For most people never.
Petulant middle-aged children as far as the eye can see with few exceptions.
I remember one time someone told me “being an adult is when you realise you can cook yourself bacon whenever you want, and just eat it, and nobody will stop you”.
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When your first child starts walking and destroying things.
A child knows the adult drink is coffee.
A teenager knows the adult drink is alcohol.
An adult knows the adult drink is water.
I like this and the “when you wish you were young” answers the most
It’s a spectrum
My definition of an adult is simple:
“To be an adult, a person has to understand when it is appropriate to be childish”
Me: like right now! Look at that belly, I’m gonna rub it! Does it tickle, does it tickle? You can’t hold back the laughter forever!
The surgeon: sir please get out of the operating room
When you are at the point where essentially everything in your life is up to you. You make the decisions, you deal with the problems.
And that’s why many people never ‘grow up’. They refuse to take responsibility for themselves.
Blows my mind how many highly educated professionals in their 30s/40s think they are hapless victims and everyone else is the problem in their life. And they absolutely refuse to believe they have any power over their personal choices. As if the hand of god is forcing them to overspend, drink excessively, and otherwise hate their life.
I think my favorite is when they blame other people for ‘upsetting’ them by merely existing in a different way than they do…
Never. There is no line to cross, no milestone, nothing.
You will always be the same entity you are now. You should always work to improve yourself, but the stream of consciousness that is “you” is always going to be the same you.
Every day you wake up 1 day older and have 1 more day of accumulated experience. It’s that accumulated experience that makes people think you’re an “adult”.
If you really absolutely need to assign a binary “I’m an adult” label, I think it’s the day you realize that there is no such thing as an adult and all the people you thought were adults and therefore could handle adult responsibilities were actually just making it all up as they went, the same as you are doing right now.
Apparently it depends on skin colour and the severity of the charges. /s
When they start acting like it.
Which (to me) mostly means taking responsibility for their actions and taking care of the responsibilities they have.
I think it’s when you decide it, plenty of children walking around in grown bodies paying bills but also letting the whims of the world carry them with their current never taking a stand and steering their own lives. To be an adult is both a choice to be free from undue influence but also to be fully responsible for your own actions.
Self-sufficiency, responsibility
When they decide to
Maybe even a bit more every time they decide to.
Some bits of adulting are harder than other bits
When you are legally considered that in your country’s law. Any other distinction is fuzzy and unlikely to be really useful.
No guarantee that you are gonna be an adult once you reach a certain age treshold, though. There are many children in grown people’s bodies out there.
