Daffodils

Originally uploaded by nodigio

This blog isn’t all about disasters and surviving them. It’s certainly not about The End Of The World As We Know It/We’re All Gonna Die! It is a survival blog, and while it’s about all kinds of survival, mostly it’s about being an adult in a world that can sometimes be hostile.

There was a time when the majority of people knew who the adults were, and it was pretty clear when a person passed from childhood to adulthood. The responsibilities and skills were self-evident. Those who didn’t get them were cared for by those who did, or they died. Life was fairly cut and dried in that way.

Nowadays, we have thousands of people who should be adults who are still acting like and being treated like teenagers (or younger!). Most of us don’t know how to live as adults, although we continue to age and take on some appearances of being adult: marriage, jobs, living away from our parents, purchasing big dollar items by ourselves. Most of our daily needs are met by other people, though. We abuse ERs and 911 (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/05/29/ap/strange/main5048176.shtml) for minor issues we should – as adults – be able to handle reasonably ourselves. We buy the bulk of our food prepared by someone else and an amazing number of adults have no clue how to provide for their own basic needs. We don’t know how to civilly handle disputes, how to resolve conflicts, to compromise so everyone is content if not happy, how to shop responsibly, how to budget, how to anticipate and save, and it doesn’t matter if we do know how to drop and roll in case of a house fire. Housefires don’t happen as often as conflicts.

So this blog is about survival – living in this world as an adult. I try to cover as many situations as I can think of, from civilized driving to doing your own laundry to cooking to handling a botched food order to knowing when and how to use an emergency room as well as the Big Things: tornadoes, volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, biological warfare, living in a war zone, or nuclear winter.

There’s a lot to being an adult. All of childhood is meant to be spent laying the groundwork for becoming an adult. The teen years are when we are supposed to be trying on adult behaviors with a safety net of adults guiding us along the way. And then, at some point, close to or even within the teen years, we get to be actual adults. Maybe not wise ones, but still acknowledged as adults and allowed to be adults.

Somewhere along the way, that progress from infant to adult stopped. We kept going through the biological processes, but we no longer acquired the skills or had the experiences that would allow us to properly become adults. Childhood was glorified and we became locked into it until we reached an age where we felt we could claim adulthood, then we jealously guarded that territory from all comers – forcing the teens into an artificial infancy, hedged with restrictions and severe punishments for daring to attempt to gain the skills and experiences they would need to join us as adults. We can’t be bothered to teach them, so we force them to be less than they should be.

Granted, this doesn’t happen to everyone or we’d really be screwed as a society and world, but it happens to enough people that we need someone to show others how to be an adult. So far, I’ve just been imparting random adult skills. I’m not sure I should be the one who shows the steps to achieving adulthood, but I don’t see too many other people stepping up to do this, so I’ll make my attempt.

Ideally, we’d have started this learning process as toddlers, when we desperately wanted to mimic what our parents did – playing “cook”, “maid”, “mail carrier”, “lawn carer”, and so on. This is why so many old fashioned toys were smaller versions of adult tools and why the most popular toys remain ones that resemble adult tools. As we grew up, we wanted to copy what we saw adults doing, and since we were divorced from what the adults actually were doing, we emulated what we saw them doing – their leisure activities, and assumed that was what it meant to be adult – drugs, drinks, smokes, dancing, racing, traveling, parties – having fun. That’s what we grew up thinking adulthood was like.

And when it wasn’t, we felt angry and cheated. We imposed a dual standard on our children: they had to be carefree, happy children and at the same time they weren’t allowed to anything which might threaten our perception of that idyllic childhood. And if they broke our arbitrary rules, we punished them with the most stringent adult punishments.

Small wonder we have so many grown ups who don’t feel as if they are adults unless they break a rule. It was the only way to learn if they qualified for adult punishments, which meant they were indeed adults.

Those who don’t break rules spend their lives wondering if they really are grown up.

Recently there have been lists and articles written on how to tell if you’ve become an adult. They’ll include things like getting married, having babies, buying a house – but these aren’t the real hallmarks of being an adult. They are just the trappings, the visible stuff that isn’t as limited to “adult” as some people would like to think.

So I thought, as a first step towards achieving adulthood, I’d join them in making my own list. It’s not organized in a progressive growing-up stages way because, if you’re reading this, you’re probably already grown up age wise and giving it to you as “toddlers learn this, this, and this; preschoolers that, that, and that; primary schoolers all this, middle schoolers all that” and so on is irrelevant. What you want is a list of traits and characteristics that will help you determine what you’ve already accomplished towards becoming an adult and where your gaps might be.

