178 - The Adult-ing Scale, Revisited 🧍📊
Hey there, !
For those playing at home, the answers to last week's poems:
- Vince
- Rumi
- ChatGPT
- Sanai
- Vince
Closest guess was Kento as he also guessed the Islamic poets - with Alex as a close second. Congrats - lunch on me <3
If you haven't been around for a while, you may have missed a post I made just over 3 years ago, 21 - The Adulting Scale.
As a quick refresher, I wrote this to help build a framework in my head of what it means to be an adult, conceptualising adulthood as a 2x2 framework of responsibility and maturity. This focused on milestones, and things you did which were the ways that you could prove that you had achieved another milestone.
Later on, I wrote 27 - The Adulting Scale, updated, which dove deeper into actual developmental psychology concepts, and changed the view from milestones to taking ownership of your life over multiple stages of development.
As I've recently achieved a new milestone in my life (moving out), I thought it would be fun to reflect on where I feel I'm at, and why!
Adulting Scale v1
I am technically, having moved out, a Level 2 adult according to this scale. The responsibility I have at the moment is just for myself (as I'm living alone), and has increased since I have that whole property (and my own life!) to look after. Having to balance looking after my house, my time and my health has been a new experience - and has definitely leveled up my responsibility metric.
Maturity-wise, it's difficult to say where I'm at; it's such a subjective measure that I don't think it's actually that easy to compare (which means it's not a very useful measurement). More recently, I feel like I've come to experience more interpersonal, management-type work maturity at work as a Manager, but also that I have had to know myself more through recent health issues as well.
I feel pretty solidly Level 2, and as I turn 30 this year, it seems like a perfect time to move to the next stage of life anyway :)
Adulting Scale v2
I'd like to think that I'm at Stage 4 -
- Subject: IS self authorship, identity and ideology
- Object: HAS relationships, mutuality
The link I used back then is still there, and is really well explained. At all stages of development, it's about being able to step back from yourself and be able to think about your thoughts in different domains. Specifically, this one is about the fact that we can develop our own identity, and understand where it comes from.
The way Stage 4 can also be explained is that we can define who we are, and not be defined by other people, our relationships or the environment.
It's this sentence that does give me pause, as I do think that I can often be defined by others, or I can use their influence to internalise who I am versus who I know I am.
In some aspects of my life, I do believe that I am still at Stage 3 - where the most important things are the ideas, norms and beliefs of the people and systems around us (i.e. family, society, ideology, culture, etc.). I think that there are lots of different ways that I am still exploring myself, and who I am to the people and environment around me, but I also do know that there are some specific things that I know very clearly about myself.
So maybe I'm...Stage 3.5?
Other thoughts
There's a balance to thinking about these frameworks. Though I found Kegan's theory alluring, observing that moving through the stages was a more internal than external thing, I couldn't help but observe that the very act of trying to reach milestones was also quite fulfilling.
Specifically, I think that changing from stage to stage or moving through the adulting levels from my initial framework requires a mix of experience and introspection - which sounds trite and obvious, but was not for me.
At most points in your life, you feel like you know who you are. You know what you believe in, you know your values, and you feel that strongly. You don't have to think very hard about yourself, because, well, you've always got a lot of shit going on.
That is, until the fecal matter hits the air circulation unit.
Maybe it's in a conversation with a friend, or maybe it's in an argument with a date, or maybe it's when an unexpected event happens to you. In these cases, you experience something new as you have to wrestle with a new facet of yourself - whether that's something you never thought about, something you never thought you could do, or something that you feel a level of excitement or disgust for unexpectedly.
These things come from experience:
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If you've never had to work so hard that you sacrifice your health, or relationships, or family life, how would you know that you could do it? Or that you never wanted to do it again?
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If you never had to discuss what you thought about human rights violations across the world, how would you know how deeply it affects you? Or maybe how little you cared about it?
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If you've never had to face a question about mortality, how would you know what you want from your own life?
There are questions that you can't truly answer until you literally experience them, and if you're challenged by them, that should push you forward to better understand why that's the case.
From a young age, I expected to be able to focus on the introspection section of this equation, running through every simulation in my head of exactly what would happen, how I felt about it, and how it meshed with the values that I have acquired over time. I was a brainy kid, and thought you could solve the world with pure brainpower. And so I felt confident that I knew myself well enough to embark upon life's journeys.
But alas, as the saying goes, "No plan survives contact with the enemy."
Without experience, the inputs to your introspective simulations are imperfect and not yet backed up by reality. You're making educated guesses about things that you have absolutely no first hand experience of. My first heartbreak was literally heart-wrenching - like physical pain - but you can't simulate that experience without ever feeling it!
And that was me; well, is me. It's a struggle to gain more on the experience side of things, because I feel like I'm locked into an endless loop of thinking rather than doing.
You can get close, of course - I mean, that's what imagination is, and why we read stories, or share anecdotes and advice with each other. I reach out to friends and family for their experiences all the time, but I still don't know for sure with a lot of these things. It could be my overthinking brain, but without knowing something yourself, it's hard to really know something.
(I also realise this dovetails into my piece about 117 - Don't take advice - where I discuss the question - who can you trust to update your models about the world? Looks like I'm just re-explaining the wheel again and again...)
On the other hand, if you're only going out to experience everything, without trying to understand why you're doing so, you wouldn't be able to spot the patterns of your behaviour that are detrimental to yourself (or even beneficial, so you can continue doing it!). Without slowing down to understand the why, you would be a slave to your impulses, and following the whims of experience (whether good or bad).
For me, the more I do, the more I try, the more I find that I'm understanding myself better. I started a lot more things, spurred on by post-COVID life, like lock-picking, or DnD, or speed-dating, or painting a house. I know these are things that seem normal to you, but they weren't to me. There's a lot of inertia to just doing things that I am constantly trying to push myself into, and even when I do, I burn out on them quickly (unless they're inherently tied to other people).
It's a process, isn't it - this adulthood thing - and we're just trying our best...
I feel like I fell into the trap, again, by writing this piece. I just made up a new framework (Adulting Scale v3?) - though this one seems to be a more actionable framework than just a taxonomy of adulthood. Maybe that's better...?
I guess I'll just have to try it out.
Chat soon :)
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✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Moving to an electric toothbrush - random recommendation, but I recently bought an electric one because my dentist said I was brushing too hard - opened my eyes to the world of toothbrush features (like tracking how long you brush, pressure sensors etc.). It's so much easier (?!) like I knew it was easier but it's even simpler than I thought. I honestly feel like I'm not even brushing my teeth because I put so little pressure on them now - I just let the toothbrush do all the work. Weird recommend but y'know, that's where we are now :D
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Al's Pizza - cute store, cute pizza boxes and yum pizza. Tried it at a friend's place (ty Loz!) around the Eltham / Forest Hill area - nice feed, and the pizza boxes have some fun designs on them which they use as much as possible for the insta feed :D I think this time around it was a cricket player? Very fun - recommended place to go!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Lo-Fi Air Traffic Control - live feed of air traffic control towers underscored by some lo-fi beats - what's not to love?
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Free the Gameboy - a weird and wonderful project which aims to get rid of the battery requirement for Gameboy's, using button presses to generate enough power to get the Gameboy running, and solar power to charge it otherwise. Fascinating engineering and design!
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GarlicGPT - yet another one of those chatGPT-generated news feeds, but seemingly more coherent and updated on a daily basis. Including headlines such as "McKinsey Reveals Revolutionary New Strategy: Just Do Whatever You Feel Like" and "SpaceX Launches New Rocket: Destination - The Moon’s Cheese Supply". Fantastic!