I’m a big time word nerd; I get fascinated by words I’ve never heard and marvel at the power of these little tidbits of breath and sound that have evolved into symbols to form essential building blocks of our relationships and society.  Think how a single word or phrase from the right (or wrong) person has changed the course of your day or even your life.
As such, it’s probably no surprise to anyone that I find myself engaged in a profession that allows me the opportunity to use this obsession as a means to make my bread and wine.  In my contract with the state of North Carolina, they promise to keep me gainfully employed if I hold up my end of the bargain: constructing the time and experience of youth for the purpose of their edification.  In my particular case, edification is the transmission of knowledge, concepts, and skills associated with words, thoughts, ideas, and images.  It allows me to monetize my linguistic obsession.
My current obsession on a chilly January morning is a neologism that has gained in online fluency and seems at the forefront of my current experience: adulting.  Even spellcheck wants to tell me it’s not a word, but we know how behind the curve stodgy computer programs can be from real-life experience. 

Let’s go to the masters.
The venerable Oxford English Dictionary specifies that adulting is behavior typified by the accomplishment of “mundane but necessary tasks.”  Fair, but let’s turn to a source that always seems to have its digital digit on the pulse of the people: Urban Dictionary.  While UD’s users agree with this definition in concept, they often contextualize this word with vitriol for the people who use it, ridiculing millennials who bemoan having to pay a bill or getting their oil changed as an oppressive burden, suggesting that if you’re whining about adulting on social media, you’re not an adult (“settling beef without blasting on social media” was a specific part of one definition).  Yet some users bemoan it in a much more spiritual way, the very definition of an existential crisis:  “Post adolescence when the light in your eyes fade away.”
TL:DR?  Sorry, adults have to read the fine print sometimes, and at times this adult can be overly verbose.  Essentially, adulting (if we are to believe the “experts”) characterizes life after adolescence as boring, mundane, and soul-crushing.  Moreover, there seems to be some resentment for those who refuse to conform to this.  After all, in the adult world, nobody’s paying for your broke ass, and the rest of us feel you have nothing to complain about when another adult is footing the bill.  People may give you a hand, but you begin at some level to stand on your own, or at least be a positive contribution.  Perhaps this is the best definition of being adult: not burdening those who gave you a start.  And sometimes, unfortunately, adulting means dong what you have to do, not what you want to do, as boring and soul-crushing as that sounds.
 
 
But before I start yelling the kids off my lawn and regale you with tales of double uphill snow treks to school, this reflection of adulting actually grew in a rather pleasant evening that has had me musing my own place in the adult world.  Last week, a small group of students and a friend of mine met for dinner in what has become something of an annual ritual.  When I received the dinner invitation, I already had an idea of what I wanted to do that Tuesday: go to the gym (per a new habit of exercising more) and watch the Carolina/State game (per my obsession with Carolina basketball). 
But the opportunity with this group of people was one I wouldn’t pass up.  They are the first class of HL Philosophy students I taught, and for whatever reason, me throwing them out in the hall to sit on the dirty, roach infested floors for “upper level work”—or whatever shenanigans ensued—bonded them into a tight knit group that has endured, despite them being flung to various universities across the East Coast.  And once a year, we find a way to sit down to a communion of chicken quesadillas and catch up.
But the taco shop was under repairs, and they had to settle for pizza.  But perhaps they are ready for such big life changes.  They have, after all, completed or are on the cusp of finishing their undergraduate careers, and past this step of their education, the entropy of life threatens to fling them to the four winds, and there was the recognition that once they are out of school it may be difficult to replicate this this annual communion again.  Much of our conversation was about these next steps, and for all of them, while are some are more secure in their next landing than others, there is the looming uncertainty that comes with any graduation.  Where will I move?  What will I do?  How will these next steps change who I am?
While they are mature and wise beyond their years, they are entering into the first steps of an adulting phase.  As a teacher of teenagers, it’s not a phase I generally get to see except in snippets on Facebook when I see former students go through the checkposts of life: engagement, marriage, house acquisition, parenthood.  But here I recognized that adulting is primarily an unstructured space.  The authority of childhood and adolescence has melted away, the structure of school and fabricated requirements no longer create clear necessity.  It’s a wide-open, largely undefined future.
In that absence of structure, we begin to fill our lives with habits.  Usually (at least for us Americans) it starts with employment and the patterns of behavior form around our ability to make cheddar, hopefully in a job that gives us some way to build meaning and purpose in a way that doesn’t turn the days into mindless drudgery.  But there are small habits, too.  How we choose to eat.  When and if we choose to exercise.  How we behave when the day of work is through.  Who we seek for companionship.  Who we avoid.
Soon, these habits breed our necessities.  I choose to live in a city where a car is preferable, so sometimes I have to spend the morning getting my car serviced.  I choose to be a teacher, and I choose to make my class meaningful and rigorous, so I have to grade essays.

