Choose two 
- 13
- 15
- 18
- 21
- 25
- 30
- 35
- 40
- 45
- 50
- 55
- 60
0
voters
I voted 21 and 50. When I was 21, I was finishing getting a Bachelors degree part time college schedule because I had a good paying full time job and my own apartment. Because of that situation and I was legal age to get into bars, I felt like an adult.
When my daughter was entering high school I was 50. That made me think I had reached middle age.
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I am not sure. I think adulthood is more of a 4D spectrum than a single threshold.
Or maybe itâs more that adulthood and middle-age are purely biological while maturity is a spectrum and they need to be kept as totally separate concepts. After all, itâs more than possible for an âadultâ to be immature and not fully developed in some other ways that are important.
There are biological markers vs cultural markers and milestones. But itâs also a shifting set of overlapping axes (autonomy, responsibility, follow through, self concept, self awareness, social recognition, impulse control, emotional regulation, tolerance for ambiguity vs black & white thinking, resilience, time horizon, perspective taking.
Some related quotes:
Iâd say itâs pretty safe to call an 18 year old an adult based on peaked physical body developmental stage, but not mentally (brain finishes in the mid twenties) or hormonally (there are 50+hormones and most of them peak in the mid twenties and start dropping after that). So realistically, full biological adulthood is really somewhere around 24-26, give or take a few years of standard deviation.
Middle age would be 40"s-50âs.
Psychological development and maturity level is a huge spectrum though.
People often look alike on the outside (e.g., all âadultsâ), but diverge widely in maturity because those axes develop unevenly.
On a personal level, by my standards I feel like I wasnât really mentally and emotionally mature/stable until sometime in my 30s. So I guess Iâd kind of say that in hindsight I âfeltâ like an adult sometime in my 30s. But if youâd asked me before that Iâd have likely claimed to have been more adulty than most before that. I left home at an early age, paying my own way to go wander around the poorest Nation in the Western hemisphere (which at the time also had the poorest city in the world). I got held at gunpoint multiple times (once was even by the countryâs special forces patrolling for hang members to shoot), witnessed people killed (one by stoning), stuck in riots with people screaming to kill me (because I was a white, American, foreigner), and got so sick multiple times I begged to die. All before I was 20. Then the crazy guy I am, I went back a second time in my lower twenties, this time not alone. I took a bunch of other college kids with me to go work in hospitals and orphanages, and rescue Street kids, and hitchhike around the country, etc. Even taking them to the poorest city in the world.
I paid for my own collegeâŚby working the whole time to earn the money while I attended.
I felt pretty independent and reasonably responsible early on in many ways. Though in other ways I was also ignorant and undeveloped but couldnât tell until I got a little older and only then realized that my younger self didnât have parts of my brain developed yet and didnât even have the capacity to think or understand some things. I was definitely not fully emotionally stable.
Many people thought I was amazing and mature and independent from an early age, and itâs true from some perspectives, but I also had huge deficits from other perspectives. I feel like I didnât finish fully developing until my 30s, or at least I wasnât stable before then no matter what my biological adult status was, in some ways I feel like I donât deserve to call myself an adult before I stabilized myself in my 30s.
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Iâm curious about the sources for deeper dives, particularly this one:
That one seems particularly apt within the context of much of todayâs public discourse.
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Sadly I only know the date that I encoded that particular quote in my personal notes. I checked and do not have a clear source attribution for that one.
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When people I donât know called me âSirâ.
Arghhhh.
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No sweat. I did a Web search quoting the first part of that one. I figure it probably came from a book or article that hasnât been published online. Thanks for the response! 
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Interesting. I think James Bond was perpetually 35. 
When I was thirty-five, it was a very good year
It was a very good year for blue-blooded girls
Of independent means
Weâd ride in limousines
Their chauffeurs would drive
When I was thirty-five
Drink 21
Vote 18
Marriage license 18
Confirmation 15/16
Bar bat mitzvah 12/13
Debut 16-18
Quinciniera 15
Driverâs license 16
Work permit 16
Graduation 18 ~22
Military draft 18
Financial responsiblity
Marriage
Offspring
Consciousness of mortality
Fully-fledged offspring
Retirement
?
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Iâm probably skewing the data. I marked 35 as feeling like an adult
and someone else probably marked it as middle-age 
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I donât know, I like the skew, it makes you think a little, a sort of mental âsquint.â
Obviously, I liked this quote best 
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Yeah, honestly, I kind of like the the pottery with âgold repairsâ even better than the original. They look awesome.
I have been a long proponent of turning perceived âweaknessesâ into âstrengthsâ if you channel them right. Itâs one of my favorite things. Or, similarly, things that happen TO you may not be your fault, but itâs ALWAYS your responsibility for how you make a happy, healthy life for yourself no matter what happens TO you.
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Yeah, thatâs some appealing stuff - and the message, too.
Hereâs someone playing a broken thing and singing over it.
I voted 55 and 60, but in all honesty, adulting is overrated and I still donât feel like one.
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A friend of mine had a saying about their being only three cool things about being an Adult.
- You can eat your desert before your meal
- You can go to bed anytime you like
- You can say âdo as I say, not as I doâ.
Everything else is crap.
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Heh, my older brother learned this rule (eating dessert last) was crap when he was in elementary school. They served something cold like Ice Cream with lunch, and like a good kid he waited to eat his dessert last, and it melted before he could get to it and he cried and was traumatized by it. After that he has always eaten dessert first because he already learned as a kid that rule was crap.
So does this mean he was an adult in Elementary school?
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I believe my friend was speaking of his childhood experience of having to wait until after his childhood meal to have desert.
Once he reached adulthood it was a cool thing to eat desert first.
Not all upbrings, are the same. I remember a few times when my daughter was a toddler we grabbed dinner to take home and Slurpees from 7-11. I told my daughter she could drink the Slurpee in the car before dinner and before it melts. My wife would have made our daughter put the Slurpee in the freezer until after dinner.
There is nothing worse than a liquified Slurpee.
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I went with 18 for adult, mainly because I turned 18 in the middle of US Navy boot camp. I graduated Highschool in June, left for the Navy on Aug 20th at 17, and turned 18 on Sept 12th, a little over 3 weeks into boot camp.
Middle age, I went with 40, just because I figured itâs about midway of a typical lifespan.
For the next stage, senior citizen which wasnât mentioned in the poll, I think that might be officially 62? If thatâs the case, Iâll hit that one in just over one year.
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Same here, I graduated in June at 17 and was in Great Lakes boot camp in November, turned 18 at the end of December. Before I turned 19 I got a Draft Notice in the mail which I sent back with a picture of sunny South Vietnam & a picture of my military I.D. I also included a small note that said come and get me.
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Two people walking on the street meet face-to-face. Bread and butter, says one. Whatever, says the other. They walk on, vowing to pick up the pace.