It took me until my mid-30s to feel like I had crossed a threshold in processing grief and trauma from my late teen years. I was capable of adult behavior long before then, but my concept of the world and how I fit into it (or don't) was still childlike in many ways on a fundamental level.
Like most such things, I'd expect this to be a spectrum, and I may be somewhat of a late bloomer. Regardless, I have a theory that there is somewhat of a protective effect operating here. Believing in a simpler reality which involved future wish fulfillment for me - however unrealistic it was - may have helped me survive. Coming to acceptance of what I see as a more accurate but far bleaker perspective required me to grow strong enough to sustain my will to live despite that perspective.
Biggest lesson learned: I could not do it without at least one other person (or more) who I trust almost 100% with all of myself. Realizing that going it alone is futile is definitely part of what I consider becoming an adult, and it can take a long time to fully accept that.
> Biggest lesson learned: I could not do it without at least one other person (or more) who I trust almost 100% with all of myself.
Its strange. The biggest lesson I learned was almost the opposite: I learned that the meaning of life has nothing to do with other people or their estimation of me. It has more to do with who you are when there is nobody else around. Other people often act as a sort of fun house mirror that distort and reflect back a false image.
Learning to be happy alone and seeing through the pleasant lies is absolutely vital to becoming an adult.
On the contrary, developing a deep relationship with someone very different than myself (different religions, native languages and countries, socioeconomic class, race, gender) has shown me the lies I've been telling myself all my life.
It's easy to identity lies and hypocrisy in others. But the brain has all sorts of tricks to prevent it from looking inwards; at least for me it prefers feeling rewarded to deep self-criticism. Finding someone who sees me and will happily call me on my assumptions, conditioning, and BS has been a great gift.
I feel like we need both. There are mental/emotional experiences I have on the regular which there is no point in trying to communicate to someone else but still bring me great benefit. We need to value our alone time, absolutely.
We also ultimately derive pretty much everything we most value in life from our interactions with other lives, which is why I think it's so important to develop high-trust relationships with at least one or two other people so we can continue to grapple with the fact that we all have different perspectives, weaknesses and strengths and can usually learn more and get significantly more things done when we cooperate than when we're running solo. Which requires trust.
YMMV, of course. Some people can go build a cabin in the woods and live off the land and spend all their free time meditating and be perfectly happy. But that's not most of us. And even those people eventually get too old to keep taking care of themselves.
Can you elaborate on the last point? As someone going through a very hard time with my wife at the moment I’d love any words of wisdom.
I’m going to go against the grain here.
The parent’s advice is toxic and mistaken. It’s a road to codependency. I’ve been with my wife 20 years, married 15. I would have said the same thing they said — I can’t do it all on my own, I need someone else.
Rubbish. And also dangerous rubbish. I’ve been weak for a long time simply because I hadn’t taken myself seriosuly. I literally believed that I couldn’t do it alone, which was wrong.
It was unfair to my wife to use her as an emotional support when she didn’t want to be. She’s been there for me a lot over the years. But when you tell someone that you can’t do it without them, it’s no longer their decision, and that’s unfair. Both to her and to me.
Please read Codependent No More, and especially Lost in the Shuffle by Subby. (I’ve identified a lot more with the latter.)
The point is, it’s okay to be having a rough time with your wife. Let go. Let her do her own thing. Stop caring so much. It’s okay for her to be upset and not want to help/have sex/go to an event/involve you/whatever the problem may be. The reason it feels rough is because you personally let it feel rough. Once I adopted that mindset, it became so much easier. And ironically my marriage improved.
Meds are also important. Make sure you’re on a good dosage of antidepressants if you need them, and a mood stabilizer. I recently started Latuda and dropped Seroquel per my psychiatrist, and it’s been night and day.
Lastly, keep trying to talk to people about your problems. I ended up reaching out to a random person on Twitter. They were kind and to my surprise happy to listen. It was one of the main reasons I was able to get through it all. The best person to talk to is a therapist, though I’d be happy to listen till you can find one.
You’re strong. You need to believe that. And you’re strong independently of your family or anyone else. Give yourself credit for getting as far as you have; that part has been important too.
Just want to point out codependency--especially if you read Codependent No More--is not about being dependent on another person. That is dependent personality disorder perhaps.
Codependency is better described IMO as secondhand addiction. It was coined to describe the symptoms of people who live with alcoholics and other substance abusers and the destructive coping patterns they use to survive in the addict's wake
I get what you're saying. A therapist is one of the types of people I had in mind, although that obviously isn't an option for everyone.
I agree that it's important to be able to have your own independent autonomy to properly function in a healthy relationship, especially a romantic one.
The point I was trying to make is perhaps more subtle than it came across, namely that webs of trust between humans (e.g. 'community') are, in my view, essential to being a fully actualized adult. If you aren't close to anyone, I think that means something is wrong which deserves further inspection, particularly within yourself.
Sorry for the somewhat harsh words. You have a point. The problem is that it’s way too easy to fall down the codependency rabbit hole when you start thinking of it as “I can’t do X unless someone else Y’s”. It was true for me, and I just wanted to make sure it wouldn’t be true for the poor fella going through marriage problems.
The trick and the trouble is that it’s easy to acknowledge the importance of being independent, especially in a romantic relationship, vs actually doing that in practice. After your 30’s your friends start to fade away, and one day I woke up without any except my wife. That was clearly a degenerate situation unfair to her, and expanding your social circle is something that should be done independent of whatever relationship you happen to be in. In fact, needs to be done.
There is a huge difference between acknowledging that humans are an inherently social species that usually needs comfort and psychologically benefits from an intimate relationship and straight up codependency, where you violate the boundaries of each other and thereby take away psychological safety.
I agree! The point is, don’t use your wife for your comfort and psychology benefits. Use the other people in your life. Especially when you’re having marital problems.
I have had many difficult times with my current S.O. over 15+ years.
Everyone's situation is different, but I can say that in even a semi-healthy relationship, time heals many wounds, greater mutual understanding grows, hard edges can soften and people will often surprise you. You can also learn things you could improve about yourself which you were previously blind to. The sense of stability this reinforces is immensely helpful.
On the other hand, I also have an ex-- and while I wish I would have ended that differently in hindsight, it did need to end for my mental health to improve. If you are with someone who abuses you, cannot be reasoned with and never admits fault, it is wise to plan several exit strategies.
Sorry I don’t know your circumstances but “Walking on Eggshells” by Langford has literally saved me.
The only wisdom I can offer: other people emotions don’t have to control yours (despite what they tell you). The best take on this that I know: be like a goose - they don’t get wet, just shake it off.
And take care of yourself!
A novel? You sure you're talking about the right book?
Fiction can reveal a lot of real wisdom if you’re open to receiving it.
I'd hit up a solo therapist. I went through a hard time with my wife and turns out she just sucks. Be warned that she sucked a lot worse in the divorce and states differ wildly in how biased they are against fathers if you have kids.
It was helpful to figure out some of my stuff and deal with a bunch of trauma.
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Or else books / online communities. I can't recommend using ChatGPT for this kind of help but it can be used to validate your experiences, provide a different experience, and if you ask it, point you in the right direction.
For example, if you explain it (or Reddit) an interpersonal situation it can break it down and e.g. point out certain behaviours or boundary crossings.