So, in no particular order, here are the things I think are defining traits of adulthood:

+ Adults understand their actions have consequences.
+ Adults either know or can reasonably predict what those consequences are.
+ Adults are prepared to deal with the consequences arising from their actions no matter how hard it is, how expensive it may be, or how long it takes to deal with them.
+ Adults accept responsibility for what they did or didn’t do.
+ Adults have the ability to plan their lives and the adaptability to alter those plans at need: employment, job loss, health issues, disasters, death (theirs and family members’), care of property and reputation.
+ Adults have acquired the skills needed to provide for their basic needs and make their lives comfortable, from household management and budgeting to employment to leisure activities.
+ Adults take an active part in their governance, regardless of how time consuming or expensive it may seem, because how they are governed controls almost everything else they do.
+ Adults take an active part in caring for their community – from maintaining public areas to helping those who need it to planning for the needs of the entire community.
+ Adults understand the importance of manners and will deploy them frequently.

Yes, I know some of this will take away form your fun times, but that’s what being an adult is. It’s doing what needs to be done and dealing with the consequences. It means spending time planning so things don’t go drastically out of hand. It means sometimes sacrificing your fun for the greater good.

We are fortunate that we have such marvelous tools available to us. We can use those tools to reduce the amount of time we might otherwise have spent on adult things so we have more time for personal pleasures. The internet with its many applications can allow us to know who are elected employees are, when they’ll be up for re-election, who the campaigning candidates are and what they offer, what’s happening in City Hall, the police department, the fire department, and the community centers and agencies that affect us. We can keep track of pending legislation and act on it quickly with a few clicks of our keyboards. This is awesome. We need to encourage more of our government to move into the internet age so we can interact with and keep tabs on our elected employees and know what’s going on that will affect us directly or indirectly.

We can also keep tabs via the internet on our communities and families and friends. We can use the internet to plan special events and locate scarce resources in our area. We can use it to do all manner of adult things of this nature.

If a disaster comes and we don’t have access to the internet, we still need to develop the off-line skills of contacting and connecting with our communities – telephones, snail mail, telegrams, community meetings, and so on.

And we’ll need the physical skills of caring for ourselves: housekeeping, clothing repair, laundry, cookery, transportation and its upkeep, tool use, basic healthcare, conflict resolution, and more.

A lot of conflicts can be avoided through the use of good manners, and if a conflict still arises, manners can help show the way to resolving that conflict.

Customer service is one of the few areas where manners may not stand you in good stead. Even though the representative who answers the call can do a lot to help you, there will be issues that exceed their training and what they are legally allowed to do for you. They may know the answer and they may desperately want to help you, but their actions are monitored (and yours, too, don’t forget), and they can’t break the law to help you no matter how mannerly and polite you are. Most of them are trained to help you 95% of the time. If your customer service need is outside what they are allowed to do – say you’re calling ISP Indie because your computer won’t boot – no matter how polite and mannerly you are, ISP Indie can’t help you. They don’t service computers, they aren’t trained to troubleshoot computer issues, and neither repeating a polite request or screaming like a banshee will change that. If, on the other hand, your issue is that your computer keeps getting knocked off line or you can’t get signed on at all, that’s exactly what ISP Indi is there to help you with. Bottom line – when you contact Customer Service, be sure you’re calling the right Customer Service for your issue.

And whatever you do, it’s so not adult to whine to 911 if you don’t get the orange juice you ordered or if the overworked cashier wasn’t charmingly sweet to you.

Here’s a partial list of things adults don’t do:

+ call 911 for every little problem. You call 911 only if something’s burning, someone’s so seriously hurt they can’t be moved, you suspect a crime is in immediate progress (like a breaking and entering, not like you didn’t get all of your fast food order), or something where emergency personnel are required by law to respond.
+ go to the ER for anything not immediately life-threatening. A walk-in clinic is much faster and cheaper.
+ indulge in road rage. We’re all trying to get somewhere as quickly and safely as possible, and playing speed up and slow down games and blocking games is childish and can cause even greater delays.
+ scream at the cashier, waiter, customer service representative – they did nothing to earn your ire, although the company for whom they work might have. Reserve your anger for those who deserve it. Write a nasty letter to the CEO instead of yelling at the person on the front lines.
+ drop contact with your child(ren) after a divorce. You engendered them, they deserve your care and attention no matter how difficult it may be, or how costly. Once you’ve brought a child into the world, they are your responsibility for so long as you or they live. That responsibility changes as they age, obviously, but they will always need you. Dropping out of their lives is a childish thing to do.
+kidnapping your child from a spouse, former spouse, ex-lover. There are very rare circumstances where a child needs to be rescued from an abusive parent – and those are best handled through agencies and authorities that should be able to sort matters out and help the child. Adults should be able to take care of themselves and ought to be taking care of the child, but childish grown-ups won’t.

I’m sure you can think of many more incidents that demonstrate the lack of maturity in a person of a legally adult age. The news is full of it.