There’s this saying that I’ve been hearing and reading a lot lately. There’s a few variants of course, but it comes down to: Is it called adulting to be happy with a new kettle/a clean bed/freshly made coffee/a different colour on the wall/other little thing for a daily used household item, cross out what doesn’t apply to you.

I understand this feeling, although it´s probably not the same for everyone who uses that phrase. Being an adult is nice, cause I get to choose what to eat, go to bed when I want to and that’s great, in theory. On the other hand, there are a lot of obligations I need to meet. It still feels strange to see myself as adult and responsible. It mostly feels like obligations for me to this day. So it feels silly if I feel very happy with new bedsheets, or a mug, or a laundrybasket.

Why do we feel silly?

Why is that, I wondered? Does it count for everyone? Did my parents feels like this when they were my age? What about my grandparents? Is it a universal thing or a generation thing? All I can do right now is give my perspective why I personally feel this way.

Finances is still the biggest thing that has to do with this in my case. Living (in Netherlands, I can’t really speak for other countries) is incredibly expensive. There was a time where I could barely make ends meet. This was during the previous financial crisis in 2008, I was stuck doing the (minimum wage and not fulltime contract) student job, cause there were basically no jobs available at the time. Working weird and changing hours and worrying if I would get more hours each month was bad. The company took full advantage of me and never gave me a bigger contract. I worked all the extra hours I could, applied to all of the few vacancies there were and was exhausted all the time.

I struggled to pay the most basic things for most of my adult life. This means, I could just afford rent, electricity, basic internet (which believe it or not, is a necessity here) and the problem was food. I wanted to save at least a few euros each month, usually no more then 5, cause that’s all I could miss, which was not even true, cause I couldn’t eat healthy or enough. There were weeks where I survived on instant noodlesoup and bread. An even bigger problem posed when I needed to replace a piece of clothing or shoes. This meant I had to use the little money I had managed to set aside and usually even more. The ‘more’ part had to be taken out of the foodpart. This meant more weeks of (noodle)soup and bread.

Boots Theory

Terry Pratchett has a beautiful explanation with my problems back then too, from the book Men at Arms:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

Read more on the wikipedia page here: Boots Theory

I was always stuck having to buy the cheapest shoes and clothes, which lasted maybe a year, if even that. And once the cheapest bike I could find, cause mine got stolen… The cheapest bike had bad tires and bad lights, it was also too expensive for me, but I needed it to go to my work and do said work with the bike. I had no choice.

You can imagine how happy I am now that I can buy healthy food without worry AND set money aside each month for emergencies/broken things. The job I have now is still not what I’d have chosen to do, but it will do for a while. It means I can pay my bills and save a little AND write too on the side. Hopefully at some point I can start making money with my writing. That would be a dream coming true.

Choices are important

The point with all this is, I’ve never really had a choice in buying the things that were of good quality or just looked nice to me. Now I can finally buy the things that are good AND nice looking, instead of the cheapest. So I feel stupidly happy with my new bedsheets, a good quality cookingpan and mugs with a cute picture on it. It might not really be called adulting, maybe it’s just the fact I’m relieved I can afford it and still have money left. But I sure understand the feeling whenever people ask the rhetorical question “Is it called adulting to be happy with this?”

I would even go so far as to assume everyone who has lived in poverty understands this. That would make it a universal feeling and the only reason I hear it a bit more lately, is because of internet. The people I heard it say and myself are able to make ends meet a bit easier at the moment. We’re still not rich, not even close! But we can do more then just the basics and that feels nice. Why does it feel silly to be happy with those things though? Maybe because we have to get used to the fact that we never were happy with our things? Never happy with having to spend money, not having a choice in what and when we buy it, because we needed it. Having a choice makes all the difference in that case. It sucks to not have a choice.

I hope that at some point everyone in the world will have a choice, although I realize that’s quite a big dream.