The strange truth about "adulting"

I’ve recently turned 23, and I distinctly feel like an adult. Which is an odd thing to announce, because looking from outside nothing about my life changed drastically, but I definitively know that internally I changed a lot.

The best way I can put it: for most of my life the world was something that happened to me, and at some point it quietly became something I could push on. When you’re a kid, you’re told how things are. Classes in school start at half past eight, the letters on a keyboard sit in a strange order, father wears a tie when he goes to work, and you take all of it as simply the shape of the world. Then at some point you notice that people decided every piece of it, which means people could decide it differently. The world stops being a set of walls and turns into a playground you’re allowed to rearrange.

The adulting feels like a slow turn in how one stands toward the world. And the more I watched it happen, in myself and in other people, the more it came apart into three separate pieces. You can have any one of them without the others: seeing that the world is made up, believing that you in particular can change it, and having the means to do it.

“The seeing” is noticing that the world is built, that the rules are conventions somebody chose rather than facts of nature. It sounds obvious written down, and it took me hilariously long to actually get there. I think childhood quietly trains the opposite. You’re taught a certain amount of obedience, and underneath it a kind of trust that somewhere there are sensible adults who thought all of this through and had their reasons. Finding out that a lot of it was never thought through, that there were often no wise adults in the back room, only other people improvising, is one of the most thrilling discoveries I have made. It’s the moment the ceiling turns out to be a door.

“The believing” doesn’t follow from the seeing, and that’s the point. You can grasp completely that a rule is arbitrary and still never believe you’re the one who could move it. To me, “the belief” is mostly rooted in the character and past experiences. Some people see almost nothing and are sure they can change things; others see everything and assume the changing is done by someone else.

“The means” is the most practical one: money, a network, standing, the right to be in a country (I’ll explain this one in a second). You can “see” and “believe” and have little “means”, and then you run into a wall, a hard limit on what you can actually do. The place I keep hitting mine is visas. I’m from Russia, so every time I’ve studied abroad I’ve needed one. For me getting into the university and being allowed to come are two different things. Getting in is the part I can do something about: I write the application, I explain what I want, and often it works. The visa is the part I can’t really control much. It comes down to a very bureaucratic process — trying to find appointments, waiting for an embassy to look at the case — all of this has nothing to do with how much I want it or how hard I tried. I use visas because it is just a personal example, but the most obvious limitation of means for most people (including me) is money. Some people are born past that wall and never notice it. Others spend a whole life climbing to it. Plenty of people would tell you this is the one that really defines you, that seeing and believing are luxuries and means is what the world actually answers to. I don’t agree that the first two don’t matter; they’re less visible and more internal to the person, but I think they’re just as fundamental.

Some people have all three at once, which is, I think, what we’re really naming when we call someone powerful. Many of us carry an uneven mix that shifts over time, and the particular mix one is holding shapes how we think about the world. I would like to look into different combinations of the three. What follows are deliberate caricatures, but the exaggerations make the logic easier to see.

Take the senior investment banker who’s very ambitiously making their way up the firm. Real means, real self-belief, the person who expects to win and generally does. What’s genuinely easy to miss, from inside a game that rewards you and that you’re good at, is that the rules were arbitrary to begin with: why the weeks run 120 hours, why the hierarchy matters so much, why a mistake on a slide the client won’t even open feels like a catastrophe. The wins might keep our imaginary investment banker from ever needing to ask. This industry is obviously filled with many smart people who see the whole thing perfectly well and simply decide it’s worth playing, so if you are a banker please kindly take no offence in this example:)

In the opposite corner is the 19-year-old who drops out of university to build their AI B2B SaaS. They see the game, they believe in their ability, they just don’t have the means yet. Jan Koum was on food stamps a few years before he sold WhatsApp for nineteen billion dollars. To me personally this is the most romantic of the combinations and the most fragile, because belief that runs this far ahead of means is either the start of a real success story or an expensive lesson, and from the inside the two can feel quite similar. What’s interesting is that an entire industry now exists to bet on exactly this gap. Venture capital is, in a way, a marketplace where people who have the means go looking for people who have the belief but not the means, and pay to attach themselves to it.

Then there’s the person who sees how arbitrary everything is, early and clearly, and has neither the means nor the belief to act on it. Seeing that the game is riggable while feeling unable to rig it doesn’t come out as freedom. From there it’s a short step to deciding the whole thing is rigged by someone, because at least that explains why nothing you do seems to move anything. It’s part of why stories about a hidden hand behind the world are so durable and so loved: the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Bilderberg meeting where the real decisions supposedly get made, David Icke’s reptilians running things from behind the curtain, the QAnon cabal with the Clintons at its heart. Each one turns the powerlessness people feel into an explanation that justifies the feeling. I don’t think there’s an easy way out of that place, only hard work that lets you improve your means, and I trust the people who admit it much more than the ones selling an easy exit.

And finally the person who has only the means, money inherited, say, rather than earned. They could change a great deal and usually don’t, because means don’t necessarily bring the seeing or the believing along with them. Someone can have every resource going and still do nothing with any of it.

Very importantly, the three forces are heavily interlinked.

Start with the means. The moment you have a little real leverage you get to try things, and trying things is how anyone finds out that their push does anything at all. There’s evidence for this. In the 1990s a US federal experiment called Moving to Opportunity used housing vouchers to move families out of high-poverty neighbourhoods into better ones, families were picked at random, and when economists later followed the children, the ones who moved while they were young went on to earn roughly $302,000 more over a lifetime, the earlier the move the larger the gain. Part of what a better environment gives a child is simply more attempts in which their own effort visibly changes something, and belief is mostly the residue those attempts leave behind.

Belief, in turn, tends to fetch you more means, because you apply, you ask, you start the thing, you take the shot the person who doesn’t believe never takes. And both feed the seeing, because the nearer you get to how anything is really run, a company, a government, a market, the more plainly you see it’s all people improvising. Nobody grasps how invented the rules are like the person in the room where they’re written.

So the three feed each other. And you’re handed very different amounts of each from the start, which is where the unfairness comes from. Some children are born with means, into environments that supply the seeing and quietly manufacture the belief; others are born with none of it. Both of my parents were salaried employees, and the culture at home was about diligence and doing things properly rather than re-imagining the world; it took me a lot of detours, odd bets, and jobs to arrive at the seeing at all.

For most people, adulting is the job, the laundry, the taxes. Everyone reaches that part. The other one, becoming the author of your life instead of a character in someone else’s, doesn’t come to everyone equally.

I can’t change how unevenly we get the means, which obviously shapes the seeing and the believing. But breaking adulting into three parts helps me work on it: I look for the weakest of the three, and that’s where I put my work.

The playground we’re handed is nowhere near finished, and adulting, for me, is knowing I’m allowed to rearrange it and trusting I’m able to.