The thing with adulthood is that a lot of it becomes way easier once you stop expecting life to behave by rules that don’t really exist.
Fairness has no contract
You might do everything ‘right’ and try your absolute hardest. The truth is, though, you can still get flattened by something you didn’t deserve. We tend to grow up hearing some version of ‘Work hard, be decent, make good choices, and things will probably work out.’
That happens sometimes, sure, but most times, it doesn’t. Bad things happen to good people all the time, and being a good person doesn’t guarantee you a good life. You can get sick and lose your job. You can be betrayed, too. Being a good person has nothing to do with it.
Not everyone will click
You’ve probably met someone before who just doesn’t seem to like you, even though you’ve been perfectly nice to them. It’s annoying. But it’s also normal. Yes, attraction and friendship aren’t only based on someone being ‘nice,’ and other factors have a big role to play as well.
Your personality and similarities are important ones, along with shared interests and plain old preferences. Liking is quite specific to the particular pair of people involved. Put it this way, you can be a perfectly decent person and still somehow irritate those around you. It’s not necessarily a reflection of your character or worth in any way.
Answers may never arrive
Closure. It’s one of those things we all try to get, yet the truth is that there isn’t always a final conversation or explanation. We don’t always get that satisfying message that ties the whole thing up so that we can move on. Some things just end.
A person might leave you or stop speaking to you. They might end a relationship or make a decision you don’t understand. That could be all you get from them, and most of the time, you’ll have to get closure yourself, not from other people.
Some bonds have an expiration date
Here’s a pretty strange one. There’s a very high chance that you are going to outgrow people you genuinely love. Not because of betrayal or anything. It’s nothing that serious. It’s often because one person moves or gets married. Perhaps their career changes.
Then you drift apart and stop talking to each other as often. It doesn’t necessarily mean the relationship has failed. It’s just something that belonged to a particular stretch of your life.
Usefulness can look like affection
It’s easy to mistake being loved for being needed. Take, for example, being the person everyone calls in a crisis. You might think it’s because you’re deeply loved, and that’s true sometimes. But it could also be that you’re extremely useful, and those two aren’t quite the same thing.
Just because you’re needed doesn’t mean that you’re loved. It’s possible that the people calling on you for help do adore you, but look at what happens when you remove the service you provide. You might find that things get rather interesting, and not in a good way.
Potential stays hypothetical
People love talking about having potential, and that’s probably because it’s so comfortable. Yet the harsh truth is that your potential has practically no value unless you turn it into something. Yes, really. Potential is only something that might become real unless you actually act on it.
It won’t help you pass an interview, and it won’t help you meet deadlines. Being capable of writing a book or starting a company isn’t the same as, well, actually doing it. The thing has to exist at some point instead of being an idea in your head.
Settled is usually temporary
Adults look so settled when you’re young. You see the older people around you, and you assume that things fall into place when you get to that age. That’s not realistic. There’s never a time in your life when everything eventually becomes permanently settled because everything keeps moving around. There’s no stopping point that you’ll get to.
Things like marriage, divorce, unemployment, retirement, bereavement, disability, childbirth, and other changes can happen at any time. Maybe you feel completely settled at 34. But by the time you’re 37, you could be living a very different life.
Later is shorter than it feels
One of the most harmless sentences is also one of the shortest. ‘I’ll do it next year.’ Most people are famously bad at estimating time, especially when thinking about future plans, and they think they have a lot more time than they actually do. Newsflash, planning takes a long time.
There isn’t always another chance to visit someone, and there isn’t always enough time to change careers. You may not be able to travel or get healthier. It’s not all doom and gloom, however, as there sometimes is another chance. But eventually, there won’t be.
Your mirror has blind spots
Two things can be true at once. Sure, you probably know yourself pretty well, but you also probably have some ideas about yourself that are completely wrong. It turns out that self-perception has quite a few blind spots, and some people rate themselves too highly on their desirable traits.
Others underrate themselves. It’s not exactly something we can help doing as we’re inside our own heads all day, so the explanations we create for our behavior can feel incredibly convincing. But other people might’ve noticed the same pattern for years.
Nobody can do the becoming
There comes a point when saying ‘I want to be the kind of person who…’ becomes pretty useless. You have to do something afterward, or else you’re just saying words. Wanting to exercise isn’t the same as exercising. Wanting to write isn’t writing.
Nobody is coming to make you become the person that you keep saying you want to be. No, you have to make an actual plan and follow through with it, instead of leaving vague wishes as they are. There’s nobody who’s going to turn around and install discipline in you.
Talent doesn’t control the scoreboard
It’s always good to have talent, don’t get us wrong there. But one of the hardest lessons to learn is that you can be better at something and still lose to someone who isn’t. Yes, success involves more than talent, and things like luck, timing, money, and confidence play an important part.
Stuff like persistence and whether the right person happens to notice your work matters, too. Even when you look at things like professional sports, there’s an element of chance involved. You have to accept that you may never become as successful as someone less talented than you.
Every choice has a price
One of the most annoying things about adult decisions is that, sometimes, both options are good. Perhaps both options are bad. Either way, a large part of being an adult is accepting a trade-off between things, rather than finding perfect solutions that don’t actually exist.
You might take the promotion, yes, but now you have very little time to see your friends, for example. Being an adult involves recognizing that there isn’t usually a secret third door where you get all the benefits and none of the annoying parts. Life doesn’t work out like that.
Your place may not stay empty
You could leave a job and find out that somebody is sitting at your desk just two weeks later. You could leave a relationship and learn there’s another person eating dinner on your side of the table. It’s hard to accept sometimes, but it’s true.
Some people in your life would replace you surprisingly quickly if you disappeared from their lives. We’re built to adjust after someone disappears from our routines. Being replaced doesn’t erase what happened before, far from it, but life will continue after you’ve gone.
Explanation isn’t interruption
You might know exactly why you behave a certain way, and it’s probably because of your upbringing. Perhaps you always shut down during arguments, for example, as that’s how you saw your parents behave. But knowledge doesn’t really mean much.
The reality is that you can spend your entire life blaming your upbringing, yet you may still end up becoming exactly what you hated. Some behavior has a way of carrying from one generation to another, even when we try to break the cycle. Behaving differently isn’t the same as understanding the origin of your behavior.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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