But I would be careful, as these chatbots will by default put you in the right, even when you aren't.
Even therapists are a mixed bag - and some are legitimately dangerous - but in my experience at least 100x safer than a chatbot or just books.
If for no other reason than a chatbot can’t call you out on your bullshit, because it has no hope of telling what is or is not bullshit. And that is key. And has no actual feelings, remorse, license to lose, etc. etc.
etc. etc. responsibility.
may also be lacking in therapist. is certainly lacking in LLM
Every person is different. Some people don't need a stable relation, some people *can't have* a stable relation, some people thrive with it.
Every relation is different. A successful relation is built when both side are compatible.
What does compatible mean, though? Some relations are swingers. Some relations follow strict religious rules. Some people need taking a beating, and I don't mean an erotic one. In None of this cases I am meaning they are codependent, and then there are successful codependent relations.
The only constant I have seen is that every successful relation has discussions, fights, momments when they considered separating. And there is compromise, in every case.
I am sorry I don't have any specific advice. Good luck
Do not try to understand women.
That said women’s understanding of truth (men’s too, but IME they have an easier time controlling it) is emotion-dependent and worst case emotions-driven, i.e. it literally depends on how they feel right now. If they say something untrue you can ask if that’s how they feel now or if it’s a general truth (don’t make it sound like they’re lying though, remember it’s all emotional). You’re in trouble if they say the same thing without any emotional charge; no feelings at all is the worst.
Please note this is n=1.
That’s not a woman thing, that’s a person thing. Your advice is good but it would equally apply to me, and I’m a man.
> Please note this is n=1.
Then why use the plural terms “women” and “they”?
Because: bigotry.
I did not feel fully adult until my parents passed on. I was in my early 40s at that point. Then I knew that there was no fallback; it was all up to me.
Quite similar experience here.
Actually it took me few more events to be able to reflect and understand that looking from another perspective.
A person becomes an adult once they take responsibility for their own actions and the consequences thereof. Many people never reach that status, regardless of age.
It's not helpful to redefine terms separately from the article.
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> Realizing that going it alone is futile is definitely part of what I consider becoming an adult
Weird, for me its the complete opposite. I accepted to live alone for the rest of my life because a) I am undesired and I wont make a move. b) I barely met people I would even consider it being worth talking to, I need to feel equal on a cognitive level and not a lot of people match that requirement. I either feel lesser or above.
> I need to feel equal on a cognitive level and not a lot of people match that requirement. I either feel lesser or above.
Expecting perfection out of life is definitely a road to unhappiness.
You certainly don't need to have someone in your life -- as someone who married late and has two kids now I sometimes look back on my long period of begin single with fondness -- but I would also recommend being very honest with yourself. Very few people are totally undesirable and expecting others to meet some predetermined standard is very common among people that don't interact socially very often (I speak from experience). While I'm lucky that my wife is very bright (and in many ways much smarter than me) the most important thing that she has given me is new perspectives on life and seeing that it's more important to be kind and helpful than smart.
It's very hard to see outside of our early conditioning without outside perspectives. We may have a vague sense that we might not have been given the best tools for social development (we may even be brutally aware of it), but having someone that has the skills that we are missing is often more important than that they have equal skills in areas we are strong in. Having a good partner can make you realize things about yourself and open you up to things that you never even realized were there.
Yea I get that. A partner would be nice but in 30 years of my life I met 2 women I liked. I am extremely self aware in that regard. I am repulsed by modern dating and dating apps and I dont get myself "out there". I also have way too high standards but I cant just ignore them. Also being chronically depressed does not really help either...
So I just accept my situation and I don't want to change my ways as I am content with how my life currently is.
Why are you so arrogant that you feel most others aren't on your cognitive level? Most likely you're not actually as smart as you think you are.
They said that they either feel lesser or above. (Though this might point at a different problem; I'd hope one could enjoy the company, really enjoy it, of both sets of people.)
He said that can feel either lesser or above so there's nothing arrogant about that.
> Why are you so arrogant
Assuming they are, just for the sake of the discussion: what kind of answer do you expect to this question? You think someone who is arrogant has a theory of why they are so and are willing to share it? I would expect they are mostly blind to their own arrogance. Can be useful to point it out.
I guess it was just a rhetorical question. But it feels weird. Do you think it can possibly do anything else than create hostility?
Did you read until the end? I wrote I either feel lesser or above. It works both ways. Arrogance is lived experience, I met a lot of people in my lifetime.
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>At around the age of 32 the strongest overall shift in trajectory is seen. Life events such as parenthood may play a role in some of the changes seen, although the research did not explicitly test this. “We know that women who give birth, their brain changes afterwards,” said Mousley. “It’s reasonable to assume that there could be a relationship between these milestones and what’s happening in the brain.”
>From 32 years, the brain architecture appears to stabilise compared with previous phases, corresponding with a “plateau in intelligence and personality” based on other studies. Brain regions also become more compartmentalised.
--
I felt this 32-year-old shift, but later (now 43). I joke with friends that I was a bone-head like most males until about 30. Joke yes, but feels right.
Prior to 30ish, I was more insecure. Lacking in emotional intelligence.
My career and relationship history reflect that switch-flip in a way. Only during the second half of my 30s did I begin to feel more secure and more confident in my career, despite not achieving some outrageous senior position or level of income. That career is now in a better and more measured place - in which I recognize what I do well and what I don't do well, and don't beat myself to a pulp for not having "it"
Only in my 30s did I robustly embrace the power of compromise in friendships and relationships. Now I'm near 10 years married (and happy, most of it, let's be real) with two wonderful kids.
And now I'm much capable of reasoning with my anxities, emotions, and insecurities. Do I still ruminate? Yes. Do I still react? Yes. But I know how to redraw situations to reset my in-moment feelings and/or avoid unecessary negative action.
I've always thought that I'm just extremely late to mature. I'm 36 now and haven't really felt like I sort of "get" things until my early 30s. My 20s were full of learning experiences, failures, and addiction to doing whatever the hell I wanted. I got a puppy with my wife at 29 and it felt like my life was over. This all really makes a lot of sense to me. It also makes me wonder why the human body rewards young parents when their brains are just simply not fully finished cooking. I couldn't have imagined raising a child at 22 with the way I acted and how important freedom was to me. I would've simply been a miserable father.
Thousands of generations of parents had children much younger than today. I think we’re too worried about having everything perfect and de-risked these days. Also realize that parenting is what grew me up. I don’t think people are ever “ready”
It’s a lot more complicated financially for people. You used to not have to rely on dual incomes just to survive. Wealth inequity, housing affordability, and healthcare have all changed. This is why many are choosing to have kids later in life or not even at all because of those reasons and even the environment with climate change it’s a hard decision to make to bring new life into this world to suffer in it.
It's always been financially complicated for most people. The notion of a nuclear family prospering with a single income was mostly only possible for a limited slice of the US population during a few decades post-WWII. If you take a broader historical view that was a brief anomaly.
And it's really weird that anyone would think of something amorphous and uncertain like climate change as a reason not to have children. Even the unlikely worst case scenarios are still going to have less impact than the major wars and plagues that our species has lived through. Some people just lack a sense of perspective.
> It’s a lot more complicated financially for. You used to not have to rely on dual incomes just to survive.
