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I think part of it comes down to how you define "grown up". When I was 19, I felt like I was 19. I'm not entirely sure how to explain it, but that's just how

I think part of it comes down to how you define "grown up". When I was 19, I felt like I was 19. I'm not entirely sure how to explain it, but that's just how I felt, I felt like I was the appropriate age. When I was 20, I still felt 19. When I was 21, 22, 23... etc, I still feel 19, and now I'm almost 34 and a small part of me is still kind of convinced that I'm 19 years old, despite my desk job, mortgage, and rapidly thinning hairline. I didn't really feel like I got a lot of my shit together until I was about 25-26 though. I think a lot of things changed, but the most obvious thing from my perspective is that I got a lot better about managing my personal finances, saving money, and making sure things were paid on time. I think drawing a firm dichotomy between "kid" and "adult" is a malformed premise.

adamc 2y ago
When my mother was in her early 70s, she told me that she still felt 17 inside. She said you always do, you just learn to behave in a way that doesn't elicit negative commentary. Aging is largely a role we learn to adopt. I'm not dismissing that we do gain some experience. But our emotions don't change that much.
- tombert 2y ago
  Yeah, I have no idea how much of this is hormonal vs genetics vs environmental vs anything else, but I know that 19 is when I became a lot more empathetic [1], a trait I still keep up now. I'm sure I've learned and developed my emotions since then but I think 19 year old me was the beginning of my "current" personality, if that makes sense.
Clubber 2y ago
I'm the same except my "feel" age is 23. That's the last year of college before I started working. Did you have a significant life change at 19, like starting work, join military, anything like that?
- tombert 2y ago
  I started college at 19, so that might be it. I dropped out at 21 and started working desk jobs after that, so you'd think that that would be it, but no, I "feel" 19.
sixo 2y ago
This happens for at different ages for different people, and for particular individual reasons. It is a kind of dissociation: a "part" of you becomes emotionally stuck in the past, either because of trauma, or not making peace with the past, or being unable to make continuous sense of your identity relative to your life. Something like that. The modern world is full of 50+ year olds pretending to be teenagers because there are no other coherent scripts to identify with after that point. I expect for a lot of people, the "break" happens when they have to join the workforce and give up on whatever ideals they formerly dreamed of.
- tombert 2y ago
  Maybe, though I don't know that me feeling like I'm 19 is really "bad". I don't think I have any trauma associated with that age. I didn't really join the workforce until I was 21. I don't have any kids, and I do think that that somewhat stunts your growth.
siavosh 2y ago
I wonder if any of this is related to how few rituals we have left in modern society that clearly mark a before and an after in our lives. Rituals where the whole society identifies, respects, adjusts it's expectations for.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > I wonder if any of this is related to how few rituals we have left in modern society that clearly mark a before and an after in our lives. That's an interesting observation but are you thinking of rituals or ceremonies?
malux85 2y ago
Yeah I was like this for a while - I still felt 19 until I was about 35, then something changed nearly overnight, A calmness and matureness came over me, I don’t feel old, but I feel like I understand the world a lot better, my tastes changed and I get enjoyment from much different things. Overall I’m much happier, much more open minded, and seeing and appreciating much more beauty in the world. Then I see people like my auntie, who is 65 and still acting like a spoilt-brat 14 year old. It’s sad to see someone waste their life and not grow as a human, and also very frustrating. Some adults are just big kids, it’s the ones who don’t grow.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > I still felt 19 until I was about 35, then something changed nearly overnight, That doesn't seem to be my way. My changes typically take years->decades of work. On the upside, people underguess my age by a decade or so.
- tombert 2y ago
  Out of curiosity, I asked my dad about this just now, and he said he still feels about 18. He's 63 now, so I guess different strokes for different folks and all that fun stuff.
  - malux85 2y ago
    Yeah my dad is 74 and he says the same thing, in many ways he is still a child, I don’t mean that in a negative way for him, just that he hasn’t matured “on a spiritual level” for lack of a better term. I’m 39 and I’m now the “head of the family” - I’m the one everyone comes to for wisdom and guidance etc,
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> I think part of it comes down to how you define "grown up". At 16, I defined an adult as someone too old to grow. After four decades as a grown up, my assessment is even more critical. I find adults to be direct cause of ~every human caused problem. That's how I see adults collectively. Individually, we each start with immature psychological bits. We (hopefully) make expected progress on some of them before dying. The upshot of that is we are 1) unbalanced and 2) that everyone (including youth) is better than us in some ways that matter.
drewcoo 2y ago
"Just" is a weasel word. I can't ever trust it.
ryandvm 2y ago
I think growing up isn't when you stop feeling like you're 19, it's the specific point in everybody's life when you realize that nobody else is "more grownup" than you. That you too could be a contributor to this world if only you'd try. I feel like it was embarrassingly late in life when I stopped thinking that the people running things were smarter, more mature, and just generally better than me. It turns out there are dipshits and geniuses and crooks and saints all the way up and down the whole thing. They are not grownups, they are just the people without imposter syndrome.
- tombert 2y ago
  I know what you mean. When I first learned how to program, "web frameworks" like Ruby on Rails and Django and whatnot seemed like magic, and that those required a special kind of intelligence to do. Then I learned how those frameworks worked, built three of my own, and realized that while they're still kind of cool, they're not magic. I've repeated the same process with finance, formal mathematics, cooking, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Most things aren't actually that hard if you sit down and force yourself to learn them. At this point, I start with the assumption "no one is smarter than me". This is very obviously not true, I'm not a hyper-genius or anything, but I think it's a good mentality to have when learning new stuff. If no one is smarter than me, then I should be able to grok most things if I spend enough time with them.
tzs 2y ago
What made me realize I was definitely an adult was the first time I bought Brussels sprouts at a grocery store. I realized that was something child tzs would never have done.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
  Lol! That depends on the child education. One thing is you tell the child "buy whatever you want" and another is let the children in the market and say "buy food for the whole family". They will buy veggies in the second case. Also it might be related to cooking skills!

