The Absurdity of Adulting

Introduction

Somewhere around age twenty two, most of us expect a switch to flip. One day you are a kid who needs a permission slip signed, and the next you are a fully formed Adult who knows how to fill out a W-4, understands what a deductible is, and can look a mechanic in the eye without flinching. That Adult has a system for meal planning. That Adult flosses. That Adult definitely knows what a Roth IRA is, has known for years, and can explain it at a dinner party without breaking a sweat.

That Adult does not exist. You have been waiting for a person who was never coming.

Here is the secret nobody hands you at eighteen, along with your diploma and your first stack of confusing mail: everybody is faking it. Not faking it in the fun, confident, "fake it till you make it" way people put on posters. Faking it in the real way, the way where your landlord is Googling "how to fix a leaking faucet" fifteen minutes before he shows up to fix your leaking faucet. The way where your doctor double checks a drug interaction instead of reciting it from memory, because that is literally what she is trained to do, and it still throws you the first time you notice her doing it. The way where the person auditing your taxes has, at some point, also cried in a Target parking lot over a broken air conditioner quote.

Adulthood was never a destination. It is closer to a very long improv scene that nobody warned you was improv. You walked onstage assuming everyone else had a script, so you spent years quietly panicking that you had lost yours, when the truth is there was never a script in the first place. Everyone is making up their lines as they go, checking their phone under the table, and hoping the scene partner does not notice the flop sweat.

This book is not going to hand you the script either, because it does not exist. What it will do is lower the bar to somewhere you can actually clear it, and make you laugh along the way, because the gap between "the Adult you imagined" and "the human you actually are" is one of the funniest, most universal jokes going. You are not behind. You are not uniquely bad at this. You are just a person, doing the thing every other person is doing badly in private and pretending to do well in public.

We are going to tour the absurd rituals that make up modern adulthood, one by one. We will start in the kitchen, that theater of lies where a drawer full of single use gadgets coexists with a diet of cereal eaten standing at the counter. From there we head into the bureaucracy of existence, where a single form can defeat a grown adult who has otherwise never lost a fight in his life. We will talk about money, the least understood substance most of us handle daily. We will talk about the body you are now, inconveniently, in charge of maintaining. We will talk about the home that seems to silently judge you, the social performance of appearing to have your act together, the costume you put on for work, and finally, the myth of the Together Person, the imaginary rival you have been comparing yourself to this entire time.

Each chapter ends with a short, real checklist. Nothing fancy, nothing that requires a course or a coach or a new app. Just a lower, saner bar for what counts as doing fine, because doing fine is actually enough.

Nobody knows what they are doing. Once you accept that, adulthood stops being a test you are failing and starts being a joke you are finally in on. Let's go find out how absurd this really gets.

Chapter 1: The Kitchen of Lies

Somewhere along the way, you absorbed a very specific fantasy. In it, you come home from work, put on a clean apron, and turn a handful of fresh vegetables into a glowing, colorful dinner. You do this every night. Your knife skills are excellent. Nothing goes bad in your fridge, because you are, deep down, a person who has it together.

This person does not exist. Not really. Even people who genuinely enjoy cooking are not doing this every single night. The rest of us are eating standing up at the counter, straight out of the pan, wondering if cereal counts as dinner again. It does. We'll get there.

The gap between the fantasy chef and the actual, tired human being making dinner is where most of your food guilt lives. Close that gap, and a huge chunk of adult misery disappears with it.

The Crisper Drawer Is a Hospice, Not a Promise

Every grocery trip starts the same way. You walk in as the person you intend to become next week: someone who eats a rainbow, who meal-preps, who has never once let a vegetable turn to liquid in a drawer. You buy the spinach. You buy the bell peppers. You buy the head of cauliflower you've read about online, the one that becomes a pizza crust if you have four spare hours and a cheesecloth.

You put it all in the crisper drawer, which is really a small glass hospice for good intentions. By Wednesday, you're tired. You order food. By the weekend, the spinach has become a dark green situation you don't want to look directly at, and you throw the whole bag away without opening it.