This is a toxic myth and acts as excuse to blame extrinsic factors that won't see change by the time you'll need them to, even if they can be fixed. Economic life today can be a lot more complicated for middle class professionals and skilled laborers, but they were only ever a fraction of the population in the first place, and families in tougher circumstances than today's middle class folk figured out how to navigate the cards they were dealt.
Emotionally, it legitimately sucks if you come from a comfy middle class background, and have a career that you believed should have been good enough to deliver the life you remember your parents or grandparents having and now doesn't seem to be. It feels unfair and disorienting, maybe. But the fact is that middle class lifestyle is gone for now, and if it does manage to get restored, that restoration will take a generation or two to come.
In the meantime, you have to figure out how to adapt and live that more modest and "more complicated financially" lifestyle. It can be done. Lots of people have been doing it for a long time. Along the way, you'll probably discover that lower class folk who never had the luxuries of your parents and grandparents in the first place were not seeing the world as something they had to "suffer in": they lived in homes, but often with more people in them. They traveled, but more infrequently, less glamorously, and with more pragmatic rationale like "visiting family" than "seeing the world". They had parties, but served simpler dishes on less fancy platters. They had "child care" when two parents worked, but got it by exchanging favors with family or neighbors instead of sending half a paycheck to a prestigious daycare. They laughed, they drank, they had kids. It's not a world of suffering to just not have some luxuries.
More complicated than when? You used to have kids because you needed more hands to work the farm and a good number of them died young.
Exactly, so that made having children a financial benefit. I'm confused that you said it but don't get it.
I don’t know about that. My great grandmas and grandmas didn’t have lots of kids for the labor, they had them because they didn’t have a way to not have them. The grandpas might have though.
Coincidentally, my aunts did not have to have more than 2, and almost every single one had 2 kids.
Yes that model has been inverted.
The family used to tax the grown or mostly-grown children in the form of farm labor. The government in many prior centuries taxed like 2-5% total and the rest was intrafamilial support.
Now it is flipped on its head. Everyone else's families tax your child for their social security, socializing the benefits while still you retain most the costs privately.
Thus tragedy of the commons situation. Why make that investment when you can just tax everyone else's kids and rest assured of your own social security, if they don't pay it you can just have them tossed in a cage or their assets seized, no need to have children yourself.
What you write is the mathematical fact of societies with flattened and upside down population pyramids and wealth transfers from young to old, not sure why you are downvoted.
I agree. Having children does make ones priorities very cut and dry. I found it a lot easier to "adult" once I had children. My Friends, at the time often asked, "Is having children hard?" I often replied, in the beginning at least, "Children are easy, it's everything else that is hard."
Indeed, it is society's expectations that are hard.
I moved to the middle of nowhere after my kids were born. One day I let my child walk home "alone" from school, for the portion that is on our own property, and of course as soon as you do that a fucking Karen will randomly pop out of nowhere, and start interrogating the child. It is like clockwork. You could be 100 miles from civilization and as soon as you do something someone somewhere disagrees with, a fucking Karen (and even in a minivan, down rugged rural dirt roads, how the fuck did she get there?) will magically be there that exact second with a cell phone at the ready to call CPS. Thankfully I was able to stop her before that happened, as I was actually watching from behind the bushes, which in itself is shameful but saved my ass.
I suspect it's a cultural thing as well, with most (all?) wealthy cultures veering towards individualism and working. Whereas with previous generations, the grandparents and environment would be more involved in raising children and educating the new parents.
But I also feel like people grew up or had to grow up earlier back when. My parents were married, bought a house and had kids on the way by their mid 20's, when I was that age I had just about finished my education and started my first fulltime job, it'd take another decade to buy a house. Buying a house / getting a mortgage is a major commitment, and I think you'd get a big boost of adulthood / personal development if you do that in your mid 20's.
Exactly that. It's not an arbitrary dated threshold that lead to "growing up". It was the event of having kids. I'm still able to look at my current life through the lenses of a 25 year old me and hell, that looks bleak. But I can say with confidence that I'm content. Of course there are little things here and there but mostly everything is fine.
I only wonder if there is going to be a next stage, the magical "midlife crisis", where I'm going to question all my decisions up to that point and I'm curious how I'm going to handle that.
also its a lot easier to have kids at 20 if the kids grandparents are only 40 instead of 70
Maybe also because the life spent leading up to the child having was much different earlier - I mean society, jobs, distractions... I'm sure this has an important role as well in setting up expectations and kicking up responsibilities.
People that tell you you need to be ready are lying. The only thing you need to be able to sustain is feeding them, and the rest mostly works itself out. As it has for millennia.
The only reason this would not be the case is if you have specific requirements for the life of your child.
I would encourage you to look at the medical costs of children in the US. My children's braces alone will cost ~$7k-10k over the life of each of them, with insurance, and to do without will cause irreparable oral damage into adulthood. Certainly, this doesn't apply to other developed or developing countries, but to say "you just need to feed them" wildly differs from reality. You're just ignoring suffering at scale by saying "it'll work itself out." It doesn't, and I can provide pages of citations to support this assertion. Also, having served in a short stint as a Guardian ad Litem to advocate for children going through family court, I have anecdotal observations as to failure scenarios of failures to adequately provide for children, both materially and emotionally.
"Everything before 40 is research" I once heard, and every day, I find it to be more true.
I'm a great parent because it is what is necessary and my children had no choice or consent in existing, but I also tell anyone younger that unless they are absolutely sure they want kids and are ready for decades of suck, don't do it [1] [2] [3]. Live your best life, be true to yourself, find your passion and joy exploring and being curious; one can do this without children. If one needs kids to mature or become a better human, find a therapist first. Also, maturity is optional. You have to grow old, you don't have to grow up (take on responsibility unnecessary to take care of yourself, broadly speaking). Religious beliefs aside (potential reincarnation and whatnot), enjoy life, you only get one run through your part of the timeline. Don't waste it on the expectations or belief systems of others.
[1] (lack of support systems, both social and familial, ~$380k in 2025 dollars to raise a child 0-18 in the US not including daycare and college, etc; n=1, ymmv)
I would describe the age of 40 as the time when my brain truly started to function but unfortunately, I feel ashamed of that.
If it makes you feel any better, that's about the age I started functioning mostly like an adult. It started around 30 but took a good decade to take hold.
Just because people can physically, biologically have children does not automatically imply that they can - or should - be the only ones to raise the children. Children used to be a community effort; the US strayed from this a long time ago. Of course it would be much harder to raise a kid at 22 (or 16, or) than 40!
Yet our physiology is tuned to become parents at 16 rather than 40.
I think nature doesn't care whether it's easier or better or whatever. It only cares for _more_ children to survive until their own time to have children.
We used to have grandparents around and extended family. Think about how different life was 50,100 or, 500 years ago. Not enough time for evolution to respond
100 years ago a lot of people (like my grandparents) left their extended family in Europe and emigrated to the USA.
> Not enough time for evolution to respond
And we have to guess that evolution didn't "respond".
Sooooo, we have some lack of fit, evolved over 10s of thousands of years for life as it was then and for the last ~5000 years in selected cultures faced with something quite different, powerful governments and armies, metals, weapons, tools, sailing ships, agriculture, domestic animals, ....