If this is beginning to sound morose and make you feel dejected and soulless about being an adult, let’s take a break, and if you’ll stay with me, I hope this thread will help to rekindle a bit of the light in your eyes by the end.  Breaks from necessity are important in maintaining your sanity as an adult.  Even on vacations or Saturdays, I think about the work tasks I have to do.  Sometimes, you need a distraction.  Over winter break, Nic and I went to go see Vice, which we both loved and reviled in so many ways that it was a welcome retreat from our hectic teacher lives.  Of all the powerful ideas suggested in the film, the one that I keep coming back to for this purpose is that we, as American adults, fall into a vicious cycle that made it easy for all the corruption to occur right under our noses: the economics of our country often require that we work tirelessly, committing so much of ourselves to our jobs that when we are done, we often retreat to mindless entertainment to dull the pain.  And as such, all of the problems are hiding in plain sight.
Whether we are in a position to challenge the largesse of the federal government’s corruption is perhaps a post for another day.  For the purpose of this meditation, I would suggest that the same is true for us on a personal level.  Adulting, in its worse form, gets caught up in this cycle.  We create a series of necessities for ourselves and then chase those necessities to the point of exhaustion.  When given the choice, we sacrifice joy and happiness for necessity, and ignore the soul crushing that we allow to happen right under our noses.  And we tell ourselves that life is supposed to be like this. As a committed yogi, I often use this practice as a break, but I notice that even those of us who try to be mindful of our health and well-being can get caught up in doing little more than stepping off the hamster wheel just to catch a quick breath before jumping right back on. 
The uptick in the use of adulting no doubt is caused by an anxiety of an unknown future, but also an anxiety of getting caught in this cycle.  Young people often look at the worst excesses of the generations before them and say “I don’t want to be like that” (as my former students’ screeds against Boomer culture attests).  I feel it’s important for all adults, those just climbing into the adult world and those of us who have been in it for a while, to consider the perspective of existentialists like JP Sartre, who claimed at one point that all necessity is a fiction that we use to hide from the anxiety-inducing freedom that we all have, and that believing in necessity is an act of bad faith.  Those just entering into the adulting world are at a place where they are about to start laying the habits that will become the foundation for the patterns of their adult life, the foundations of who they are.  At this point, it is an amazing opportunity as the patterns we set for ourselves, if they do so consciously and harmoniously, set the foundation for the adults we grow into.  In ten years, they will look up and realize that they have become the accumulation of these patterns.
But even the best patterns can become limiting.  If you’ll allow a Taoist metaphor, consider ourselves a length of rope.  As presented, a rope can be used for so many purposes.  But often to use the rope, we must tie it in knots.  Frequently, we forget to untie the knots, and the more knots in the rope, the more it can only be used only for specific purposes based on those specific patterns, and the less it has the flexibility for many more uses.
For those of us who have been adults for some time, this evolution should be recognizable.  We fall into a pattern of habits.  Soon our lives are structured on them.  Our companionships often rely on shared interests, likes, and dislikes.  And it becomes hard to imagine that we are anything other than the knots we have tied.  If we remain conscious of why we have chosen these patterns we may remain grateful that we are undertaking these tasks.  Often when I bemoan grading papers, I remind myself that this is the outcome of the meaningful interactions I have in my class, a choice associated with the joy I feel when my former students tell me that they’ve found success that I’ve helped to build In them.
But sometimes, old patterns can wear thin.  Grading essays may be fine, but becoming overly caffeinated and sedentary may be a pattern less appealing.  After a while, we may want to change, and the opportunity is always there to do so, but changing habits seems more difficult than buying into necessity.  It becomes a shift in who we are, who we’ve become.  If you decide to drink less and hit the gym more, you won’t see your friends out at the bar as much.  And as research shows, it gets harder and harder to make new friends in adulthood.
So as my morning of meditative writing winds to a close, here is the point that will hopefully bring the light to your eyes.  First, friendship and companionship is always worth the effort.  They are the source of the best laughter and the comfort; they challenge us when we need challenging us and support us when we need support.  If we are lucky, we will cherish the freedom to change and evolve through our lives.  Some friendships, because our patterns don’t align easily, may wither, but true friendships will revel with us in our newfound joy.  As adults, friendships don’t come easily; we’re not always forced to interact, and it’s easy to retreat to patterns of shallow, isolated titillation.  Friendships, can be challenging, but at the cost of being without them, they must be nurtured.    
Secondly, sometimes, as the Tao te Ching suggests, we must untangle the knots.  At one level, this may seem difficult, and it does require the consciousness of how we form our own habits, which means being able to step back and self-evaluate and make the real hard choices of adulting.  I find that my worst habits, the ones I want to change are so much easier to relapse into when I am physically fatigued and mentally drained.  It’s so much harder to resist junk food and junk TV on a Friday afternoon, so much easier to tell myself “I’ve earned it.”   But soon new, better habits can replace the older, less useful ones. 
But those new habits can become old habits as well.  And while they might be better to some goals, they can as just as easily become their own necessity.  Going to the gym might be a better choice than eating chicken quesadillas or pizza, but it’s never a better choice than the joy of human friendship, and we should never, ever, sacrifice joy for necessity.