Adulting

 This week I finally got around to transferring my vehicle registration to my new state of residence; what amazed me about myself in the process is that I actually got it done-- all in less than a complete afternoon. I had already picked up the title to my vehicle from the storage unit in another state where it was housed, so I basically just had to show up at the county treasurer's office and submit my paperwork. They hit me when I did so with a $75 fee: an expense I had not factored into my mental budgeting for the month. But instead of procrastinating the payment, walking away, or weeping over the injustice of it all, I paid it.

Then the next hurdle appeared. I had my new license plates in hand. But I had no readily-provided way to attach them to my car. The old plates were still bolted into the frame with flat-headed screws inaccessible to any ordinary screwdriver. I went at them with a pair of simple pliers but I couldn't get them to budge. My tool kit at home had nothing that could affect them. Once again, I considered railing against the injustice of fate. I contemplated weeping. I thought: maybe I'll just give up and drive around with my MA plates for a few more weeks and deal with all this later. 

But then I realized I had nothing else to do that afternoon. So I drove to a Walmart and found a socket wrench. Once again, buying a wrench was not an expense that had figured into my mental calculations. For the third time that day, I was tempted to weep, rail, and abandon hope. But instead of any of those things, I bought the wrench, went out to my car in the parking lot, and succeeded in removing the former plates and bolting in the new ones. By the end of it, I had completed the entire process of re-registering my vehicle and installing the new plates, all with several hours of the afternoon still to spare. 

This was utterly different from how the same process would have played out just a few years previously. I suppose I am getting older. I turned 33 yesterday-- the age Jesus was crucified and Henry Miller left for Paris, and therefore I suppose as valid an age as any to experience a transformation or a resurrection. 33 is surely old enough at any rate to be able to figure out how to attach your own license plates. But still, I find it hard to attribute the change purely to aging and neurology-- in part because not everyone makes the same change at this time. There are plenty of adults much older than me who still lack the capacity for adulting. 

For instance: I was reading the New York Times' extensive new reporting on the personal travails of Hunter Biden. Poor Hunter-- perhaps no other public figure has had their private failings and humiliations so microscopically examined in recent years without asking for it. And the things that people have found are indeed embarrassing. As much as the right has tried to use them to cast Hunter as an arch-villain and quintessential corrupt insider, however, the failings they have unearthed are in reality far too human and relatable for that: more than anything, they simply show a failure of adulting. 

Read the anecdotes of Hunter's missteps and tell me truly if they do not provoke a cringe of recognition. There's the time he signed up for a honeymoon in Mexico, for instance, only to realize when he got to the airport that his passport had expired. Why couldn't he simply renew his passport? Because he had two outstanding tax liens from the IRS. Why did he have tax liens? Because he hadn't filed his income taxes for two years running, 2016 and 2017. Why didn't he know he had several large tax payments still due? Because he had ignored emails about it from his personal accountant. 

It doesn't appear any of these omissions were deliberate or malicious. He wasn't trying to hide anything nefarious from the authorities. He was simply procrastinating. And, as so often happens with procrastinators, the longer he procrastinated the more unintended consequences of his procrastination piled up; the greater the mental burden and anguish of trying to attend to them all became; and the more he procrastinated still further the obligation to deal with any of them. Here is somebody guilty of nothing more heinous or inhuman, then, than a lack of adulting. 

As someone who can relate all too well to this kind of self-sabotage-- but who (as the above anecdote illustrates) has since improved his ability to "adult"-- I'm inclined to ask-- what is the psychological mechanism behind it? What makes some forms of adulting so hard; and why are some of us but not others ultimately able to overcome these mental barriers? 

I'm convinced that the answer lies in the frustrating triviality of large parts of adult life. There's a passage in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer that I think explains the phenomenon. In discussing the mental illness of the protagonist's father, we are at one point in the novel informed that for a time he stopped eating. Why? Because eating just wasn't "important enough." So many of the tasks we associate with adulting have this same characteristic: they just don't seem important, usually because they supply merely the bare minimum conditions for living. 

I myself struggled to eat regularly in my first year of college. Every struggle with adulting I've had since then has concerned an activity that is similarly dull but unavoidable. After all, I have never struggled with procrastination in the areas of life where many people experience it the most: I always turned papers in on time, showed up for job interviews and completed assignments when promised at the workplace, etc. But when it came to the simple administrative tasks of existence: paying bills, going to the doctor, etc.-- these filled me with avoidant misery. 

But what is it about these activities that could be described as "unimportant," in Percy's sense? After all, aren't they essential for life? And what in turn could be more important than staying alive--since survival is the precondition for everything else we might do in life? I submit that by "unimportant," what I really mean is that they lacked the characteristic that seemed most important to me when I was in my twenties: that of being helpful to establishing a unique identity. Work for school or my job could be accomplished, by contrast, because it advanced my claim to specialness.

The tasks that Hunter and I tended to avoid, meanwhile, all have the characteristic of being universal. Everybody has to pay taxes; everybody has to eat; everybody has to pay bills; everybody has to attach new license plates. No specialness intrinsic to any of them. In order to accomplish any of these things in the old days, therefore, I felt that I had to somehow do them in a way that set me apart from others. If I was going to eat, I'd need to build an identity as a gourmet or fine chef into my self-conception. If I was going to replace a license plate, I would need to establish myself as distinctly "handy."

Then, since it was impossible in practice to acquire expertise in every mundane task of life before doing them, I would procrastinate. The food wouldn't be eaten; the license plate wouldn't be attached. It was only in my thirties that I began to realize that one could do some of these mundane things at the bare minimum level of competence-- one could buy a socket wrench and use it, for instance, without first becoming an expert in socket wrenches or establishing oneself as a person whose unique identifying trait is a skill with handiwork. 

What is it about reaching my thirties that enabled me to achieve this realization-- which I submit, again, is the essence of all adulting? Perhaps what happens is that one simply comes to a point in life in which one feels that one's personal identity is sufficiently established and secure. Thus, one no longer needs every single activity in life to contribute to or reinforce it. Some can simply be done as the boring preconditions of the sustenance of the personal identity and the other more interesting aspects of life. 

This theory of adulting-- if valid-- also helps explain why some people face more difficulties in adulting than others. It is because some people struggle especially hard with insecurity and a lack of stable identity-- people, for instance, who grew up in the public eye, who have struggled with addiction, who have a history of family trauma and tragic loss. Such factors might help to explain why what appears so simple to many proves an insurmountable barrier to them. And so: Pity the Monsters! Pity the Hunters! Adulting is harder than it looks.