Supposedly for those 10s of thousands of years in parts of Europe people formed tribes and had some communal living, that is, in a long house, maybe 50-100 yards long 10-20 yards wide, with walls and roof forming a semi-circle. So, women and children got their socialization, security, lessons, skills, not merely from a couple, a bonded husband and wife living just as a couple, but from the tribe as a whole. I.e., now, for a lot for a person to learn and have, including shelter, we are depending heavily just on the mother and father.
As the authors mentioned, ~30 years is the age many people have kids, and it is already well known that female brain changes after giving birth, for example. The authors didn't research if being a parent can explain a part of the difference (and also if parent brains are any different than childless people brains).
I'm personally curious about this: I'm slightly above 30, I observed significant changes in my behavior recently... and I became a parent this year.
Just a heads up, the female brain changes are reverted 1 year after giving birth (that's what the health professionals told us).
They also discovered that the male brain changes too.
I felt way more empathetic during the first year my son and my daughter were born, but I feel like I lost that part of me. I kinda miss it
Are you insinuating that childless people never fully mature? Because as a childless person I've noticed that a lot of the distance I felt with my friends with kids disappeared as soon as their kids were grown. Essentially we're all childless now, and think of the world in the same terms.
I think it's not about maturity just about socio- and bio-logically induced re-prioritisation.
I can accept that the brain changes after becoming a parent.
I'm not convinced it's automatically, or even usually, for the better. Many of the parents I know are deeply and profoundly unhappy.
> Many of the parents I know are deeply and profoundly unhappy.
As a childless person, I believe this is a societal problem, not a biological one. We've broken apart the tribe and made just two people (at most) responsible for most of child rearing. And worse, we pretend the parents are directly responsible for a child's safety and development at all times, even though we all know some kids are just way easier or harder to raise, right out of the box.
Smart take. Parenting used to be more communal in some ways. Now it's up to two (maybe) working parents to deal with kids.
43-yr-old parent of 2. I love them. They're amazing. But there are so many challenging moments. So many.
In those deep/profound moments of stress, I try to remind myself that the only thing I really need to do is stay calm. Allowed to have emotions, course.
But to execute some level of calm really helps resolve so much of what you experience.
With the amount of sleep new parents aren't getting, I'd be shocked if there weren't changes to the brain.
Maybe they are unhappy but on the flip side, most people with children will tell you that if you haven't been a parent you don't know what happiness is. The happiness of being a parent is just unimaginable, cannot compare with anything else.
Strangely enough, I think I do understand. As near as I can tell, life's two greatest pleasures are
1. Love (both loving and being loved)
2. Voluntary hardship
I'm mean, what is parenthood if not love and voluntary hardship?
On the other hand, I think you are describing your subjective experience. I've talked with some "one-and-done" parents who deeply love their child, but wouldn't want another one if you paid them.
No, I'm not insinuating anything.
The authors charted human brain and divided it into "eras" where they saw significant changes based on age. Major life events can affect brain structure, and becoming a parent is one of the most important adult life events. Becoming a parent in early 30s is common. Just these facts combined mean that being in early 30s correlates with brain changes somehow. The authors explicitly mention that they know about this, and that they didn't control for this it yet.
Back to your question, I never said anything about maturing. It is a well-known fact, that female brain changes after childbirth. There is also research that suggests that first-time fathers brain changes too. This doesn't necessarily mean becoming more mature.
i think its incredibly difficult for a male to truly become a man without children. it is very easy and seductive to be a manchild forever, whereas society seems to force women to grow up. And its certainly possible for a father to remain a manchild, but i think without that kind of responsibility and focus of having to mentor and keep another human alive its difficult to fully mature.
edit: I am a man
This has to be satire right?
You don't need to have kids to nut up and take responsibility for yourself and others.
notice how I didn't say that
Seriously can't tell if this is satire.
I don't think it's satire. It makes some kind of sense even if I don't agree with it
Anecdote: I became a parent at 25 and didn't feel these shifts until 30/31.
So .. the thing is, this is a descriptive account of the biology of the brain. However, I sometimes see the "discourse machine" building narratives around pushing the age of majority later, and I suspect this will get used in ammunition for normative purposes.
Seems a stretch to use this as the basis of any radical change like raising the voting age to 32 (although maybe it supports reducing the minimum presidential age from 35 to 32!), but it does perhaps suggest looking at what kind of soft-paternalistic structures might help “adolescents” make better life choices. It is a little absurd that we expect an 18 year old to navigate the world with the same competence as a 40 year old.
I think it's weird having an arbitrary minimum age to be president. I would probably never vote for someone in their 20s anyway, but I don't think there should be a legal barrier. In my country (Brazil) it's the same age, but we usually just copy US in think kind of policy. I wonder how common it's in the rest of the world.
I'm more bothered by the geriatric politicians in various democracies than I am that you're missing out on some amazing politician in their twenties.
The UK has a practical minimum of 18 for Prime Minister (technically there is no minimum but practically there is) but realistically never elects a PM under 40.
For British Sovereign there is also no limit, any particularly young Sovereign has effectively delegated to a council of regents historically. In practice this is also unlikely - although in theory of course we are two untimely deaths from a 12 year old taking the throne.
The US could really do with a maximum age for Presidents, and a retirement schedule for the permanent government on the Supreme Court.
There should absolutely be a minimum and maximum age.
Preferably an IQ test as well.
Between 35-60 at start of term, IQ above 130.
> It is a little absurd that we expect an 18 year old to navigate the world with the same competence as a 40 year old.
I don't think it is. 18 year olds are smarter than most people give them credit for. They probably know math better than most 40 year olds just given their adjacency to math practice in school.
Knowing math specifically and intelligence generally are orthogonal to the skill of wise decision making.
Some of the smartest people I’ve ever known at any age have been among the worst at “life skills”.
The older people get, the less they want youngsters to vote, drink, and drive--unless they believe they have something personally to gain from it
I'm not sure about the evidence for that gross generalization but young people are much less likely to vote than older people.
This is why you've gotta actually think about what you believe morally speaking at an early age and then stick to it. I don't vote, drink, or drive myself, and never will, but I hope I will always defend the rights of the youth to.
How do you plan on defending those rights if you dont vote.
I’m in my early 40s and went through a really intense, almost midlife crisis type period at the start of this year that turned out to be surprisingly transformative. I have come out of it feeling more patient, focused, confident, kind, and much better at honest self‑reflection. It’s just one anecdote, but my working theory is that people hit these developmental turning points at different times; some earlier, some later. studies like this make me wonder how much of that is brain wiring catching up with the lives we have lived so far
I don't know if it was adulhood, but after 30 I started feeling calmer & more adult than before.
There was no special event in my life that kickstarted this, it was tge beginning of a more mature way to look at things & people. I started to see some repeated events & behaviours that I had already experienced and this also contributed to have a more tempered way to manage things.
As you age of course you still face unknown things, but you star to see that supposed new things rhyme with things you already know.
So midlife crisis has not hit yet.
Let’s continue dividing that into 15 distinct eras, then 60 eras, until we finally end up with a smooth, continuous process that I suppose we could call “aging”.
Fascinating study.
