Being an Adult is Annoying
22:51 |
| Credit: Jenna Mourey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPi2s1K_pgU |
For the past few years I have treated the transition from student to adult as one of the most terrifying and extreme life changes one can ever go through, second only to the trauma the unsuspecting foetus must feel when it is suddenly squeezed from its comfy, uterine home into the bright, cold world of Real People. It was a venture into the unknown, akin to Armstrong's lunar adventure except without the support and funding of the US government, and, rather like mankind's most giant leap, it felt like everything could go wrong and I would either end up catapulted into an inescapable abyss of emptiness, or exploding.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I had been wrong. Rather like being forced to breathe through my own lungs for the first time, adjusting to adult life came remarkably smoothly to me. I managed to do all the things I associate with adulthood – namely, finding a job and a house to live in – so easily that I've concluded that I must have inadvertently cashed in years of backdated good karma from moving snails from well-trodden pavements into grassy safe zones. "Terrifying", it transpires, is not the correct word to describe being a grown-up – at least, not for me. The correct choice would be more like "annoying". I was expecting graduate life to be summed up with a blood-curdling scream; it came out as more of an, "Oh, for fuck's sake."
Since leaving university and joining the rest of the Responsible Citizen Brigade I have found myself in a near-constant state of mild irritation. Some of it is uni spillover that I've been dealing with since I was eighteen, such as not owning a dishwasher, never having enough space to hang up laundry and being cut off from the supply of artisan cheese to which I became accustomed while living in my parents' house. Some of the irritations are, however, new and exciting, by which I mean intensely frustrating and make me reconsider my decision to not move back to my 18,000-population commuter-belt hometown.
Being low on cash is something to which all students without summer homes and trust funds have to become accustomed and having done a four-year degree meant that I had an extra year of preparation for the poverty that comes with being a new graduate. My salary isn't high but I'm still earning more every month than my student loan provided me with every term, so am actually better off than I have been since leaving my family home. What I was not prepared for was the amount of money that is now taken from me, not only by the British government but by being forced to buy things I neither want nor like.
I won't delve into the issue of tax here, partly because, as a socially responsible lefty liberal type, I'm in favour of taxation and partly because I have no idea how income tax actually works aside from the pre-emptive salary deductions that appear on my payslip. All I will say is that I can see why most people with communist sympathies develop them in university while they're still exempt from most taxes. The buying things I don't want, though, is a genuine problem not helped by moving into an unfurnished house. I recently had to spend actual money that I earned through selling my labour on a bin. A bin. I work thirty-seven and a half hours a week to earn the right to the goods and services necessary for my survival, and I had to spend the fruits of my labour on a piece of plastic in which I put things that I no longer want. Gone are the days when parting with cash meant bringing something joy-inducing into my home. Now the money I would like to be spending on shoes and gin is going on clothes horses and drain cleaner.
Annual leave, a subject touched upon in my last post, is another aspect of adulthood that is, to be crude, a pain in the arse. Well, it would be more accurate to say that not having enough of it is. Due to confusion on my part regarding how much annual leave I am entitled to, I may now have to go into work on New Year's Eve, something that neither I nor my boss are keen to happen. This isn't because someone needs to be in the office; it's not because there will be anything productive or useful I will have to contribute to the company during the post-Christmas pre-New Year period. No, it is because I have failed to adult properly and therefore both my boss and I must be inconvenienced. Thanks, adulthood.
To finish on a positive note, I don't regret any of the decisions I've made in the four months since finishing university (aside from that incident in July when I opted to trim my own fringe in a badly-lit bathroom over paying a professional to do it). I am fortunate enough to be doing a job that I love – a job that enables me to live in one of the country's nicest cities, at that – and this is something that I don't take for granted. Remembering this time last year and comparing where I actually am with where I thought I would be certainly makes the tenner I had to spend on that bloody bin an acceptable price to pay. Annoyance may not be the most pleasurable emotion but it is objectively easier to deal with than abject terror. Of course, this level of healthy perspective is harder to cling on to when you're spending Friday night lying in a pile of dirty laundry instead of going out because the council took your last £50 of this month, but I have around another eight years or so to work on my flaws before the next life stage comes around.
0 comments