Not Ready to Adult Yet: A Totally Ill-informed Guide to Life

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WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?

Despite heavy reliance on my own personal experience – I mean, ‘myself’ is what I know best, the only thing I can truly call myself ‘an expert’ in – this book will not be an autobiographical romp through my life to date. I’ve not done enough stuff yet. You gotta think word count. I would really have to drag out that time I went caravanning with Pam and Bill in order to achieve anything other than pamphlet status. And no one wants to hear about that holiday. A boy called Craig chopped a wasp in half but otherwise it was largely uneventful.

Instead I’ll talk about my generation – millennials. They’ve got loads of stories. They’ll know loads of Craigs. Craigs who’ll have done things other than demonstrate serial-killer tendencies during a long weekend in Moffat. The millennial was born between roughly 1981 and 2002, basically (although not exclusively) old enough to remember what they were up to during 9/11 but too old to grasp the notion of watching young lads with mad fringes playing the computer game Minecraft on YouTube. It’s a generation famed – should the copious BuzzFeed articles be believed – for failing to grow up, never being able to properly ‘adult’.

That’s me, I’m like that, but why are we all perceived this way? If that’s also you then strap in. If it’s not then don’t you worry your non-millennial head. Most of the stuff I’m going to talk about here is universal and hopefully funny regardless of the digits you have etched onto your birth certificate. As well as talking about my generation, I will also talk to my generation, in a series of conversations with fellow millennials about their own personal journey through life, their hopes and fears, and the lessons they have learnt on their path to adulthood. A few of them have got well over a million followers on Instagram, so that will be bloody exciting.

I hope that through the process of researching and writing about my generation I will better understand how we work, and as a result better understand myself. Why was that night I swore at a child such a pivotal point in my personal development? Why does that precious ‘it’ always manage to slip me by no matter how much luck is thrown my way? And, believe me, luck is what we all have in abundance, even if it doesn’t always feel like it. You are lucky. You’re reading this book, which means you’re most likely from a first-world country, one of those that allows freedom of speech and has sufficient educational facilities to make literacy the norm, and you even have enough expendable income to be able to buy this in the first place – unless you’ve nicked it, of course. We’re bloody lucky and privileged and all the rest, yet sometimes it doesn’t feel enough. Why? What are we so scared of?

FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION

That night stays with me to this day for the simple reason that it was the first time in my short lifespan that one of my biggest fears became a reality – a fear all millennials share when it comes to life: the fear of doing it wrong. Fucking up. Becoming an adult is scary and easy to get wrong, so this fear of fucking it up hangs over us like a rain cloud hangs over a cartoon character having a bad day. University costs a fortune, reality-TV stars are millionaires by the age of 21 and everyone on social media seems to be smashing life (as well as avocados). So if you take a wrong turn at any point, well, why did you even bother? Success has changed from a marathon to a sprint and the starting line is very much over-capacity. You’d better make it to the finish and you’d better do it quick! I mean, who wants success in their fifties? You can’t even look good in the photos.

The really weird thing is that for years failure was seen as a necessary rite of passage to success. Like many of you reading this I can often find myself deep in a late-night YouTube hole. And when I’m properly stuck down there, one of my most common places of solace, after blackheads being popped and kittens performing on musical instruments, is the inspirational talk, normally a celebrity collecting an honorary degree with a rolled-up certificate in one hand, a funny hat on his or her head and some inspirational music in the background, which I do hope was added in after. I mean, surely even the most wet-behind-the-ears graduate would realise the ridiculous levels of self-importance attached to bringing your own Enya CD to a university speech. Anyway, the point is that during these talks failure is hyped up beyond belief, fetishised to the young people in the slightly less funny hats who look up in awe.

These stories begin in various ways: ‘I didn’t land my first proper acting job until I was 40,’ ‘I had several failed companies before making my millions aged 55,’ ‘I sawed my own arm off with a penknife.’ Yet despite the severity and diversity of the challenges our speakers have faced, they always end the same … ‘But look at me now.’ You don’t get much more adult than that! Standing in front of an audience being open and frank about all your failings but still managing to have achieved something special – now that is good-quality adulting.

Failure today, however, simply isn’t an option. You must succeed young, without any periods spent on the dole and ideally with all your limbs still attached. Failure to meet this new-found desire to succeed quickly leaves us in a constant state of flux, doubting our every decision. It still blows my mind when I’m watching some reality TV show and I see a 14-year-old being interviewed backstage saying something like ‘I’ve been working my whole life for this’ or ‘This is my one shot.’ I feel like grabbing them and screaming, ‘There’s no rush – when I was 14 I was sitting in a caravan watching someone chop a wasp in half!’

Despite the knowledge that time is on my side I have those moments of doubt every day; sometimes it’s a light murmur under the surface and other times it’s debilitating in its severity, but it’s always there. The feeling that I’m not good enough, I’ve not achieved enough, I’m not happy enough, that’s not good enough, they’re not good enough, I’m not thin enough, my photos don’t get liked enough, my job isn’t impressive enough, I don’t earn enough and so on. It will continue, I imagine, until death. Sweet, blissful death. And even then I’ll be thinking, ‘Oh Christ, I’ve only gone and died – this is embarrassing.’

As depressing as it may sound, these worries are necessary for our journey into adulthood. Without a fear of failure or a desire to achieve we would all just coast along, never really achieving anything. We’ve all got that mate who’s seemingly happy all the time. Who wants to be like them? They’re creepy – constantly smiling, never hungover, big fan of their boss, constantly eating ‘superfoods’. Get in the bin. I’d rather be in a Wetherspoons chatting to my equally hungover friend Karen about how Jim from accounts is a fucking prick, his eyes are too close together, I hate those ‘wacky ties he wears’ and ‘correctomundo’ isn’t an actual word, it’s a waste of oxygen.

Young people today seem to fail to realise how young they actually are. If you are under the age of 25 you have no fucking clue how many bites at the cherry you actually might have. Fuck up a bit. It’s really important. Fuck up. Hell, if you’re reading this on a bus, punch the person sitting next to you. You could go to jail for two years, get out and still be eligible for a young person’s railcard. You are so young. Yet despite this knowledge of our youth, a fear of failing is what seems to pin our generation down. Anyway, enough waffle, let’s get started. Here we go – an adult man who once feared failure, avoided it at all costs, will now retell each and every failure he’s ever had to you, the reader, so you can realise that maybe failure isn’t all that bad.