Ask any college student today, and most of them will probably unanimously agree that "adulting" is the worst. For those living under a rock, adulting is described by Urban Dictionary as:

Adulting(v): to do grown up things and hold responsibilities such as, a 9-5 job, a mortgage/rent, a car payment, or anything else that makes one think of grown-ups.

This word has many uses, from something as minute as calling to make your own doctor's appointment or as important as signing the lease to your first apartment. Personally, I despise "adulting," but not for the reason that most college students cringe to say the word or even think about it- I don’t like the word itself.

I feel the need to preface this lightly by clarifying that I don't dislike the word for the same reason that many people dislike "bae" or "swag." That is, I don't have a beef with the word simply because it's a millennial contrivance; it marks a language evolution and as a proponent of linguistic diversity and decreased linguistic stereotyping, I respect the word. No, my real problem with "adulting" goes much deeper, cutting to the very core of what it stands for.

An unfortunate trend that many older generations have noticed in millennials and post-millennials and I have even noticed myself to some extent is a childishness, a staving off of adulthood, or a prolonged adolescence. Psychologists are even naming this period between high school and stable adult life "emerging adulthood" and defining it as a possibly new period of development. As millennial/post-millennial students and young workers enter this stage, they are desperately searching for the perfect job, the perfect major, the perfect partner, etc. In certain amounts, this is healthy; all people go through identity exploration in their teen and young adult years, but recently, certain patterns have emerged that may have negative connotations. This extended exploration leads to the suspension of what we imagine an "adult" life to be. Marriage is pushed off later and later, statistically leading to more divorces. Many millennials/post-millennials cannot stay at a single job for long, leading to a great amount of instability and dissatisfaction in employment. A loss in direction and low finances can send many hopeful young adults back home to live with their parents.

This leads me to one of the greatest things that this culture has created and the one side effect of this "emerging adulthood" that I have noticed the most-- a lack in serious commitment to... pretty much anything. There is a prevailing drive in our culture that we must be constantly seeking for "something better." While these are noble ideals, finding the love of our life or the job that leads us to our calling, this endless searching for a level of perfection in our lives sends many young people searching for a life that may not exist. Maybe there is no perfect partner; maybe there is just a person that you love and choose to tough through the hard times and celebrate the easy times with. What if there is no perfect career or job, but just a way to make a living that you enjoy on some level, that brings you a sense of fulfillment, and that provides the income you need to do what you need to do. Even in Christian circles where commitment to a higher entity is obviously the standard, commitment is delayed, as many college students fail to join a church in their younger years and when they do begin trying to settle down in a church, indecision leads them away from a thriving church body for as minuscule a reason as disagreement over what type of worship music should be played.

This type of aversion to commitment is not unique to the big decisions in life; I see it everywhere. I see this most often in my peers and public contemporaries as a resistance to present a clear purpose and direction in their romantic pursuit of another. I see it in the initial interest in an event or idea, but a fading away when the time comes to put the idea to fruition. I see it in plans cancelled for something better and jobs quit after a mere few weeks or months. I don’t say this to condemn my fellow young adults, but rather to point out a pattern that may be putting more stress on us than we realize. When we never commit, we may be missing out on something truly great in that endless search for something better.

Again, while some exploration is not bad, when commitments and responsibility are consistently pushed off, it has the potential to make those things abnormal in our lives. When commitment is scarce and responsibility is lightly and sparingly taken by an entire generation, the rest of the world sits in a vacuum waiting to be filled with adults who currently cower at the thought of trying to create a resume or pay a bill. The things required to live and survive in the world are no longer seen as the norm but are isolated as singular events and praised as “adulting.” In this way, stepping into a developed adult-life can seem like an anomaly. This is something that few college students and young workers, if any, are free of (myself included). And that is a travesty. High school is the time for flightiness and freedom from responsibility; college is for taking up the mantle of responsibility and seeing what that looks like for each of us. That doesn’t mean that it will be a perfect, smooth process, but making an effort to educate yourself on how insurance works or how to change a tire without seeing yourself as an imposter to the adult world will ultimately benefit us all. Being an adult will stop seeming like a lofty unattainable goal, but just another adjustment we ease into slowly, taking so much pressure off us to “adult” better or more often. Mistakes will happen, and the “perfect” job/house/relationship/etc. does not happen in a straight line. When millennials and their following generations realize that, “adulting” will cease to seem so difficult and will, by proxy, cease to be a string of isolated events that happen with tremendous effort.

If we’re honest, there’s nothing that bothers me quite like hearing a peer say something like “I’ll ask an adult adult”, as if they were not an adult themselves. Much has changed in 60 years or so, but it was not so long ago that by the time most teens start college in our decade, our equals in the mid-20^th century would already be transitioning to more distinct adulthood roles like getting a stable job, getting married, and having kids. Granted, there is something to be said about secondary education’s impact on how we develop. As school has become a full-time job and college prices have skyrocketed, these “adult” roles become more difficult for the modern young adult to bear while pursuing an education. That is a valid point, but that is not an excuse for running from the inevitable future and demonizing the end that we should all be striving for- to become mature, well-rounded individuals with a clear identity and purpose who handle things not like children or adolescents, but adults- not occasionally and not celebrated as if they are momentous occasions, but humbly and with a confidence and responsibility.

This is not to say that there is no room to celebrate when you buy your first home or feel proud when you correctly pay for something with a check the first time, but when the acclaim of those isolated events becomes a substitute for constructing a real adult life, then something needs to be reassessed. This tendency to celebrate and elevate the completion of mundane things that the rest of the adult world is already doing every day will only ostracize our unique perspective on life even farther from our previous generations. If there is anything to be said about this phenomenon, it is this - becoming an adult, like becoming a teenager, is a fluid, ill-defined experience that varies greatly for everyone. By marginalizing the process into a set of actions (like going to the doctor on your own or ironing your shirt) and calling them “adulting”, it makes it a rigid progression to an “ideal” state that just isn’t realistic and may very well lead us into more dissatisfaction rather than the fulfillment we all so desperately seek.