The stats warrant some caution, though. The main finding is based on figure 4 [1] and I wouldn't be surprised if the number and location of these 'eras' varied a lot if the authors use 40,000 people instead of 4,000.
Especially the last era - over 83 - is suspicious. With 4000 people and ages 1-90, how certain can we be about this? But I don't want to cast unjustified doubt, I'm sure they did the math.
Having seen a lot of research papers lie, or simply use incompetent math, I'm not sure at all.
at some point when i was 32 it hit me: "ive accepted the idea of giving up perceived freedom and having a kid" (adoption or old-fashioned-style)
my spouse is 3 years younger and when i told her my conclusion i added that i feel no urgency, only that something shifted
this was 3 years ago and now my spouse is 32 and said the same thing to me, someone who previously had NEVER wanted to go through the process of childbirth[0]. had to remind her that we had the same convo when i was her age
incredible that shift has been pinned down with research
[0] 10 years of big hospital nursing can be like "scared straight" for pregnancy
Yeah I could distinctly feel my brain shifting into its adult era over the last couple of years (I'm 31)
It was kind of odd. I'm more serious now (but at the same time.. less?). I'm way more easily able to focus on what actually matters in this life. (In saying that, I think it's more likely that my brain has finally decided what's important... in a way I feel like a passenger)
I question the correlation and causality. I wonder how much of these eras are caused by brain physiology and genetics versus changes in the behavior with age, which can even be caused by external sociological factors, for example. Or a mix of both.
> From 32 years, the brain architecture appears to stabilise compared with previous phases, corresponding with a “plateau in intelligence and personality”.
For example, here - is this *caused* by genetics, or is it because in today's society this is about the age when you have finished your schooling and first working experiences and have simply less to learn?
I know my examples simplify the reasoning, but the question about causality still stands, I think.
I am personally supportive of any research that continues to define my age as having just achieved adulthood.
This study seems like finding a way to quantify the well known and then twisting it to make a good headline.
People don't grow up until they need to. Of course you're gonna see college educated rich westerners delay whatever mental markers you're looking at. And likewise people who "stay active" seem to stave off the mental decline of old age.
Exactly this. With a comfy life, you can mature later. The more hardships and adversity one must overcome the faster that maturation happens. Particularly so when the hardships put one on an abnormal path.
Losing a close relative or a job is normal adversity that everyone will go through but not everyone has. Going through those other things while having a different philosophy or life ethos than those around you, thus also causing you to prioritize and pursue different things in life adds a different layer of challenge. That causes you to have to figure stuff out on your own and thus contributes to maturing in a different manner and at a different rate.
I definitely felt older back in my early thirties, but I feel like I got younger now in my mid 40s. I think it's because my kid is in college and doesn't need me as much as they used to. Plus, I'm debt free and make enough money to not worry about the cost of going out.
In my late 20s/early 30s I was under water on my house, not getting paid enough, and had a small child. It was clear that I had to step up and "be a man." Which, I intuitively think had a bigger effect on me than simply getting older.
I do have felt similar shift around that age, but I wonder if it is due to reaching certain points in career where you are put into more leading position and have more confidence in what you do even if you don't have children? Easy to go into horoscope style confirmation bias here though.
Nonetheless I am never going to stop saying I still feel like I am 16. Just more confident 16.
As some point you're going to stop saying that because you'll realize that sixteen year olds are generally dumbasses.
Anecdotally I’ve felt this shift over the past few years. I am 33 and have always been a huge proponent of personal growth, change, pushing yourself to be better. In the past few years Ive felt the opposite urge, an urge to accept myself, flaws and all, as the hand I’ve been dealt and I must merely play that hand, not focus so much on what-ifs, etc. Perhaps this is my brain solidifying.
29 and feeling the same. It's kind frustrating and freeing at the same time. I feel like I'm making less progress, but at the same time don't feel the pressure to make progress.
There is wisdom both in trying to change what you can, and realizing that you maybe can't change everything. If you've been trying to change things, by 33 you may have a fair idea of what you in fact cannot change.
I'd also like to add anecdotally that a lot of people develop burnout at that age, probably because they keep pushing themselves and/or get sucked into their own enthusiasm / passion instead of set limits and the like. But then, I also think people get less resilient to stress and the like after 30, less able to compartimentalize or bounce back quickly.
What you end up getting is people ~10 years into an exciting career where suddenly they can't perform or cope as well as they used to. But they can also be in a pretty senior position by then and be pushed out of their comfort zone.
> based on the brain scans of nearly 4,000 people aged under one to 90, mapped neural connections and how they evolve during our lives.
That is an absurdly small sample size to make such a conclusion.
It seems this age range could at least partly be culturally attributed. In modern industrialized life, many people don't have to "grow up" until a later age. At the risk of generalizing, people have more support from family, friends, and society at large.
Is the forming of those neurons based on some natural law, or is that people just haven't had to live the experiences that do so until their 30's nowadays?
As far as I know, forming neurons isn't something that "just happens". It happens due to catalysts in life. In pre-modern society, and indeed most likely in under-industrialized nations today, those catalysts, those experiences, would happen earlier. As others mentioned, there is a clear correlation with the typical age in which modern society gets married, settles down, and has kids.
I wonder what that era age would have been 200+ years ago.
Not sure why this is downvoted.
The authors themselves not that parenthood could be a catalyst for the change at 30-- in previous centuries, when parenthood happened much earlier, why could it not affect the brain's timeline? This study is simply descriptive of a particular dataset, a collection of snapshots at a particular time and place. Certainly the brain is elastic and responsive to external conditions.
What I noticed is that the 4000 samples are all from England and the U.S. Replicating this study with a greater geographical and socio-cultural diversity would be very useful in supporting or expanding these results.
Wasn't it 25 that the prefrontal cortex matured and people could be considered adults? We will have to infantilize people until their 30s now?
The problem with such reports (the studies themselves method-wise etc are in general fine I guess, but how the results are interpreted and disseminated is the issue) is that unless we find some specific correlations with behavioural and such measures, it makes no sense to give these kind of meanings such as "adolescence", adult mode", behavioural/mental/cognitive matureness or whatever cultural or other norms one may think a "mature/adult person" should abide to. Especially since these abstract topological measures, while interesting, are not that trivially linked with real outcomes in a causal sense, and instead of eg simply reflecting rather environmental or other changes in a person's life.
I haven't read this paper, but for the "25" paper, it was a longitudinal study that stopped observing people at 25. The result "brain continues to develop up to at least age 25" was misinterpreted as "stops developing at age 25" by media & social media.
I have similar concerns about reporting on this paper - feels ripe for pop-sci misunderstandings.
All research is ripe for pop-sci misunderstandings. Always. But this study at least didn't have a cutoff for ages studied.
> We will have to infantilize people until their 30s now?
People already pick and choose who they feel sympathy for and give a pass to on the basis of their personal experiences, belief system, and social proximity. Think of how many, for instance, ridicule politicians for being too saintly and enabling or mean and without empathy then give their friends and family a pass for the exact same behavior. They'll get angry with celebrities for things that they allegedly did then shrug off a driver running a red light and nearly killing them because they "don't take things personally". Addicts are a blight on society until it's somebody's child or brother or sister in which case they just need help. Et cetera ad infinitum.
People (you and I included) are fickle. This changes nothing.
