How To Grow Up And Be More Mature | Mark Manson

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How to Be an Adult

When you google “how to be an adult” most of the results that come back talk about preparing for job interviews, managing your finances, cleaning up after yourself, and not being a disrespectful asshole.

These things are all great, and indeed, they are all things that adults are expected to do. But I would argue that they, by themselves, do not make you an adult. They simply prevent you from being a child, which is not the same thing as being an adult.

That’s because most people who do these things do them because they are rule- and transaction-based. You prepare well for a job interview because you want to get a good job. You learn how to clean your house because it has direct consequences on your health and what people think of you. You manage your finances because if you don’t, you will be royally fucked one day down the road.

Bargaining with rules and the social order allows us to be functioning human beings in the world. But ideally, after some time, we will begin to realize that the whole world cannot always be bargained with, nor should we subject every aspect of our life to a series of transactions. You don’t want to bargain with your father for love, or your friends for companionship, or your boss for respect. Why? Because feeling like you have to manipulate people into loving or respecting you feels shitty. It undermines the whole project. If you have to convince someone to love you, then they don’t love you. If you have to cajole someone into respecting you, then they don’t respect you.

The most precious and important things in life cannot be bargained with. To try to do so destroys them.

You cannot conspire for happiness. It is impossible. But often this is what people try to do, especially when they seek out self-help and other personal development advice—they are essentially saying, “Show me the rules of the game I have to play; and I’ll play it.” Not realizing that it’s the fact that they think there are rules to happiness that’s actually preventing them from being happy.

While people who navigate the world through bargaining and rules can get far in the material world, they remain crippled and alone in their emotional world. This is because transactional values create toxic relationships—relationships that are built on manipulation. And toxic relationships, as I conclude in my Healthy Relationships Course in the Mark Manson Premium Subscription, are devoid of emotional nutrition and extremely difficult to get out of.

When you achieve adulthood, you realize that viewing some relationships and pursuits as transactions guts them of all joy and meaning. That living in a world where everything is bargained for enslaves you to other people’s thoughts and desires rather than freeing you to pursue your own. To stand on your own two feet, you must be willing to sometimes stand alone.

Adulthood is the realization that sometimes an abstract principle is right and good for its own sake. The same way that the adolescent realizes there’s more to the world than the child’s pleasure or pain, the adult realizes that there’s more to the world than the adolescent’s constant bargaining for validation, approval, and satisfaction. The adult does what is right for the simple reason that it is right. End of discussion.

An adolescent will say that she values honesty—because she has learned that saying so produces good results—but when confronted with the difficult conversations, she will tell white lies, exaggerate the truth, and fail to stand up for her own self-worth.

An adolescent will say he loves you. But his conception of love is that he gets something in return (probably sex), that love is merely an emotional swap meet, where you each bring everything you have to offer and haggle with each other for the best deal.

An adolescent says she is generous. But when she does favors and gives gifts, it’s always done conditionally, with the unspoken idea that she will receive something in return at some later date.

An adult will be honest for the simple sake that honesty is more important than pleasure or pain. Honesty is more important than getting what you want or achieving a goal. Honesty is inherently good and valuable, in and of itself. An adult will love freely without expecting anything in return because an adult understands that that is the only thing that can make love real. An adult will give without expectation, without seeking anything in return, because to do so defeats the purpose of a gift in the first place.

So the little kid steals the ice cream because it feels good, oblivious to the consequences. The older child stops himself from stealing it because he knows it will create worse consequences in the future. But his decision is ultimately part of a bargain with his future self: “I’ll forgo some pleasure now to prevent greater future pain.”

But it’s only the adult who doesn’t steal for the simple principle that stealing is wrong. And to steal—even if they got away with it!—would make them feel worse about themselves.