What kind of grownup I want to be

the standard I'm trying to live up to

In my last post, about what I wanted out of my marriage, I mentioned that a high-quality committed monogamous relationship is one of the only reliable ways I know for producing a grownup. Someone reasonably asked: what is a grownup, and how do you spot them?

I think everyone needs to work out their own particular answer to this question. But in the interest of cultivating the virtue of vision, here’s my current idea of what a grownup is. As with the marriage post, I’d like to emphasize that this is the high standard I’m aspiring to, not a statement about who I am able to be consistently.

If you’re a grownup, you:

> Know what game you’re playing and endorse it with open eyes

Fine to be a bachelor poet chasing your heart through seaport bars and desert highways. Fine to be a family man who is neurotic about hiring the exact right babysitter. Fine to be a girlboss, fine to be a tradwife. As long as you understand the game you’re playing, your motives for playing it, and its likely effects on the world, and endorse it given the information you have.

> Can work with your opposite energies

If you’re independent, have you owned up to your needy dependent squishy parts? If you’re an empath with big watery eyes who loves merging with people, can you take care of yourself? If you’re a serious type A high-achiever, what’s your relationship like with play? If you’re a clownish sort, can you see the virtue in taking one or two things seriously?

> Understand why things are happening

There is a certain age at which it stops being cute to constantly say, “Why does this keep happening to me?” Because you are causing it to happen. Try to understand how you engineer the repetitive occurrences in your life. Do not continuously run from the truth about your behavior.

> Reduce, not increase, the ambient level of drama

Some people volatilize the surrounding area, leaving behind a string of conflicts everywhere they go. Some people have a civilizing effect and help nearby conflicts reach harmonious conclusion. NB that conflict avoidance is just a form of deferring the drama with interest. Have you squashed all of your beefs, and stopped producing new ones, to the extent possible?

> Mend, rather than break, more generally

You just make the world around you better, in whatever way is currently practical, at least a little bit.

> Give and receive mentorship

In general: your excess capacity and knowledge are going to those who need it, and you’re also consciously looking to absorb what you don’t know from your elders and superiors. You’re neither excessively humble about your expertise, or shy about the fact that you still have a lot to learn.

> Have self-awareness, but are not primarily self-focused

You understand your own baggage and shadows, but your whole life isn’t about perfecting yourself, or ridding yourself of every last particle of micro-baggage. The full range of emotion is open to you, and you’re also happy to acknowledge that your emotions may not be the point of a given situation. Some sort of healthy cyclic balance between working on yourself and working on the world.

> Have some sense of the spiritual

If you don’t know what people are talking about, experientially, when they talk about God, or Buddha Nature, or whatever your favorite label is, you are missing a large part of the human experience that is importantly humbling and helpful in a bunch of other ways. You can think whatever you want about the metaphysical claims that people attach to spiritual experience — it’s totally coherent, although hard to do in practice, to have classical spiritual experiences and remain a committed atheist. But if you just have no idea what that Thing is, you’re missing a basic point of life. Once you are not missing that basic thing, there is then the tremendously challenging lifelong project of understanding how to live in alignment with it, a subject that nobody can definitively crack.

> Do not see your immediate relationships or the world through the lens of the drama triangle

Grownups are not surrounded by rescuers, villains, and/or victims to be rescued. This includes your view of society. Implied in this point is that some entire political movements are not composed of grownups, or, rather, infantilize the people who subscribe to them. I stand by that implication.

> Can basically handle your shit

Would I trust you with a baby? How about assembling something rudimentary with clear instructions to follow? Can you be counted on to keep your commitments — the important ones, at least? Have you stopped counting on the ambient goodwill of adults who are willing to pick up the slack when you bail on shit?

> Don’t confuse your impressions of people with reality

We are all doomed to only really experience people via our particular interactions with them. These interactions are shaped by the specific persona and motives we show up with. As a result, someone’s response to us might be extremely different from another response they just performed an hour ago with someone else. Those who fully get this can’t take their opinions of people too seriously.

> Maintain balance of dignity and humility

Every day, you wake up in a biosphere that manufactures just the right blend of gases required to power the sack of infinitesimal machines that is your body. You arise in a dwelling that likely wasn’t built by you, assembled with tools dreamt up by many others. If, standing atop this giant interdependent web, you credit yourself for your good fortune, you are a child. However, it is quite silly also to refuse compliments or pretend not to see your own gifts. (Credit for the concept of “dignity and humility” goes to Margo Fisher.)

Photo credit goes to William Eggleston. Thank you to Cate Hall, Catherine Olsson, and Mark Estefanos for your input on this piece.