When I was 30, I once thought to myself, "When my parents were my age, they had 3 kids and lived on a Navy base in another country. I still feel like a child that has fooled people into thinking I'm an adult."

I'm 43 now and I'm still not convinced that I'm not 3 kids stacked in a trench coat. Despite having a great career that pays for an upper-middle class lifestyle, when I travel first class or go out to a fancy dinner, I feel like I'm merely cosplaying as a functional and respectable adult that has their shit together. When I bought my house at 33 years old, I was thinking "Should someone be calling the state AG or something, they're allowing a child to sign mortgage papers".

Someone once told me this feeling is pretty common and that it goes away once your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed in 2019 and it definitely has not gone away.

My theory is that this feeling is the result of not enough socialization with people of varying ages. Their behavior towards you in aggregate grounds you to your age subconsciously, something like that.

> Making life is a normal part of life, and it's quite sad that we don't acknowledge the capacity of young adults.

I think it’s more that we’re all just faking it. The thirty or fourty year old that thinks they know better than the 20 year old is deceiving themselves. The differences between individuals are much larger than the differences between the averages at those ages.

Once people take responsibility for their lives and other people's lives, lots of things change. Perhaps the zeitgeist of behaving like a child in your 20s is just an emergent behaviour coming out of a consumerist economy?

I had the same experience a decade ago being ten years younger than everyone else at the park or birthday party.