plenty of “Growing Up” to do. And there’s nothing more exciting to me than that.