The adults reading this can confirm that adulting is a scam. Those who haven’t found that out yet or aren’t adults yet will find it out soon enough. Adulting is hard, and messy, and painful, and often disappointing, and sometimes just not it.

 

There are jobs to get and work to be done, and money to be earned, and obligations to be fulfilled, and responsibilities to take care of, and who knows what else life can throw at you. Life as a kid was much simpler, much more carefree. There was so much more fun to be had. Now there are just bills to pay and issues to work on. Why did we want to grow up again?

 

You probably have a picture in your mind that speaks to the struggles of adulthood and how life was better when we didn’t have to deal with them. Are they so bad though? The challenges life throws at us aren’t all bad (only some of them, others were sent by the devil and he can have them back).

 

Not that they’re not hard to overcome and often leave us wondering why we can’t just use GTA dollars in real life, especially in this economy. But there is value in the hardship and the challenges. They’ve taken us places and they continue to do so.

 

Are you feeling cheated after that last sentence? Like you’ve been led on? Like you’ve wasted your time and energy reading something written by someone who just doesn’t understand how hard life is? Apologies that you feel that way, it was fun at your expense. We might have a dark sense of humour here at LNC. #Getushelpplease. Adulting is a scam, just not in the way you might think.

(Photo by Sylvia Szekely on Unsplash)

We’re sometimes wistful of our childhoods. Childhood was fun and exciting and an adventure was there to be had almost every day. This isn’t true for everyone. Some of us had horrible childhoods. But children are generally the same in their formative years, in that no matter how grown up they act or seem or what they’ve been through, they’re still kids.

 

There is an innocence to childhood that gets lost in adulthood, a playfulness that sees fun everywhere and can make it out of anything. There is also a novelty to so many things, both good and bad. A train ride, a flight, a trip to Mombasa, a trip to one of the national parks, a music concert, even a wedding or a funeral.

 

These things are not yet an ordinary and routine or mundane part of life for a child. They happen once in a while (for us regular people at least) and each with their own sense of occasion, and often they don’t happen in the same way twice. So there’s something new to be experienced almost every year of a child’s life, throughout the year.

 

Then they get old enough that things cease to be new and exciting and it suddenly feels like they’ve seen everything. We are hardly ever shocked or surprised by things, especially in today’s world where the shocking has become an everyday thing.

 

The human mind is an amazing and fascinating thing. Think of the things that you do now out of habit or routine that were once new to you. You drive yourself to places for example. It wasn’t all that easy when you started, but now it’s basically second nature.

 

But the mind’s incredible ability can also be an Achilles’ heel. When we become adults, and especially in today’s world, we become saturated with things and experiences until we lose the fun and novelty that came with them.

 

This may be part of why we live our lives so much on the edge now, especially the members of Gen Z and their predecessors, the infamous Millennials. It may be why we drink ourselves to stupors throughout the week. Why we experiment with and use drugs so often. Why sex has become so casual and easy to get. Why more of us are into extreme sports. Why we find it difficult to stay in jobs despite them being well paying and secure. Why some of us bounce around in life trying to find our passions and purpose. These may be attempts to make up for the lack of novelty and fun in our lives. Novelty and fun that we miss or perhaps didn’t get to experience during our childhood.

 

Look at bucket lists, for example. We create them to do things we’ve never done, to go to places we’ve never been, to see things we’ve never seen. We create them to make life more exciting. To inject some fun into life. To have experiences that make life more of an experience in itself.

 

But maybe we also create them to get the same feeling we had as kids when we first went to the cinema and watched a movie. Or to know what that feeling was like if we never went and wished that we did. To restore some of the innocence and novelty that we once had or find out what that feels like if we hardly ever experienced it.

There's supposed to be a cool image here
Let your inner child out and let it play. (Photo by Kiana Bosman on Unsplash)

So what’s the remedy to all this? There might not be a one-size-fits-all solution to it since we are all so different and our lives and experiences just as diverse. But one way may be to take a look at life through a child’s eyes. To see things as they are, for what they are, in all their splendour and wonder.


A lady and her nieces went Christmas shopping and the younger niece was looking at fake plants on the shelves. She couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw a fake cactus on sale. “A fake cactus?” she asked, “Really?! Why not just use the real thing?”

 

Maybe we ought to have that perspective when we look at life. We ought to try to look at the beauty and wonder of things in life more and to find it in seemingly mundane things. To go out and have fun and make the best of the experiences we’re having, even if they aren’t what we expected. That’s not to say that we should make a big deal out of everything, but that perhaps we should make a bigger deal out of some things than we regularly do.


Let’s hope it awakens our inner kid from their slumber.