When you saw the title of this article, you probably thought Hey, this person must know what they’re doing! I was hoping for a manual for this whole ‘adult’ thing. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint, but this is lesson number one: no one really knows what they’re doing, especially when it involves adulting.

It’s true — that’s why we have societies, see, because secretly, we’re all very confused by life, and societies keep us organized enough so that we don’t all go about running into and killing each other.

You, as an adult, or as you become an adult, have probably been asked what you want to do when you grow up. In other words, what will you do when you become responsible for adulting? And no doubt you have weighed your options and decided on something that makes sense. So, you aren’t (I hope) going to answer that you want to become a duck when you grow up. Not seriously, anyway.

But the thing no one tells you is that the one asking you has no place to tell you your dream is ridiculous because they themselves don’t know what they’re doing. It’s the big secret of adulting, and why so many people become confused when they enter the phenomenon called ‘adulthood.’

Unfortunately, there are side effects to adulting. Once you do it for a while, the most predominant of side effects will start to show itself: the views you held as a child will change.

You realize that swing set or playhouse you thought was your own is actually owned by hundreds of thousands of other children as well. You want to snuggle with your teddy bear, but you can’t because what if your teddy bear didn’t want to snuggle, and to do so would violate its rights? As a child, you dreamed of being a princess or a dragon, but now you realize those positions are not nearly as glamorous as you once thought; princesses are caged birds, and dragons are menaces.

One of the biggest things associated with adulting is something called ‘responsibility’. Responsibility is what happens when a person adulting succeeds at appearing to know what they’re doing. It is something learned with practice.

Responsibility requires you to prioritize — its synonyms include ‘survival’ and ‘independence’. Prioritizing survival — food, shelter, and the survival of the human race — is the most important aspect. Thus, you spend your money on food, a house, and instructions on how to raise a kid. Well, perhaps not so much the last one.

Independence is also related because, in order to keep up this appearance of being ‘responsible’, you must be doing these things all on your own.

Now, I have not included all my observations on the act of adulting because that would require a real manual. The giant use-the-book-as-a-weapon kind of manual. The reason I have made adult into a verb is that others have done so in the past, and it strikes me as significantly pleasant to be able to adult, as opposed to being an adult. Using adult as a verb makes itan action that isn’t always happening, as opposed to a state of being. To be an adult is unchangeable. To adult is to choose when you want to do adult things, and when you want to be kidding.

But of course, I myself have pretended to know what I am doing, so who knows if I am trustworthy enough to tell you how to adult?