I'm Only Here for the WiFi (17 page)

If we ever needed a perfect example of expectation as opposed to brutal, brutal reality when it comes to entering the once rosy-seeming era of being a grown-up, consider the whole mess of student loans. There we were, idealistic and fresh-faced, ready to get all this book learnin' so we could be well on our way to a nondescript job that fulfills all our emotional and financial needs while reaffirming that we belong to an educated, superior class of society because we made the temporary yet crucial investment in a college degree. And then there was the whole part after the fact, after all that Pell Grant money got siphoned off into bottles of Rikaloff and Mad Dog, when no one gives a fuck about anything you did unless it was engineering or computer science, and you're basically just going to have to work at a restaurant and live with your parents for a while, and put an egregious amount of your weekly earnings toward repaying a debt that you refuse to even acknowledge the full extent of.

Our lives in the real world have started off with about as cold a bitch slap as one could possibly ask for—in the financial department, no less, where we are least equipped to deal with it—and yet
debt is but a drop in the bucket against an ocean of all the things we have to learn. Regardless of whether we want to catch up to those around us and build something out of our Credit Cards Gone Crazy lives, we're going to have to eventually fashion ourselves into something resembling a coherent, responsible adult.

What do we think of, though, when we think of an adult? Surely we don't think of ourselves. We more likely think of our parents, or authority figures from childhood—people who were seemingly let in on a sacred guide to life that explains all of the more complex inner workings of the world around them. When you scraped a knee, or had a question about math class, or had your tiny little heart broken in a playground dispute, adults were there with the kind of sage advice that would seem like gospel to your naive eyes. Adults were almost a separate species, something that you could certainly never become—at least not if you didn't take this magical night class that they all seemed to attend, which taught them all the tricks and shortcuts to living life knowledgeably. (We're excluding the more drunken-or-cat-covered aunts and uncles in our lives whom we knew, from a very young age, were not quite in the grown-up column. For argument's sake, let's pretend they don't exist.)

The real surprise, of course, comes when you find out that none of this navigating-daily-life-with-a-bit-of-panache-and-intelligence shit comes with SparkNotes. While we were all convinced that there was some mystical hallway you passed through
between school and real life, where a series of benevolent wizards were going to come teach you how to balance your checkbook and mow the lawn at regular intervals, it turns out that you basically just stop going to school at a certain point and then it's like “'K, cool, now get a job, human sloth. It's time for you to start contributing to society.” (And no matter how much ugly crying you do, The Man isn't going to suddenly absolve your debt and give you a sweet apartment to live in rent-free. I tried.)

The bottom-line idea here is that you're basically going to have to figure everything out by yourself, no matter how much they tried to convince us that that one Home Ec class in seventh grade was going to make domestic life a worry-free dance in a mint julep fountain. So much of what constitutes “being a responsible person” is just stuff you discover as you go along, usually by making terrible, expensive, heartbreaking mistakes and falling flat on your face in front of important people. The only way you're going to know not to date the gorgeous, condescending cheater with the chest tattoo is to date him and have your soul urinated on by his callousness. The only way you're going to understand how important maintaining a good budget is is to find yourself at the crossroads of “Everything is expensive” and “Oh, fuck, I have no money.” The only way you're going to stop getting fucked over on apartments is by having it happen one time and realizing that you probably shouldn't sublet from a cokehead you found on Craigslist who insists on being paid in $100 bills.

And let's not even pretend that we're in the ballpark of officially considering ourselves fully grown. Yes, technically we can sign contracts and we're expected to pay bills and not make verbal agreements for important financial decisions, but we are still very much amateurs. We are legally adults, but much more in the “underpaid assistant” phase of the ordeal than the “respected upper management” stage. There are going to be achievements and goalposts and obstacles that mark the road toward being a fully functioning grown-up, and we have passed only a few of them. Of course, this doesn't mean that we can throw up our hands and be like, “Welp, fuck it, I'm just going to treat people like shit when it suits me and drain my checking account on a regular basis because I'm young and beautiful and immortal.” It just means that the stumblings and hesitant false starts are to be expected.

We'll all occasionally joke about how “Oh, God, I'm so old” when you see a group of fourteen-year-olds standing in front of the movie theater sharing one stolen cigarette among ten people and making out with each other wearing what appear to be JNCO jeans—but we know that we're not really old. In fact, the only reason we can even say things like that and get the kind of hesitant laugh we do is because we know that we sound like enormous, self-absorbed dickheads when we go off about how world-weary we are at the ripe old age of twenty-five. If anything, we're terrified at how young we are in comparison to a world that seems very much grown-up and not accommodating to people
who are having a hard time figuring things out and/or making ends meet. We'll joke about our stodginess, but we know that we're still collectively getting our bearings.

Which is perhaps why it's so disorienting when we see people around us doing things like getting married, moving away, having children, or making decisions with someone other than themselves at the forefront of their minds. Sure, it's easy to mock the first parent among you and point out all the hilarious, semi-irritating-for-those-around-them things that come with having a kid, but at least some of that mockery stems from a twitchy kind of nervousness. Every time our friends and loved ones get older, every time they take a conscious step forward toward an invisible goalpost marked
maturity,
we wonder if we are falling too far behind. No one lives in a vacuum, and to pretend that the growth of those around us isn't a little terrifying would be disingenuous. We are all constantly making small increments of progress, but there are undeniably big social and personal markers that draw a clear line in the sand through your life. It may be funny to tease the first parent, but what about the last? Will the person who takes the longest to jump these life hurdles (if she does so at all) become the subject of mockery or, worse, pity?

