Growing up is never easy, and millennials have turned the struggle into a slang word: “adulting,” with dedicated memes that say things like, “I’m done adulting for the rest of the day” and “Adulting is hard. I deserve wine.”
“When you say, ‘I’m adulting,’ it means you’re taking care of business,” explained Kelly Williams Brown, author of Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps. “Millennials have anxieties that other people have it together, and they don’t. No one feels like a grown-up. It’s not like you wake up one day and have all of these capabilities when you turn 18 or 21.”
While every generation has, to some extent, felt like they’re faking it at grown-up life, Mark Potts, head of insights at Mind-share North America, said,…