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After #adulting course, let's study grocery shopping

April 2nd 2017
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I am so happy for news like this to take me away from my death watch over democracy: The Adulting School has opened its doors in Portland, Maine.

No, it's not a joke. Well, maybe it is a joke, but it's been featured in U.S. News & World Report, New York Magazine and NPR, and it's real enough to have a spiffy website equipped to take the money of millennials who just "don't know the sh?!% you're supposed to know." That's a quote from the Adulting School website, which offers help mastering things like changing a flat tire, folding a fitted sheet and balancing a checkbook.

I am too lazy to set up my own competing website, but I am happy to take any of you millennials to school right now. Old school. For free.

Lesson 1: Want to be an adult? Stop posting every successful omelet you make to Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. People have been making omelets since the Middle Ages. And without fancy nonstick pans. This is not an accomplishment. In fact, almost nothing you do on a daily basis is a real accomplishment. Welcome to adulthood. 



Lesson 2: Stop saying "like" all the time and "Me and so-and-so went such a place." "Like" is barely even a word anymore -- it's a social media action. And adults say "So-and-so and I went such a place." Speaking of language, real adults of either gender don't curl up the end of every sentence in pathetic askance -- so stop doing that.

Lesson 3: Now we'll tackle budgeting. You can't go out to eat 15 times a week. Life is not one big fast food adventure. Adults cook for themselves. Learn to make a few basic meals. And no, you don't need to pay The Adulting School to teach you. Not if you can Google "meat loaf" and are in possession of an opposable thumb with which to grasp tools such as knives. Every time you don't go out to eat, put 10 bucks in a jar. Now you have a savings account. (We'll discuss 401(k)s in a separate lesson). Oh, and when you do master meatloaf, don't bombard social media with images of your meat. That's just bad taste.

Lesson 4: It's not your parents' fault. Yes, they coddled you and helicoptered over you and hung your participation certificates on the fridge (which is part of the reason The Adulting School figured you'd pay for another certificate).

But it's not your parents' fault you can't cook, keep your apartment clean or understand the fine print of your college loans. Do you think our parents showed us any of that stuff? We barely saw our parents. They didn't have time to teach us anything. They were too busy being adults. They never talked to us. For one thing, none of us had phones. For another we didn't trust them, and they didn't care for us all that much. Otherwise they wouldn't have smoked in the car while we took long trips without seat belts, and they wouldn't have let us hitchhike across the country when we were teenagers. 

Lesson 5: Folding a fitted sheet. No human being, adult or not, can master this task. So take this one off your #adulting list. Real adults know their limitations. 

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