Lately I've been thinking about what it means to be an adult. When I was a kid, I thought being an adult meant carrying a briefcase and having a lot of keys on your keychain. I came to realize this was a barometer for responsibility, not maturity or adulthood. You might say that responsibility is itself a barometer for maturity and adulthood, and I would say that you are wrong.

Look at parenthood, for instance. Parenthood is always associated with adulthood, but I've seen far too many kids have kids to think this is in anyway true. The thing about parenthood is, it's a job you can't quit. If you're hired somewhere and all you have to do is not kill the company, eventually you're going to know what you're doing. It's all about the learning curve, and I argue that it's the same thing with parents. Some are good right off the bat, some grow into it, and some never quite get the hang of it. But inevitably, people will call them a Good Parent because to not call them such would be to acknowledge the idea that not everyone should have kids. And while this is a sentiment that most people can get behind, it's usually only the abstract sense, surely not as it relates to anyone in the room with them.

Bills are another thing that people associate with being an adult. I see this very much the way I see having a kid - you're playing a game wherein your only job is to make sure things don't get worse than they already are. You're not trying to win the game, you're just trying not to lose it. Call me crazy, but I'd like to think that adulthood represents more than just trying not to let everything go to pot. I'd like to think that adulthood represents the part of the journey wherein we've figured out who we are, what we want, and where we want to go. Anyone can make a baby or a payment, so shouldn't we ask more of ourselves than that?

My thinking - and yes I acknowledge it's a bit dim, but stay with me - is that adulthood is when we learn to be selfish enough to care that we are the very best we can be in this life. It means looking at the world and seeing it for what it is, and questioning it. Questioning what it presents to you, what it asks of you, what it says are the rewards for you. Questioning whether you actually consider them rewards. Questioning what your context says about you, what your friends say about you. We are defined by our context - our friends, our car, our jobs, it all gives us our outlook and attitude. We try to tell ourselves that it doesn't, that we're strong and no one else makes us who we are. And this would be true, sure, were it not for reality. For every time we have a decision to make, we ask advice. When we're hungry, we ask others what they're in the mood for. We choose colleges near our friends, some choose houses near their parents. So yeah, you're the only one making a decision in the moment, but the factors you consider started too long ago to discount them.

So in the end, it goes back to a cliche. Some are born adults, some achieve adulthood, and some have adulthood thrust upon them. I'll take the second everytime.