adamc 2y ago

When my mother was in her early 70s, she told me that she still felt 17 inside. She said you always do, you just learn to behave in a way that doesn't elicit negative commentary. Aging is largely a role we learn to adopt. I'm not dismissing that we do gain some experience. But our emotions don't change that much.

tombert 2y ago
Yeah, I have no idea how much of this is hormonal vs genetics vs environmental vs anything else, but I know that 19 is when I became a lot more empathetic [1], a trait I still keep up now. I'm sure I've learned and developed my emotions since then but I think 19 year old me was the beginning of my "current" personality, if that makes sense.

Clubber 2y ago

I'm the same except my "feel" age is 23. That's the last year of college before I started working. Did you have a significant life change at 19, like starting work, join military, anything like that?

tombert 2y ago
I started college at 19, so that might be it. I dropped out at 21 and started working desk jobs after that, so you'd think that that would be it, but no, I "feel" 19.

sixo 2y ago

This happens for at different ages for different people, and for particular individual reasons. It is a kind of dissociation: a "part" of you becomes emotionally stuck in the past, either because of trauma, or not making peace with the past, or being unable to make continuous sense of your identity relative to your life. Something like that. The modern world is full of 50+ year olds pretending to be teenagers because there are no other coherent scripts to identify with after that point. I expect for a lot of people, the "break" happens when they have to join the workforce and give up on whatever ideals they formerly dreamed of.

tombert 2y ago
Maybe, though I don't know that me feeling like I'm 19 is really "bad". I don't think I have any trauma associated with that age. I didn't really join the workforce until I was 21. I don't have any kids, and I do think that that somewhat stunts your growth.

siavosh 2y ago

I wonder if any of this is related to how few rituals we have left in modern society that clearly mark a before and an after in our lives. Rituals where the whole society identifies, respects, adjusts it's expectations for.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> I wonder if any of this is related to how few rituals we have left in modern society that clearly mark a before and an after in our lives. That's an interesting observation but are you thinking of rituals or ceremonies?

malux85 2y ago

Yeah I was like this for a while - I still felt 19 until I was about 35, then something changed nearly overnight, A calmness and matureness came over me, I don’t feel old, but I feel like I understand the world a lot better, my tastes changed and I get enjoyment from much different things. Overall I’m much happier, much more open minded, and seeing and appreciating much more beauty in the world. Then I see people like my auntie, who is 65 and still acting like a spoilt-brat 14 year old. It’s sad to see someone waste their life and not grow as a human, and also very frustrating. Some adults are just big kids, it’s the ones who don’t grow.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> I still felt 19 until I was about 35, then something changed nearly overnight, That doesn't seem to be my way. My changes typically take years->decades of work. On the upside, people underguess my age by a decade or so.
tombert 2y ago
Out of curiosity, I asked my dad about this just now, and he said he still feels about 18. He's 63 now, so I guess different strokes for different folks and all that fun stuff.
- malux85 2y ago
  Yeah my dad is 74 and he says the same thing, in many ways he is still a child, I don’t mean that in a negative way for him, just that he hasn’t matured “on a spiritual level” for lack of a better term. I’m 39 and I’m now the “head of the family” - I’m the one everyone comes to for wisdom and guidance etc,

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

> I think part of it comes down to how you define "grown up". At 16, I defined an adult as someone too old to grow. After four decades as a grown up, my assessment is even more critical. I find adults to be direct cause of ~every human caused problem. That's how I see adults collectively. Individually, we each start with immature psychological bits. We (hopefully) make expected progress on some of them before dying. The upshot of that is we are 1) unbalanced and 2) that everyone (including youth) is better than us in some ways that matter.

drewcoo 2y ago

"Just" is a weasel word. I can't ever trust it.

ryandvm 2y ago

I think growing up isn't when you stop feeling like you're 19, it's the specific point in everybody's life when you realize that nobody else is "more grownup" than you. That you too could be a contributor to this world if only you'd try. I feel like it was embarrassingly late in life when I stopped thinking that the people running things were smarter, more mature, and just generally better than me. It turns out there are dipshits and geniuses and crooks and saints all the way up and down the whole thing. They are not grownups, they are just the people without imposter syndrome.

tombert 2y ago
I know what you mean. When I first learned how to program, "web frameworks" like Ruby on Rails and Django and whatnot seemed like magic, and that those required a special kind of intelligence to do. Then I learned how those frameworks worked, built three of my own, and realized that while they're still kind of cool, they're not magic. I've repeated the same process with finance, formal mathematics, cooking, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Most things aren't actually that hard if you sit down and force yourself to learn them. At this point, I start with the assumption "no one is smarter than me". This is very obviously not true, I'm not a hyper-genius or anything, but I think it's a good mentality to have when learning new stuff. If no one is smarter than me, then I should be able to grok most things if I spend enough time with them.

tzs 2y ago

What made me realize I was definitely an adult was the first time I bought Brussels sprouts at a grocery store. I realized that was something child tzs would never have done.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y ago
Lol! That depends on the child education. One thing is you tell the child "buy whatever you want" and another is let the children in the market and say "buy food for the whole family". They will buy veggies in the second case. Also it might be related to cooking skills!