So… I’ve Written a Rather Silly Book

I have spent quite a lot of my life writing about reasonably serious things. Politics, society, history, technology, people, the strange things we do to one another and the even stranger things we do to ourselves. Occasionally I write something simply because I find it interesting. Every now and again, however, an idea comes along that is difficult to explain without making it sound considerably more sensible than it actually is.

This is one of those ideas.

I’ve written a book called How to Be an Adult: A Mostly Serious Guide to a Ridiculous Subject.

The premise is fairly simple. At some point in life, we apparently become adults. There is no ceremony, no handbook and, as far as I can establish, no responsible adult waiting nearby to explain what happens next. One day you are worrying about homework and whether your parents will let you stay up late, and eventually you are expected to understand mortgages, taxation, insurance, washing machines, relationships, pensions, passwords and why the boiler has suddenly started making that noise.

Nobody seems to know when the handover actually took place.

So I thought it was probably time somebody documented the experience.

The book takes a rather different approach to the usual self-help manual. Instead of telling you that you need to optimise your morning routine, manifest abundance, become a high-performance human being and wake up at four o’clock to drink something involving spinach, I decided to examine the considerably more realistic business of simply getting through ordinary adult life.

We begin with money… specifically the peculiar adult experience of receiving some and then watching it disappear while wondering whether you have been robbed. We move through employment and the fine art of looking busy, the management of a home that apparently requires constant attention, the never-ending responsibility of feeding yourself, and the strange world of paperwork in which merely existing is apparently insufficient evidence that you exist.

Then things become more complicated.

There are relationships, conversations, social events and the increasingly elaborate rules surrounding communication with other human beings. There is technology, which was supposedly invented to make life easier but has somehow resulted in most of us becoming unpaid technical support departments for ourselves, our families and occasionally the printer.

There is a chapter about health, another about getting older, and one devoted to the rather advanced adult skill of knowing when you don’t actually know what you’re talking about. There is also a chapter about saying no, because apparently two letters can be one of the most difficult words in the English language when somebody has just asked you to do something you really don’t want to do.

And then there is The Adult Emergency… that point at which ordinary life stops being ordinary and you discover whether all those years of experience have actually taught you anything useful.

Finally, after all this preparation, the Institute of Practical Adulthood presents you with The Final Examination.

Yes, there is an Institute.

It was founded in 1847.

Its motto is You Will Learn Eventually.

Its accreditation status is, naturally, currently under review.

The Institute is responsible for the entire course and has helpfully provided the reader with a comprehensive educational framework for becoming an adult, despite the rather awkward fact that nobody involved seems entirely certain what an adult actually is. This felt appropriate. After all, most of us spend our lives assuming that everyone else has received some secret instruction manual which, for reasons nobody can explain, was somehow omitted from our own copy.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this is probably one of the great shared experiences of being human. We imagine that adulthood represents some destination… a point at which everything finally makes sense and we become the competent people we assumed our parents were.

Then we become those adults ourselves and discover that our parents were probably making quite a lot of it up as well.

There is something rather comforting about that.

The book isn’t really about becoming perfect. It isn’t even particularly interested in becoming impressive. It is about learning how to deal with uncertainty, responsibility, other people, mistakes, change and the occasional complete collapse of whatever plan you had carefully constructed.

In other words, it is about being human while everyone keeps calling you an adult.

And this is only the first of what I hope will become an ongoing collection of rather unnecessary books examining ordinary life with entirely excessive seriousness.

I have already got ideas for others.

Some of them probably shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a publishing platform.

Which, naturally, makes me want to write them even more.

How to Be an Adult: A Mostly Serious Guide to a Ridiculous Subject is now available.

The Institute of Practical Adulthood would like to remind you that successful completion of the book does not guarantee successful completion of adulthood.

But then again…

Neither does anything else.