Our children, by contrast, have a sense of entitlement coupled with a paralysing fear of failure. Unlike my friend’s daughter, I rented a series of freezing flats in unsalubrious areas while I saved up for a deposit to buy a home. And we were prepared to start at the bottom to do so. My generation was obsessed with work: we wanted to earn money, to have good careers, to make something of our lives. Throughout school, I worked every Saturday and every holiday. Pressure: Graduates possess a sense of entitlement, whereas older generations accepted that they would have to work their way up from the bottom I got my first Saturday job at 13, in a bakery, and thought I had it made when I graduated to working in a jeweller’s. At the same age I had neither husband nor baby, but I did have a career and a pretty ferocious work ethic. By 28, my father was married, with a mortgage, a career and a baby. But it’s our right to wonder whether today’s younger generation is over-indulged - just as it was our parents’ right to complain that we had it easy compared with them. Of course, each generation complains about the next (‘you don’t know you’re born!’). According to new research published this week, most of them no longer regard 21 as a coming of age and don’t even consider themselves adults until they’re 30. Eight out of ten 18 to 24-year-olds still live at home today, as do a third of 25 to 34-year-olds - so perhaps it’s no wonder that they’ve opted to see themselves as adolescents far past their teenage years. He’s perfectly capable of living independently.Creature comforts: An unprecedented number of young adults are still living at home with their parents So yeah he breaks stuff sometimes & does silly adhd-like things - but big picture, I’d rather have a nice person sharing my space.Īnd his mum was wrong. We seemed to struggle with a lot of the same stuff.īig picture though - he’s a really sweet guy. He didn’t identify as having adhd (just “learning difficulties”!?) - but given I have adhd myself, I’ve always thought it fairly likely he did have adhd. He believed that he could never live independently because that’s what his mum used to tell him.Īnd sure he did some idiotic things in the early months - left the door unlocked overnight, left his keys at work a couple of times so had to get my neighbour to let him in (I swap keys with friendly neighbour for emergencies), used half a bottle of bleach to clean the bathroom making it hard to breathe in there for half an hour, etc.īut nothing we couldn’t fix with a few reminders. He was late 20s, but was still living with his mum. If you have it as an available option, it’s my strongest recommendation.Īlso, I had a lodger move in with me a year or so ago. Even if you need to ask someone for help with the process. Therapy is the one thing where you need to chuck yourself in the deep end and just do it. It’s the whole “I’m not going to try it if I’m not 100% sure it will go perfectly,” avoidance/procrastination thing that we do when we’re afraid of failure. You’re afraid to treat the problems you have, because if they don’t work, then you really are the hopeless lost cause that your imposter syndrome lies to you about. My perspective on your situation is that fearing therapy is fearing healing. In my 10+ years of managing my own adhd I can say there’s nothing that helped me more, and I’d be a goner if I hadn’t gotten it in my early-mid 20s. This exact question is something I went over at length with my own therapist, and I wouldn’t really have been able to trust anyone else for an objective opinion. I’m a 35 year old kid who still doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up. But, most of all, I'm petrified of having to be an adult and having to deal with all of this by myself. I'm scared of rejection (from jobs, people, society). It's really difficult to admit that I'm actually just a little kid scared of everything. I probably should try it, but therapy scares me to. The imposter syndrome is constantly telling me that I'm just a lazy, useless nobody and that will never change. I have existential crises every other day. Any passions I used to have are slowly fading away. While I crave independence, I'm also too scared to go and get it. I'm watching all my friends grow up and becoming functional adults. If I can barely live with ADHD as I am, how am I supposed to do it as an independent adult?! I'm 22 now. But, I also realized that it was also the reason why I was terrified of independence. why I had so much trouble with things other people seemed to find easy. I finally had a reason for why I was the way I was. I got diagnosed with ADHD in my third year of college and, while it helped in some ways, it crushed me in others. It's taken me a long time to realize I have a crippling fear of growing up. This will be a long one - TLDR: I have an intense fear of growing up.
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