"Infantilize" is a needlessly hyperbolic verb.
I've always found it interesting that laws are set by politics to allow privileges at certain ages (16, 18, 21), but car rental companies - whose motives are more purely data-driven - won't rent to anyone under 25.
I'm certainly not advocating withholding suffrage until 25, but driving... the data is very strong that it would save lives.
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Then when you're not on the era you're supposed to be it's called a "regression" or "skipping stages". People are very stubborn to classify development in terms of age or time.
The feeling is definitely there,but it's hard to say of it was parenthood or aging until 36 that made me more adult. Probably both
Just the headline gels with my experience at age 54.
This is interesting and alarming to me because judging by the changes in my life I appear to have entered the age-66 phase more than a decade and a half early despite remaining intellectually curious and physically fit enough.
In the last year or so I have begun to adjust my life expectations. My father was in his nineties when he died, but I no longer believe I will reach my seventies.
Things like this only tend to confirm my sense that I am neurologically ageing at a rate that is unusual.
Semantics sure. But adult mode starts most likely at 13.
Early 30s is mid-life mode.
Why? Because time and time again research shows we should treat people 13 and up as adults. Even when they get some extra years of youth-judgement in court, and we put 18/21 in place as lawful adult...
I had kids and finally settled into a career at 33. It certainly forced me into adult mode after this.
I just met up with my Brother-in-law and his friends for our yearly gathering. All of them are in their 30s and none of them are in what I would consider 'adult mode'.
They are all un-married/no kids, barely scraping by, partying every weekend/wasting money on weed and booze. Certainly no careers (mostly retail, some unemployed and still living with parents).
I wonder if these numbers will change with the new generation, because so many are not having kids or getting married.
This sounds more like an anecdote of “my brother-in-law and his friends are losers” more than any indication of a trend.
The median income almost doubles between age 23 and 35.
There's definitely a transition associated with becoming a parent - that is well documented.
When I think about my friends and friends of my relatives, what GP described appears to be the norm - also among the educated and in the upper-middle class. They often identify themselves as "dog parents".
Did you read the article (or hell even the title) before commenting...?
>Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
I know plenty of people that had kids in their 20's - still didn't 'grow up' until their 30's. Just because they're not partying anymore doesn't mean they still don't act like adolescents when navigating complicated situations they're in (because they're had kids before they were necessarily 'ready') compared with someone in their 30's. I would argue that taking away that time in your late 20's where you can more easily make mistakes and try new things (while also having a bit of stability in terms of money) before having kids will lead to less maturity rather than more long term.
Probably not, the comment read more as a way to rant, self-boast, and judge others' lifestyles than anything insightful.
So you aren't an adult until your early 30's and you are an old slow guy not worth interviewing less than 10 years later.
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Where did you get that from? The article mentions changes at age 9, 32, 66, and 83.
It's just the popular wisdom these days. Companies tend to deprioritize hiring engineers in their 40s, especially if their overspecialized. At face value, Companies want high-energy 20-somethings that they can mold into their specialty. More likely, they know that 20-somethings expect a far smaller salary.
So you aren't discussing the article at all? And you imply mythrwy isn't either?
This is another psychology narrative put forth as a quantifiable scientific finding.
Q: "Is this based on a clearly expressed scientific theory?"
A: "Be serious -- it's just an idea, a narrative."
Q: "What would constitute a basis for either statistical validation or falsification?"
A: "You're confusing psychology with science. That's naive."
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33 year olds really should not be allowed to date 28yr olds
It took me until my mid-30s to feel like I had crossed a threshold in processing grief and trauma from my late teen years. I was capable of adult behavior long before then, but my concept of the world and how I fit into it (or don't) was still childlike in many ways on a fundamental level.
Like most such things, I'd expect this to be a spectrum, and I may be somewhat of a late bloomer. Regardless, I have a theory that there is somewhat of a protective effect operating here. Believing in a simpler reality which involved future wish fulfillment for me - however unrealistic it was - may have helped me survive. Coming to acceptance of what I see as a more accurate but far bleaker perspective required me to grow strong enough to sustain my will to live despite that perspective.
Biggest lesson learned: I could not do it without at least one other person (or more) who I trust almost 100% with all of myself. Realizing that going it alone is futile is definitely part of what I consider becoming an adult, and it can take a long time to fully accept that.
> Biggest lesson learned: I could not do it without at least one other person (or more) who I trust almost 100% with all of myself.
Its strange. The biggest lesson I learned was almost the opposite: I learned that the meaning of life has nothing to do with other people or their estimation of me. It has more to do with who you are when there is nobody else around. Other people often act as a sort of fun house mirror that distort and reflect back a false image.
Learning to be happy alone and seeing through the pleasant lies is absolutely vital to becoming an adult.
On the contrary, developing a deep relationship with someone very different than myself (different religions, native languages and countries, socioeconomic class, race, gender) has shown me the lies I've been telling myself all my life.
It's easy to identity lies and hypocrisy in others. But the brain has all sorts of tricks to prevent it from looking inwards; at least for me it prefers feeling rewarded to deep self-criticism. Finding someone who sees me and will happily call me on my assumptions, conditioning, and BS has been a great gift.
I feel like we need both. There are mental/emotional experiences I have on the regular which there is no point in trying to communicate to someone else but still bring me great benefit. We need to value our alone time, absolutely.
We also ultimately derive pretty much everything we most value in life from our interactions with other lives, which is why I think it's so important to develop high-trust relationships with at least one or two other people so we can continue to grapple with the fact that we all have different perspectives, weaknesses and strengths and can usually learn more and get significantly more things done when we cooperate than when we're running solo. Which requires trust.
YMMV, of course. Some people can go build a cabin in the woods and live off the land and spend all their free time meditating and be perfectly happy. But that's not most of us. And even those people eventually get too old to keep taking care of themselves.
Can you elaborate on the last point? As someone going through a very hard time with my wife at the moment I’d love any words of wisdom.
I’m going to go against the grain here.
The parent’s advice is toxic and mistaken. It’s a road to codependency. I’ve been with my wife 20 years, married 15. I would have said the same thing they said — I can’t do it all on my own, I need someone else.
Rubbish. And also dangerous rubbish. I’ve been weak for a long time simply because I hadn’t taken myself seriosuly. I literally believed that I couldn’t do it alone, which was wrong.
It was unfair to my wife to use her as an emotional support when she didn’t want to be. She’s been there for me a lot over the years. But when you tell someone that you can’t do it without them, it’s no longer their decision, and that’s unfair. Both to her and to me.
Please read Codependent No More, and especially Lost in the Shuffle by Subby. (I’ve identified a lot more with the latter.)
The point is, it’s okay to be having a rough time with your wife. Let go. Let her do her own thing. Stop caring so much. It’s okay for her to be upset and not want to help/have sex/go to an event/involve you/whatever the problem may be. The reason it feels rough is because you personally let it feel rough. Once I adopted that mindset, it became so much easier. And ironically my marriage improved.
Meds are also important. Make sure you’re on a good dosage of antidepressants if you need them, and a mood stabilizer. I recently started Latuda and dropped Seroquel per my psychiatrist, and it’s been night and day.
Lastly, keep trying to talk to people about your problems. I ended up reaching out to a random person on Twitter. They were kind and to my surprise happy to listen. It was one of the main reasons I was able to get through it all. The best person to talk to is a therapist, though I’d be happy to listen till you can find one.
