You may have heard about Hyperbole and a Half (that link goes to the exact post I'm going to mention in three seconds). It's an awesome blog, and you really ought to go read it if you don't already, because I can't not laugh at most of the things posted there. The specific post I'm sort of referencing here is the post on why she'll never be an adult.
After reading it twice, I know for a fact that I, too, will never be an adult. In fact, I'm not even cut out for being on the internet. I get pulled into the guilt spiral almost immediately when I go to deviantart, because I'll leave some messages in my inbox every time I routinely clean it out. And then they'll be there, telling me to deal with them every time I use the internet, because I have a chrome ad-on that tells me how many message my dA has. But I'll have none of that, because I want to do something more important, like write or watch Star Trek.
So they sit there for weeks, constantly growing in number with every passing hour, until I have thousands of them. I'll feel bad about not checking them, but I'll pretend they don't exist because I simply do not have the time or the inclination to spend five hours looking through deviations and journals and comments and activity messages and news articles and polls and -shot-. And the number of messages continues to grow, and my guilt and tendency toward avoiding the problem grow along with it. Until, finally, I'm somehow forced to go into my inbox and delete everything that is not said DIRECTLY TO ME. Journals, deviations, polls, news articles, all of them. Until I'm left with just my comments, replies, and activities feed. And then I post a journal, reply to a number of the comments and disappear with messages left in my inbox only to start the entire, horrible cycle all over again.
I can't say this is necessarily a bad thing. I'm exponentially more productive when I'm NOT spend four hours a day on dA waiting for new messages to show up because I don't want to leave for fear that I'll miss one, holy mother of God, I'll miss one fucking message. And I usually do that because I have homework that I don't want to do. Or I'm stuck on my novel in a way that could easily be remedied by getting the heck off dA. But no, I refresh the page 200 times and reply almost instantly to EVERYTHING.
My novel usually flourishes when I'm not using dA. Can you guess why?
I'd say what is "being adult" is in part relative to one's own circumstance, and also that what we were told it is has been skewed over time, half by chance, half by design. It's rarely as fun or easy as we thought in our teens, but then again, we weren't thinking about having to literally pay the price(s) for it.
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