Here's the part nobody says out loud: this isn't a personal failure, it's a design flaw in how we grocery shop. We buy for the person we hope to be, not the person who's actually going to be standing in the kitchen on a Tuesday at 7 p.m. with forty minutes of energy left in the tank. The fix isn't more willpower. It's buying food that matches your real, tired, Tuesday-night self instead of your imaginary Sunday-morning self. More on that in a minute.

The guilt cycle repeats because we keep blaming ourselves instead of blaming the plan. Once you stop buying ambitious produce you already know, deep down, you won't chop, the cycle actually breaks. You just stop setting the trap.

Redefining What Counts as a Meal

This is where you get some good news. A plate of cheese, a few crackers, some pickles, and a handful of almonds is a meal. On social media it gets called a "girl dinner" or a "boy dinner," but really it's just a very old, very normal thing: a small assortment of food that adds up to enough calories and a bit of protein. People in France build entire evenings around a plate that looks suspiciously like this. Nobody accuses them of failing at adulthood.

If you ate something, and it included a bit of protein, and you're not still hungry an hour later, you did the job. That's it. That's the bar.

Next, meet the Frozen Vegetable Amnesty. This is your official permission slip to stop buying fresh produce you know you won't get to in time. Frozen vegetables are already washed, already chopped, and they wait patiently in the freezer for as long as you need them to. They don't turn to sludge. They don't guilt-trip you from the crisper drawer. A bag of frozen broccoli or a mixed stir-fry blend, tossed in a pan with a little oil and salt, gets you real vegetables on a real plate in about six minutes. General nutrition guidance from places like the Mayo Clinic treats frozen vegetables as nutritionally comparable to fresh, since they're usually frozen at peak ripeness. There is no shame tier here. Frozen counts.

Then there's the Dishwasher Confession. If you are rinsing every dish thoroughly before loading it into a machine whose entire job is to wash dishes, you are doing two people's work for one meal. Scrape off the big stuff so you don't clog the drain, and let the machine do the rest. If something comes out less than sparkling, it rides again next cycle. The appliance can handle it. This is not a moral test.

The Cereal Exemption and What "Good Enough" Actually Means

Once a week, you are allowed to eat cereal for dinner. Not as a last resort you feel bad about at 9 p.m., but as a scheduled, sanctioned, guilt-free option. It's fortified with vitamins, it takes ninety seconds, and it means one night a week where feeding yourself requires zero decisions. Athletes call this a deload week. You can call it Tuesday.

None of this means nutrition doesn't matter at all. It just means the bar most of us are measuring ourselves against is fake. General public-health guidance, the kind you'll find from groups like the Mayo Clinic or the CDC, generally comes down to a few plain ideas: get some protein, get some produce (fresh, frozen, or canned all count), and don't skip meals to the point that you're starving and then overeating later. That's a low bar. You can clear it with a bag of frozen vegetables, a rotisserie chicken, and a box of cereal in reserve. You do not need a color-coded meal plan or a spiralizer to be "doing fine" at feeding yourself.

The meal-prepping home chef isn't the standard. It's a costume some people enjoy wearing and most people don't. Feeding yourself consistently, without dread, without waste, and without a weekly guilt spiral over rotten spinach, is the actual win.

Try This

Build your own Cereal Exemption menu: five dinners that require close to zero effort, that you are now allowed to make on repeat without a single twinge of guilt. Include at least two that use frozen vegetables. Write them down somewhere you'll actually see them, like a sticky note on the fridge, so decision-making at 6:45 p.m. becomes a matter of picking a number instead of staring into the void.

Example starting list, to adapt or replace entirely:

1. Frozen stir-fry vegetables plus a pre-cooked protein (rotisserie chicken, canned beans, or tofu) tossed with soy sauce over rice. 2. Cereal, milk, and a piece of fruit. 3. Frozen broccoli steamed in the microwave, a scoop of peanut butter noodles, and whatever protein is closest to expiring. 4. Eggs scrambled with cheese, toast, and canned or frozen fruit on the side. 5. A "dinner plate" of cheese, crackers, olives, deli meat, and nuts, no cooking required.

Pin the list up. Rotate through it without apology. That's the whole system.

End of free sample. The full book picks up right where this leaves off.