We are happy for our friends and their achievements, of course. We want them to find the spouse of their dreams, or move to the country that suits them best, or do whatever they want in life, no matter how far away from us, geographically and emotionally, it
may take them. But there is going to be a part of us that says, “No, wait, come back,” even if we don't vocalize it. And it's not just asking for them to stay the same, it's asking yourself. It's imploring everything around you and within you to remain safe, and familiar, and young, and free of the real cares of life, which start to look scarier and more difficult as we get older. As long as no one is making these big changes, or declaring that he is becoming a new person with new goals and priorities, nothing needs to be called into question. If the gang is still together and going to the same happy hour, what is there to fear? It is only when someone breaks off or reminds you that his life is continuing to evolve, even if yours is not, that we are forced to confront just how much comfort we find in stability.

Recently, a friend my age was having a child, and, beyond the initial feelings of “Oh, my God, that's so awesome and weird!,” there were a million and one questions about what this meant for every life it touched. Was she ready? What does it mean to be “ready”? Would I be ready to do the same thing if the opportunity presented itself? How much of my wanting to have a child is based on society's insistence that it is my feminine destiny to have one, and how much of it is genuine? Will this make her into a different person? Is that a bad thing? What will this child be like? What will all our children be like, and the generation they belong to? Of course it's selfish to ask all these questions about yourself upon hearing news that is undeniably centered in someone
else's life, but it is also human. There are people who say that they are totally unaffected by the choices their friends make and the lifestyles they live, but those people are full of shit. We are all susceptible to peer pressure and comparison, even if it's ugly to admit. I'll be real here, though: Few things have inspired in me greater existential terror than seeing the inside of my friend's uterus pop up nonchalantly on my news feed.

These signifiers of serious development, aside from indicating that we're each taking meaningful steps in the direction of the life we want to be living, are clear reminders of how different the twenties can look on different people. Some people are getting married at twenty-two and settling down in a moderately priced condo they love decorating and posting photos of on Facebook. Some people are having a hard time holding down a job for more than three weeks at a time that doesn't involve following soap bubble artists around music festivals and being paid in burritos with doses of acid in them. Some people are staying in the city they grew up in and doing a whole lot of the same things you remember them doing in high school. And none of these are better or worse than the other (even if music festival guy may regret not building any kind of skill set/nest egg when he begins to lose his hair), but you are going to be surrounded by all of them.

In fact, simply by being in constant proximity to people who, despite their same age bracket, live lives nothing like one another, you may start to gain a little more perspective on what it is that
you want to be doing. Even if you are, say, putting in forty hours a week in an office job you're perfectly content with, there is a good chance that you are going to be friends with—at least in the online sense—people who are eschewing that lifestyle completely. They may be taking a road trip across the country and performing their music in dive bars, or setting up a booth at renaissance fairs and selling all the beaded jewelry that is not quite twee enough to make it onto Etsy. And in looking at these images, at the people who are doing things with their life and their youth that you never really considered a possibility, you may feel a snide sense of superiority or you may feel envious. You may feel as though whatever you're doing isn't good enough, or isn't fun enough. And they very well may look at you and see the picture of “true adult” that they have never really been able to capture themselves.

The trick is not to imagine that this is some kind of awards ceremony at the end of an Olympic event, where everyone is being put on pedestals according to how well they are performing and ranked in direct competition with one another. While it's true that certain quantifiable factors go into “where everyone is,” such as salary, there is no magical rule of the universe stating that for each additional dollar someone earns in comparison to you, she is going to be that much happier. There are plenty of arbitrary ways that we could categorize one another and attempt to quantify our exact level of personal fulfillment, but the truth is, we'll never really know. The second you stop looking around
at everyone growing up in positive ways and thinking about how pathetic and stunted your own personal progress is, that's the second you can start really enjoying things. Of course, this is much easier said than done.

It's arguably more difficult now than it has ever been to simply let go of the comparisons with your peers while simultaneously remaining happy for what they are doing. Every day, whether we want to or not, we are bombarded with images and updates and self-congratulatory posts about all the wonderful things that are happening for them. (Or constant, minute-by-minute breakdowns of what unemployed people are thinking about/listening to while they chill out on social media all day.) Everywhere we look, we find a new update on what is happening in the life of someone we're not even sure we want to know, a person with whom we've long since lost the ability to relate to, but who still fills our online life with bursts of “Look what I'm doing!” There is a sort of grotesque desire to look-while-not-seeing, to absorb every last bit of this information without ever feeling as if you're prying. (No one wants to feel as if they're too heavily invested in the goings-on of their extended group of acquaintances.)

But we are prying. And we want people to do it. It is the reason we most often take to our various platforms every time something good happens to us; we want to confirm that it happened, and hear how proud of us everyone is, and bask in the joy for as long as is socially acceptable. We are all constantly marinating
in this tepid stew of everyone else's humblebragging, of the more gratuitous moments we allow ourselves to announce what awesome things have been happening in our lives. No matter how much we don't want to engage too deeply, no matter how often we feel that we are too well-informed about everyone else just by browsing a few home pages, this is the environment we exist in. Escaping it—or at least rising above it—is about as complicated as it is futile. We'll always be able to find out about what is going on in everyone else's world. (Hell, your friends might even
call
you to tell you the good news.)