I was at the Office of the Monongalia County Clerk, which also happens to be the building where I had to go to pay my property taxes. In West Virginia, you pay property taxes on your car, your dog(s), and (if applicable) the number of sheep and goats you have. I did not have any sheep or goats (sadly).
The dog tax was mostly a burden of having to go directly to the municipal building. I think it was about $8 for the year.
Car taxes, on the other hand, are not nothing and this seems worth mentioning because a good number of folks seemed to have quite a few cars. Now that I think about it, some of those cars might well not have been registered. I definitely knew folks without car insurance. This was among the many things people I met in WV were without. As we say, another story for another time.
Clearly, the city had found a way to rake in some tax dollars. Morgantown is especially effective at using ticketing and impounding vehicles to this end. All of these regressive tax maneuvers very much disproportionately affect those who were already struggling to get by.
Ok, so this is a lot of front-loading…even for me.
So, I’m at the courthouse which doubles as the place where you pay your property taxes, and I get in the elevator with an armed security officer. A moment of silence. Apropos of nothing, she turns to me and says, “You know those days when you wake up and you’re like I can’t even adult today?” I think I pulled an awkward smile and awkward laugh and then the elevator door opened and I was able to escape.
What I couldn’t let go of about this interaction was that a person who was wearing a sidearm just told me that they were struggling to “adult”. This felt leaps and bounds beyond the usual eyeroll when someone mentioned “adulting”.
In a phone call, I mentioned to my mother that I disliked this (then new) term adulting – she asked what the deal was (being of The Silent Generation) and told me she actually liked it. In short, she believed that being an adult is very much a put on.
In hindsight, I agree. It’s mostly the turn of phrase that I dislike. That being said, what I really can’t handle, is the concept that someone can wake up and use a term (that sounds rather childish) and then strap on a gun and go to work. At the very least, can we agree that if you wake up and feel like you can’t “adult” and your job involves the potential for interaction that can result in the use of a deadly weapon that, just maybe, you might consider calling in for a mental health day?
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Here's an article about Kelly Williams Brown’s Adulting. It’s a look back after 10 years. A truly interesting read.
An intriguing snippet:
“As a cultural document, Adulting sums up the anxiously self-reliant ethos of early-aughts millennials as accurately as the Whole Earth Catalog summed up the back-to-the-land fantasies of early 1970s boomers.”
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What are your thoughts on “adulting”? Did you read the book? If so, looking back, does it still seem current or has it become symbolic of the times?
I've been told by peers outside of my generation(i.e. non-Millennials) that the use of "adulting" is a very Millennial term. I blame that on my age demographic growing up with the expectation of going to college, magically having a job straight out of school that provided financial stability, a house with a yard, etc all before you turn 25. The only Millennials I know who achieved that are people I grew up with in Tennessee who either have parents paying for it, or married young and have a strong joint income(though most of those couples I know also had significant financial help from their parents...). Everyone else seems to be stuck with struggling with an identity crisis between the responsibilities of adulthood without the status-symbols we were told we would have at this point, and leaning into nostalgia of simpler times of childhood. Personally, I think the term is vastly overused at this point, but that doesn't mean that the majority of us aren't completely burnt out with no remedy in sight.