Arbitrary ages of majority are weird. As odd as it seems, I think this is one way we’ve gone backwards a bit.

You have to be 18 to “be an adult.” Except it’s 19 to smoke, 21 to drink, 17 to drive, 25 to rent a car… and all of that is different in different states. Well? Are you an adult or aren’t you?

Even ignoring the fact that there’s nothing different about a person at 17 years, 11 months, and 29 days versus that same person at 18 years on the dot, we also have to realize that a thousand different 18-year-olds are different in a thousand different ways.

We need an official Rite of Passage again. Instead of an arbitrary and automatic “adulthood” label, we need a specific trial, accomplishment, or ritual. Something done with the support of your family and the oversight of your community that grants you the rights and responsibilities of adulthood only when successfully accomplished.

I’m not saying it has to be barbaric – the rite of passage doesn’t have to be wandering around in the woods until you kill a bear. Imagine something like the citizenship test, but for adulthood: You have to take a test covering subjects like personal finance, local laws, employment readiness, interpersonal conflict resolution skills, etc. What the kids today like to call “adulting” skills. And if you pass, you become a legal adult. If you don’t, you remain legally a “minor,” regardless of age. You can take the test when you want, but a failure requires a year-long wait before taking it again.

Perfect system? Hardly. But our current system isn’t perfect, either. 16-year-olds with abusive parents are trapped even if they’re capable of surviving on their own. 19-year-olds with mental handicaps are forced to “age out” of support systems. Kids can take a bullet for their county but can’t legally buy a beer.

I just think it’s worth thinking about.

If you aren’t sure, you’re probably wrong. If you can’t prove – or even say – why you’re right, you’re probably wrong.

You don’t have to always be right. But try not to be wrong too often. That means defaulting to “I don’t know” is a viable path. Being curious is better than being wrong.

I have a friend I’ve known for about five or six years. He’s a good guy, his kids like my kids, we share hobbies – fantastic adult friendship all around. But since I met him as a full-grown adult, he pretty much only knows this version of me. He didn’t “grow up” with me the way some of my other friends have.

But he has his own history, of course. And though we didn’t know each other growing up, we did grow up in the same area.

Just this week, he told me a story from his own youth, just something he’d heard (not something he had been present for). A pretty wild story, by all accounts, that a friend of his had told him about a party, et cetera et cetera.

And then I started laughing.

The story was about me.

We traced back the origins – the person who told him that story nearly twenty years ago had dated one of my friends and was at the party where I did the absurd things in question. Small world!

There’s no lesson here. (Except maybe, “Reputation is a wild animal you don’t control once released?”) But I laughed and laughed. My father would be pleased.

Bottling up your emotions, never letting yourself express anger or hurt, is poison. But that doesn’t mean you should give yourself endless leeway to indulge in your worst impulses.

Good fences make good neighbors, and that’s true of the emotional neighbors as well – your feelings and your responsibilities have to get along, and the best way for them to do that is to have a little structure. A fence isn’t a prison; it’s a guardrail.

In life, you are rewarded roughly proportionate to how much responsibility you take on and how well you shoulder it. Taken to the extreme, it’s a recipe for burnout and disaster. But the other extreme, where you never ever say “Instead of feeling my feelings right now, I have a job to do, and I need to put that first,” is a recipe for a joyless life of zero accomplishment.

Be the shepherd for yourself.

So, you’ve decided you want to do something new! You want to pursue a new hobby, a new promotion, a new relationship. That’s awesome! But of course, you’ll have to make some room in your life, which means you have to get some things off your plate. But how?

Here are some options:

1. Reduce. If you currently spend 10 hours a week doing something, can you accomplish most of what you do now with only 4 hours? Chances are good that you can – if you truly restrain yourself to that 4 hour block. Work tends to expand to fill the time you give it, so chances are that whatever you were doing has “expanded” to fill ten hours.
2. Delegate. With a little up-front investment in training time, you may be able to get someone to take over a task or three. Especially if those tasks would benefit them (like an employee learning new skills and getting new opportunities to shine), this is a great option.
3. Combine. Can you put two things together? Let’s say you like to watch a particular show every day, and you also want to work out every day. Can you do those at the same time? How about taking a walk with a friend, to get social time and exercise time together?
4. Buy out. In the amount of time it takes me to mow my lawn, I can earn much more money than it costs to have someone else mow it. So as often as I can, I buy out the tasks that don’t bring me particular joy. Time is more valuable to me than saving a few bucks by shoveling my own snow.
5. Cut. Finally, if all else fails, some things just have to go. Everything has a season, and maybe this task’s season has ended in favor of whatever new thing you want to do.

Do the things that bring you joy, and spend your time wisely!

People get upset for all sorts of reasons. Many of those reasons are silly, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn something from the behavior.

People get upset at the prices of things – especially during unusual times. Is that a good reason to be upset? Doesn’t matter – what matters is that people will be upset, and they’ll be upset in a predictable way. You being upset that they’re upset is just as foolish.

If a whole lot of people are miffed about something and you don’t understand why, then it’s not that they’re foolish and you’re not. It’s that they’re foolish, yes – and you’re a different kind of foolish.

Don’t get mad. Have fun or make money, or maybe both.

Have fun by finding ways to improve communication and understanding until people get (a little) less upset. Or find out what they’d spend money on to feel less upset and sell it to them.

But either way, don’t just go around adding to the misery!

An incredible amount of your overall performance in life is determined by how much you can conceptualize moments in the future.

Picture a stack of blocks. If you push it, can you see what will happen in your mind? Can you visualize the blocks falling, where they might land? Can you see other things in the room they might collide with?

Picture a person you know. If you say a hurtful thing to them, can you imagine their reaction? Can you see the pained look on their face?

The future is very predictable. Most effects follow simply from their causes. But when you hear someone ask “What did you expect,” in response to poor choices made by another, the answer is often: Nothing.

Some people have a really hard time visualizing any future moment. It’s not that they don’t have the intelligence or logical capacity. If you asked them, point blank, what happens to a glass bottle if you throw it against a brick wall, they can tell you that it shatters. But their ability to see that moment automatically when they’re engaged in other activity is non-existent.

My theory is that it’s not a binary “some have it, some don’t” sort of thing. I think, like anything else, it’s a skill. I think reading, particularly fiction, enhances it. I think social play enhances it. Probably lots of other things, but overall I do think it’s a skill you can develop. And I think it’s critical that you do.

Because I can predict what happens if you don’t.