Adulting is bullshit.
–dumb T-shirt
A trip to Walmart can yield any number of interesting discoveries (such as native English speakers who are unfamiliar with the word “sputter”). One particular venture featured a woman wearing a shirt that proclaimed, “Adulting is bullshit.” If the wearer of this comfort item was, in fact, expressing frustration with the childish and limiting concept of “adulting,” this author would heartily approve. Unfortunately, context suggests the “adulting is bs” sentiment is more along the lines of advocating for perpetual irresponsibility.
A culture with few children is not one composed of more adults, but rather a distortion featuring overgrown adolescents resistant to individual responsibility. Arguably, any individual traipsing around Walmart on a Tuesday afternoon in a silly T-shirt cannot be held fully responsible for the inane messages she is wearing. It is, after all, the prerogative of the adult to cast aside preconceived notions and inherited ideas, forging into reality itself and taking responsibility for the ideas we hold. This isn’t about skewering the particular lady who chose to wear the T-shirt, this is about indicting the idea on the shirt.
What’s wrong with not wanting to grow up?
There is always a temptation to flee from health. We often assume that people are incapacitated through no fault of their own. How could anyone desire to be depressed or obsessive? However, examination suggests that there is a great deal of power to be gained by excusing oneself from calm and rational action. The addict is often accompanied by an entourage of concerned people caring for him; the depressed mother (here, the term is used loosely and not in a strictly clinical sense) need not lift a finger to take care of her own children. She is, everyone whispers in hushed tones, mentally ill.
Surely, there are real and severe disorders of mental and physical varieties. These, like the poor, will always be with us. What we do not need is to encourage average people to lean into their illnesses and disfunction in a perpetual childish state of ignorance. The average 25-year-old should be settled into motherhood, professional career, religious order, instead of wearing comfy loungewear with silly messages at the local Walmart.
How did we get here?
When our T-shirts proclaim our extreme immaturity and our cross-stitch patterns consist almost exclusively of cuss words, you can be sure that ours is a culture that has little confidence in itself. Of course, one could object that this is humor. But in order to be humorous, these profanity-laced proclamations must subvert expectations. The reverse seems to be true.
When we have soundly rejected the roles that used to offer a path to fulfillment, people struggle to align their lives with deeply meaningful, transcendent reality. When we have fixated so myopically on the faults of individuals striving to live out ideals that we impugn the ideals and throw out principles, we clip our own wings.
Fundamentally, what is missing in the dismissal of all adult responsibility is any inkling that we should be other than selfish. We do not, in the end, take on the burdens of adulthood for our own good—though the refining fire of hardship does serve us well. We enter into adulthood to rear the next generation and care for the aging. Maturation is not simply for our good but for the benefit of the tapestry of human lives unfolding in space and time. It’s worth pondering the T-shirt of a stranger in Walmart because her ideas and choices do, in the end, affect us all.
As Anton Pavlovich Chekhov wrote a great many years ago:
In this depraved century—when European society is overcome with laziness, existential ennui and disbelief, when everywhere a bizarre mixture of hatred of life and fear of death reigns, when the best people sit idle, justifying their laziness and debauchery by their lack of clear life objectives—inspired souls are as necessary as the sun. These personalities are living evidence that in society there are still people of a higher order, people of heroic deeds, faith, and clearly defined objectives.
“A bizarre mixture of hatred of life and fear of death…” Is there a more apt description for the age in which we live? It’s tempting to think that the person with nothing to live for will be the most daring, but the person convinced of his own futility is usually the most impotent or ragefully destructive. It is those with a reason to live—a certainty that their actions have meaning—who willingly sacrifice, passionately pursue. Adults striving for ideals, while maintaining a childlike wonder and humility, are the people who inspire.