You’re strong. You need to believe that. And you’re strong independently of your family or anyone else. Give yourself credit for getting as far as you have; that part has been important too.
Just want to point out codependency--especially if you read Codependent No More--is not about being dependent on another person. That is dependent personality disorder perhaps.
Codependency is better described IMO as secondhand addiction. It was coined to describe the symptoms of people who live with alcoholics and other substance abusers and the destructive coping patterns they use to survive in the addict's wake
I get what you're saying. A therapist is one of the types of people I had in mind, although that obviously isn't an option for everyone.
I agree that it's important to be able to have your own independent autonomy to properly function in a healthy relationship, especially a romantic one.
The point I was trying to make is perhaps more subtle than it came across, namely that webs of trust between humans (e.g. 'community') are, in my view, essential to being a fully actualized adult. If you aren't close to anyone, I think that means something is wrong which deserves further inspection, particularly within yourself.
Sorry for the somewhat harsh words. You have a point. The problem is that it’s way too easy to fall down the codependency rabbit hole when you start thinking of it as “I can’t do X unless someone else Y’s”. It was true for me, and I just wanted to make sure it wouldn’t be true for the poor fella going through marriage problems.
The trick and the trouble is that it’s easy to acknowledge the importance of being independent, especially in a romantic relationship, vs actually doing that in practice. After your 30’s your friends start to fade away, and one day I woke up without any except my wife. That was clearly a degenerate situation unfair to her, and expanding your social circle is something that should be done independent of whatever relationship you happen to be in. In fact, needs to be done.
There is a huge difference between acknowledging that humans are an inherently social species that usually needs comfort and psychologically benefits from an intimate relationship and straight up codependency, where you violate the boundaries of each other and thereby take away psychological safety.
I agree! The point is, don’t use your wife for your comfort and psychology benefits. Use the other people in your life. Especially when you’re having marital problems.
I have had many difficult times with my current S.O. over 15+ years.
Everyone's situation is different, but I can say that in even a semi-healthy relationship, time heals many wounds, greater mutual understanding grows, hard edges can soften and people will often surprise you. You can also learn things you could improve about yourself which you were previously blind to. The sense of stability this reinforces is immensely helpful.
On the other hand, I also have an ex-- and while I wish I would have ended that differently in hindsight, it did need to end for my mental health to improve. If you are with someone who abuses you, cannot be reasoned with and never admits fault, it is wise to plan several exit strategies.
Sorry I don’t know your circumstances but “Walking on Eggshells” by Langford has literally saved me.
The only wisdom I can offer: other people emotions don’t have to control yours (despite what they tell you). The best take on this that I know: be like a goose - they don’t get wet, just shake it off.
And take care of yourself!
A novel? You sure you're talking about the right book?
Fiction can reveal a lot of real wisdom if you’re open to receiving it.
I'd hit up a solo therapist. I went through a hard time with my wife and turns out she just sucks. Be warned that she sucked a lot worse in the divorce and states differ wildly in how biased they are against fathers if you have kids.
It was helpful to figure out some of my stuff and deal with a bunch of trauma.
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Or else books / online communities. I can't recommend using ChatGPT for this kind of help but it can be used to validate your experiences, provide a different experience, and if you ask it, point you in the right direction.
For example, if you explain it (or Reddit) an interpersonal situation it can break it down and e.g. point out certain behaviours or boundary crossings.
But I would be careful, as these chatbots will by default put you in the right, even when you aren't.
Even therapists are a mixed bag - and some are legitimately dangerous - but in my experience at least 100x safer than a chatbot or just books.
If for no other reason than a chatbot can’t call you out on your bullshit, because it has no hope of telling what is or is not bullshit. And that is key. And has no actual feelings, remorse, license to lose, etc. etc.
etc. etc. responsibility.
may also be lacking in therapist. is certainly lacking in LLM
Every person is different. Some people don't need a stable relation, some people *can't have* a stable relation, some people thrive with it.
Every relation is different. A successful relation is built when both side are compatible.
What does compatible mean, though? Some relations are swingers. Some relations follow strict religious rules. Some people need taking a beating, and I don't mean an erotic one. In None of this cases I am meaning they are codependent, and then there are successful codependent relations.
The only constant I have seen is that every successful relation has discussions, fights, momments when they considered separating. And there is compromise, in every case.
I am sorry I don't have any specific advice. Good luck
Do not try to understand women.
That said women’s understanding of truth (men’s too, but IME they have an easier time controlling it) is emotion-dependent and worst case emotions-driven, i.e. it literally depends on how they feel right now. If they say something untrue you can ask if that’s how they feel now or if it’s a general truth (don’t make it sound like they’re lying though, remember it’s all emotional). You’re in trouble if they say the same thing without any emotional charge; no feelings at all is the worst.
Please note this is n=1.
That’s not a woman thing, that’s a person thing. Your advice is good but it would equally apply to me, and I’m a man.
> Please note this is n=1.
Then why use the plural terms “women” and “they”?
Because: bigotry.
I did not feel fully adult until my parents passed on. I was in my early 40s at that point. Then I knew that there was no fallback; it was all up to me.
Quite similar experience here. Actually it took me few more events to be able to reflect and understand that looking from another perspective.
A person becomes an adult once they take responsibility for their own actions and the consequences thereof. Many people never reach that status, regardless of age.
It's not helpful to redefine terms separately from the article.
> Realizing that going it alone is futile is definitely part of what I consider becoming an adult
Weird, for me its the complete opposite. I accepted to live alone for the rest of my life because a) I am undesired and I wont make a move. b) I barely met people I would even consider it being worth talking to, I need to feel equal on a cognitive level and not a lot of people match that requirement. I either feel lesser or above.
> I need to feel equal on a cognitive level and not a lot of people match that requirement. I either feel lesser or above.
Expecting perfection out of life is definitely a road to unhappiness.
You certainly don't need to have someone in your life -- as someone who married late and has two kids now I sometimes look back on my long period of begin single with fondness -- but I would also recommend being very honest with yourself. Very few people are totally undesirable and expecting others to meet some predetermined standard is very common among people that don't interact socially very often (I speak from experience). While I'm lucky that my wife is very bright (and in many ways much smarter than me) the most important thing that she has given me is new perspectives on life and seeing that it's more important to be kind and helpful than smart.
It's very hard to see outside of our early conditioning without outside perspectives. We may have a vague sense that we might not have been given the best tools for social development (we may even be brutally aware of it), but having someone that has the skills that we are missing is often more important than that they have equal skills in areas we are strong in. Having a good partner can make you realize things about yourself and open you up to things that you never even realized were there.
Yea I get that. A partner would be nice but in 30 years of my life I met 2 women I liked. I am extremely self aware in that regard. I am repulsed by modern dating and dating apps and I dont get myself "out there". I also have way too high standards but I cant just ignore them. Also being chronically depressed does not really help either...
So I just accept my situation and I don't want to change my ways as I am content with how my life currently is.
Why are you so arrogant that you feel most others aren't on your cognitive level? Most likely you're not actually as smart as you think you are.
They said that they either feel lesser or above. (Though this might point at a different problem; I'd hope one could enjoy the company, really enjoy it, of both sets of people.)
