Good morning!
Usually I find the online discourse surrounding “being an adult” pretty embarrassing, but I’ve had a couple ideas about it floating around in my notes for a while, so today I’m giving in. I blame TikTok for continuing to serve me videos of therapists explaining the definition of boundaries (honestly they’ve been kind of helpful…lol). Hope you enjoy my charts.
Are you a baby? A litmus test
The other day some friends and I were reminiscing about an app idea we had years ago that would allow you to “blind cancel” on your friends. That is, flag if you were open to canceling a plan, which your friend would only see if they also flagged it. Basically, it was Tinder for bailing. This was our ultimate dream: an official, guilt-free conduit for the quiet hope that your friend wants to cancel, too.
It only recently occurred to me that what we actually needed was to grow up—get to know ourselves, learn to communicate. Trying to weasel out of all that with an app is, well, basically the entire value prop of Silicon Valley, but more importantly antithetical to growth. Managing your social life requires self-knowledge: Will you be in the mood next week? Will they be mad if you cancel? Will you have fun tonight even though you’re dragging your feet? The trick to answering these questions, I’m finding, is not technology or mind-reading or asking for surpluses of empathy. It’s to stop being a huge baby. Unfortunately I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to navigate social situations using a tawdry, homespun radar for what everyone’s thinking and feeling at a given time, and instead of transforming me into an intuitive genius, it’s made me (at times) a neurotic little freak. To be fair, I love the neurotic freaks in my life, but together we can make life more complicated than it needs to be. Learning to anticipate, gauge, and state your needs isn’t just irritating therapy-speak, it’s a relief for everyone involved.
This isn’t the most fashionable attitude. It makes me sound a little like a boot-strapping, we-can-do-hard-things motivational speaker who is secretly a psycho and also had it easy their whole life. Obviously those people are annoying. But I find the overly sensitive, we-don’t-have-to-do-hard-things counter-narrative grating in its own way. I think a lot of us do—I hear just as much self-care fatigue as I do resistance to the idea that we should always keep going, no matter how miserable we are. Both camps are right, both camps are wrong. In the logic-defying tradition of social media, everyone is both annoying and annoyed. Lately I’ve been wondering how to synthesize these views into a coherent idea of what it actually means to grow up: to take responsibility for ourselves and also the people around us. To be compassionate without infantilizing everyone.
In March, two things happened that pushed me toward an answer. The first involved a dinner party hosted by a couple I met through a friend. On the way there, I learned via text that everyone else was running 30 minutes late. I felt immediate dread. It was nothing against the hosts, I just didn’t know them as well, and the thought of being their sole guest for half an hour had me praying for train delays. Naturally there were none, so I found myself shivering outside their apartment building weighing two options: kill time until everyone arrived or toughen up and go in alone. I briefly tried to convince myself that if I did the former without fanfare—texted my friend that I’d be picking out wine at a nearby store until they arrived—it would be an unfussy act of self-care. But I knew I was being a baby. So I picked out a bottle (took me exactly three minutes) and went up by myself. This is not a surprise ending: It was no big deal whatsoeve
