The Disadvantages of Being a Grown-up
Monday, February 08, 2016
Being a grown-up is a boring job. It is a job to begin with; a big one where people expect you to do big things like earn money and have “important” things like ones where you need a plastic card to pay for.
We all have times when we tell our kids to never grow up because they’re so adorable and we don’t want them to grow into larger human beings. I begged my son a long time ago to never grow up and he said yes, but he suddenly shot up to a five-foot-nine 14-year-old anyway. I’m doing the same to my four-year old daughter now. I know I’ll be surprised again soon.
Besides being adorable, we also don’t want our kids to grow up too soon because childhood is a happy place that you can’t go back to even if you cried buckets. When you get to an age when people begin to earnestly explain to you that magic isn’t real and unicorns don’t exist, that’s when life starts to get boring.
A few days ago, we sat around the dinner table and started recalling our life as kids. So much positive energy bounced around the room and there was just so much joy in sharing stories about the kind of games we played {the ones that young people now don’t have any idea about}, funny pranks we played on people {house helps were favorite victims, so it seemed} and all the mischievous deeds we enjoyed as kids. It was the call of the dirty dishes that brought us back to reality, and that is what makes adulthood not so fun sometimes -- the need to have time for everything, yet not really having enough time for a lot of things.
I don’t wish to go back in time and lease a space in Neverland. The tunnels that lead us back to happier times in our lives are called childhood memories, and they certainly help when we need to remember that life isn’t entirely a long foreboding journey. We are better versions of ourselves now, but the younger us weren’t so bad either; just more genuinely joyous. The world looked so much brighter when free-spirited people weren’t labeled eccentric.
For our film-showing last Tuesday, we watched Mark Osborne’s take on The Little Prince, a reinvention of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book of the same title published in 1943. We watched the highly criticized 1974 fantasy-musical The Little Prince last year that’s why Attika, who does not read yet, knows the Little Prince so well.
My re-acquaintance with The Little Prince made me realize why adulthood could be such a wretched position to be in.
We were pre-programmed to become zombies. On the average, a person spends 16 years getting himself “educated” so he could, later in life, spend eight hours a day in a job he hates. Stiff and looking lifeless, he drags himself to work like clockwork seven days a week, 20 days a month. He complains about it, but does it anyway. There are thousand like him on buses and trains, those who drive cars and ones who tread in different directions. If the daily grind did not inspire the series The Walking Dead, then I don’t know what on earth did.
Bad hair days were not real. But now that we’ve all grown, they’re real as real could be. Why not? One could always use it as an excuse to be miserable and throw his or her weight around for a 24-hour period.
Money is a need. Nothing causes the deepest, most horrible kind of misery than money. It is the sole reason for the existence of greed, insecurity, arrogance, dishonesty, and you know how much longer this list can go. When we were young, we never had to worry about needing to buy anything at all. Happiness included.
Happiness is just another concept. Everyone is sure they’ve heard the word “happy” somewhere from someone but can’t quite put a finger on it.
Question: What makes you happy?
Answer: (Insert brand name here.)
Vacations don’t come for free anymore. One has to work like a horse to go on a decent vacation. Don’t you miss the times when everyone enthusiastically volunteered to pay for your travels? I certainly do.
Daydreaming is considered being lazy. When you’re young it’s synonymous to the word imagination, and imagination is good. It was what summers and afternoons and dawns were for me. When you’re an adult you have to do something, or at least pretend to do something, while daydreaming, so no one accuses you of being lazy. Or crazy. They even have a word for that. It’s called multitasking.
Meal planning never ends. “What do you want for breakfast, lunch, dinner?” Repeat twenty times, and if you get lucky you will get an answer that’s not “anything”, then repeat 365 times. Life was easier when I was from the “anything” end.
The must-haves list is a very long one. Most adults’ head-to-toe list of must-haves is kilometric. I never thought I would be told I’d need ten different things for my face alone. Not ever.
Nap times used to be a daily requirement. In an adult’s life it is a million-dollar privilege.
Even if I said all that, being a grown-up isn’t all that bad. Being able to think about what life was like and how to make it better from there is a gift. I believe everything that happens to us now is a result of the choices that we make.
The one thing that’s great about being an adult is having a choice. So you can’t blame your imaginary friend anymore if your life turns out to be...a little bit less than what you hoped for.
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