When Are You Really an Adult?

I'm approaching 40. I've never been "aimless", and while I can definitely increase how often I take responsibility, I'm doing well. I own a house, am married, taking care of my mother, employed, socking money away in a 401k (probably not fast enough, but it's happening).

...and I've never felt like an adult. I can have the weird dichotomy of having friends young enough to have missed everything I relate to my childhood, friends that I consider "adult", and yet I still feel like I did when I graduated college.

I have talked with CEOs and VPs or just other coders that are younger than I, yet I "feel" like they are older, more experienced.

I have no idea when I'm really an adult, but I don't expect it will be soon.

I've frequently thought this over the past few years, and I feel like the conclusion I have is different than others in this thread.

I don't becoming an adult is really about you, exactly. It's not about your independence, or your actions.

It's about when other people become dependent on you.

I think this is the way that it has long been thought of in cultures outside of the post-Enlightenment West. This was my strong opinion after reading Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, (Russia isn't western like the rest of Europe) and Aquinas, Augustine, and Aristotle. I think that this is in part what the Apostle Paul is saying in 1 Corinithians 13:11 ( http://www.esvbible.org/1+Corinthians+13%3A11/ ), where you'll note that he doesn't say the equivalent of stopping to be like a child meant I had become a man, but rather I became a man, so I stopped being like a child.

I think about soldiers I have met and know. They change when they get to NCO status. I think of the boys I have met from North Omaha, which is arguably one of the worst places in America for young African American males, and that there is a difference between the ones who are the oldest in their families and the ones who are the youngest, even if they are the same age. And I think of my friends, and how we've changed when we've had kids, or when someone started a business and got ( real, not just one of his buddies-while-still-in-high-school ) employees.

Adulthood isn't about you, it's about your relationship to others.

I'm 30, married, have 4 kids (with one on the way), own a house, and have a good job. But I cannot grow a mustache or beard, except for a small patch under my chin; the best I can do is literally a neck beard. I'll never feel like an adult. Ever.

It's not that they don't want to, it's that they can't. They may be 3000 miles away, or they may have just got a cancer diagnosis, or their knowhow of math may not be up to snuff for your problems, or they don't approve of your habits and are doing it for your own good. But yeah, you hit a wall where the only person that can help you is in the mirror. That choice, to live your life, that's a big turning point.

I'd say that the realization that you are the only person who is responsible for you is only half-way there. I'd say that full adulthood realization is that you are the only person responsible for you, but you are still responsible for other people.

The reason I say that is I've know individuals who have taken the first mantra to mean that they hold no responsibilities to other people. That it is, in a reductio ad absurdum, that a driver has no responsibility to stay off the sidewalk and that the onus should lie entirely on the pedestrians to dodge her vehicle.