As adults, we spend years dealing with problems that we were never told about during our childhood, and we would’ve seriously appreciated a heads-up about them.
Your parents start needing you more than you need them
There’s not usually any kind of meeting or anything. It just sort of happens. You come to realize that, actually, your parents need you way more than you need them. You’re the one reminding them about appointments and checking their prescriptions, after all.
That moment of realization isn’t nice, and it isn’t pretty. It usually happens so slowly that nobody really recognizes it, but still, it’s there. Recognizing that the roles have reversed is a bitter pill to swallow.
You can earn more money and still feel poorer
You think as a child that getting a raise is always a good thing. You understand as an adult that it’s not. It feels good for a few days, yes, but then utility bills and groceries eat through the difference. Your pay can go up while your buying power barely moves, or even slips backward.
It’s a problem that nobody really warns you about because, well, they don’t want to admit it. But they should. More money comes, yet somehow there’s less left. There’s not really much you can do about that kind of problem, in all honesty.
You have to make major decisions while already exhausted
The thing about ‘the right time’ is that it doesn’t exist. No, the big decisions always seem to come when you need them the least, and they never appear on a calm Tuesday morning after eight perfect hours of sleep. You’ve got to make decisions when you’re absolutely exhausted.
It’s different when you’re a child because you usually have adults who slow things down and ask questions. They help you to think through things. Then you become an adult, and you’re the one having to do all that while running on 10% battery. It’s not fun.
Nobody tells you how much life administration there is
Paperwork. It’s something that nobody really likes dealing with, and as an adult, it feels like it never goes away. There’s a letter, then a phone call, then an online form, and that’s just to access the document you needed in the first place.
Practically everything requires you to fill out paperwork, digitally or in the old-fashioned way. Nobody warns you how much time you’ll have to spend time on doing all that household management.
Free time and energy rarely arrive together
Free time sure does sound wonderful. But then it finally arrives. You’re often too tired to use that free time properly because the rest of your working week has left you feeling exhausted. An open evening doesn’t feel so great when you have no energy to enjoy it.
It’s a hard fact that you’ll spend most of your free time trying to recover. Recovering from work, recovering from childcare, maybe just recovering from life as a whole. It doesn’t matter.
You sometimes have to pay money to prevent losing more money
One of the most difficult things to accept as an adult is the fact that some adult payments aren’t really purchases. No, they’re bribes. You have to pay for some things to stop a worse bill from appearing later, and that doesn’t feel good.
Maybe it’s a dental cleaning to stop you from needing a crown. Maybe it’s a service on your car so it doesn’t die on the highway. Don’t even mention insurance, so much insurance. Either way, you’ve got to pay it, and it feels unfair because you don’t get anything exciting out of it. You’re paying to avoid disaster, simple as that.Â
Your home is never completely finished
A home may look finished for about thirty seconds, but it doesn’t take long for something to go wrong. A cabinet hinge loosens out of nowhere, and then the bathroom seal starts peeling. Home fixes, not renovations, just fixes, cost an arm and a leg.
Nobody ever tells kids that having a home means needing to spend a fortune on maintaining it. The truth is, you don’t exactly complete a home. You’re just left negotiating with it, and sometimes the house wins for a while.
You may have to grieve people who are still alive
It’s sad, but it’s true. Some people disappear from your life, yet they don’t actually go anywhere. You might be dealing with a parent who has dementia, and they don’t recognize your face. You could have a friendship that ends with no final conversation.
You’re never told how to prepare for that kind of grief when you’re a child. That’s what makes it a lot harder, as you don’t get equipped with the skills that you need to deal with this grief.
You can do everything correctly and still lose
By far one of the hardest problems has nothing to do with your own behavior. Yes, you can prepare properly and follow every rule. You can arrive early and save money while also doing all the work, yet you still lose. Things don’t always go your way.
You don’t get told how to deal with that problem when you’re a kid. No, you just believe that good effort leads to good results, nothing more, nothing less. There’s not even always a lesson hiding behind the loss. Sometimes it just happens.
You have to keep working while something upsetting is happening
Upsetting things happen as a child and as an adult. The difference is that, as a child, you usually have the time to deal with it there and then. There’s no such luxury as an adult. You’ll still have to do your household chores and sort out what to eat for dinner. You’ll still have to pay bills.
Take a death in the family, for example. There’s no federal law requiring employers to provide paid funeral leave, so you might have to work through it all while feeling terrible.Â
Deciding what to eat every single day
It was way easier eating dinner when it simply appeared. That’s what it was like as a child, you just turned up to eat, and that was it. But as an adult, you’re expected to decide what to eat every night, every day, every week.
There are some reports saying that adults spend around 38 minutes a day preparing and serving, as well as cleaning up after meals. That doesn’t even include the time you spend trying to decide what to make. Dinnertime takes up way too much time, and that’s a big problem.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
15 first-world problems that are absurd
Here are fifteen first-world problems that are utterly absurd. If you’ve experienced them, you know how strangely frustrating they are, even though they don’t really matter.