He said that can feel either lesser or above so there's nothing arrogant about that.
> Why are you so arrogant
Assuming they are, just for the sake of the discussion: what kind of answer do you expect to this question? You think someone who is arrogant has a theory of why they are so and are willing to share it? I would expect they are mostly blind to their own arrogance. Can be useful to point it out.
I guess it was just a rhetorical question. But it feels weird. Do you think it can possibly do anything else than create hostility?
Did you read until the end? I wrote I either feel lesser or above. It works both ways. Arrogance is lived experience, I met a lot of people in my lifetime.
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>At around the age of 32 the strongest overall shift in trajectory is seen. Life events such as parenthood may play a role in some of the changes seen, although the research did not explicitly test this. “We know that women who give birth, their brain changes afterwards,” said Mousley. “It’s reasonable to assume that there could be a relationship between these milestones and what’s happening in the brain.”
>From 32 years, the brain architecture appears to stabilise compared with previous phases, corresponding with a “plateau in intelligence and personality” based on other studies. Brain regions also become more compartmentalised.
-- I felt this 32-year-old shift, but later (now 43). I joke with friends that I was a bone-head like most males until about 30. Joke yes, but feels right.
Prior to 30ish, I was more insecure. Lacking in emotional intelligence.
My career and relationship history reflect that switch-flip in a way. Only during the second half of my 30s did I begin to feel more secure and more confident in my career, despite not achieving some outrageous senior position or level of income. That career is now in a better and more measured place - in which I recognize what I do well and what I don't do well, and don't beat myself to a pulp for not having "it"
Only in my 30s did I robustly embrace the power of compromise in friendships and relationships. Now I'm near 10 years married (and happy, most of it, let's be real) with two wonderful kids.
And now I'm much capable of reasoning with my anxities, emotions, and insecurities. Do I still ruminate? Yes. Do I still react? Yes. But I know how to redraw situations to reset my in-moment feelings and/or avoid unecessary negative action.
I've always thought that I'm just extremely late to mature. I'm 36 now and haven't really felt like I sort of "get" things until my early 30s. My 20s were full of learning experiences, failures, and addiction to doing whatever the hell I wanted. I got a puppy with my wife at 29 and it felt like my life was over. This all really makes a lot of sense to me. It also makes me wonder why the human body rewards young parents when their brains are just simply not fully finished cooking. I couldn't have imagined raising a child at 22 with the way I acted and how important freedom was to me. I would've simply been a miserable father.
Thousands of generations of parents had children much younger than today. I think we’re too worried about having everything perfect and de-risked these days. Also realize that parenting is what grew me up. I don’t think people are ever “ready”
It’s a lot more complicated financially for people. You used to not have to rely on dual incomes just to survive. Wealth inequity, housing affordability, and healthcare have all changed. This is why many are choosing to have kids later in life or not even at all because of those reasons and even the environment with climate change it’s a hard decision to make to bring new life into this world to suffer in it.
It's always been financially complicated for most people. The notion of a nuclear family prospering with a single income was mostly only possible for a limited slice of the US population during a few decades post-WWII. If you take a broader historical view that was a brief anomaly.
And it's really weird that anyone would think of something amorphous and uncertain like climate change as a reason not to have children. Even the unlikely worst case scenarios are still going to have less impact than the major wars and plagues that our species has lived through. Some people just lack a sense of perspective.
> It’s a lot more complicated financially for. You used to not have to rely on dual incomes just to survive.
This is a toxic myth and acts as excuse to blame extrinsic factors that won't see change by the time you'll need them to, even if they can be fixed. Economic life today can be a lot more complicated for middle class professionals and skilled laborers, but they were only ever a fraction of the population in the first place, and families in tougher circumstances than today's middle class folk figured out how to navigate the cards they were dealt.
Emotionally, it legitimately sucks if you come from a comfy middle class background, and have a career that you believed should have been good enough to deliver the life you remember your parents or grandparents having and now doesn't seem to be. It feels unfair and disorienting, maybe. But the fact is that middle class lifestyle is gone for now, and if it does manage to get restored, that restoration will take a generation or two to come.
In the meantime, you have to figure out how to adapt and live that more modest and "more complicated financially" lifestyle. It can be done. Lots of people have been doing it for a long time. Along the way, you'll probably discover that lower class folk who never had the luxuries of your parents and grandparents in the first place were not seeing the world as something they had to "suffer in": they lived in homes, but often with more people in them. They traveled, but more infrequently, less glamorously, and with more pragmatic rationale like "visiting family" than "seeing the world". They had parties, but served simpler dishes on less fancy platters. They had "child care" when two parents worked, but got it by exchanging favors with family or neighbors instead of sending half a paycheck to a prestigious daycare. They laughed, they drank, they had kids. It's not a world of suffering to just not have some luxuries.
More complicated than when? You used to have kids because you needed more hands to work the farm and a good number of them died young.
Exactly, so that made having children a financial benefit. I'm confused that you said it but don't get it.
I don’t know about that. My great grandmas and grandmas didn’t have lots of kids for the labor, they had them because they didn’t have a way to not have them. The grandpas might have though.
Coincidentally, my aunts did not have to have more than 2, and almost every single one had 2 kids.
Yes that model has been inverted.
The family used to tax the grown or mostly-grown children in the form of farm labor. The government in many prior centuries taxed like 2-5% total and the rest was intrafamilial support.
Now it is flipped on its head. Everyone else's families tax your child for their social security, socializing the benefits while still you retain most the costs privately.
Thus tragedy of the commons situation. Why make that investment when you can just tax everyone else's kids and rest assured of your own social security, if they don't pay it you can just have them tossed in a cage or their assets seized, no need to have children yourself.
What you write is the mathematical fact of societies with flattened and upside down population pyramids and wealth transfers from young to old, not sure why you are downvoted.
I agree. Having children does make ones priorities very cut and dry. I found it a lot easier to "adult" once I had children. My Friends, at the time often asked, "Is having children hard?" I often replied, in the beginning at least, "Children are easy, it's everything else that is hard."
Indeed, it is society's expectations that are hard.
I moved to the middle of nowhere after my kids were born. One day I let my child walk home "alone" from school, for the portion that is on our own property, and of course as soon as you do that a fucking Karen will randomly pop out of nowhere, and start interrogating the child. It is like clockwork. You could be 100 miles from civilization and as soon as you do something someone somewhere disagrees with, a fucking Karen (and even in a minivan, down rugged rural dirt roads, how the fuck did she get there?) will magically be there that exact second with a cell phone at the ready to call CPS. Thankfully I was able to stop her before that happened, as I was actually watching from behind the bushes, which in itself is shameful but saved my ass.
I suspect it's a cultural thing as well, with most (all?) wealthy cultures veering towards individualism and working. Whereas with previous generations, the grandparents and environment would be more involved in raising children and educating the new parents.
But I also feel like people grew up or had to grow up earlier back when. My parents were married, bought a house and had kids on the way by their mid 20's, when I was that age I had just about finished my education and started my first fulltime job, it'd take another decade to buy a house. Buying a house / getting a mortgage is a major commitment, and I think you'd get a big boost of adulthood / personal development if you do that in your mid 20's.
Exactly that. It's not an arbitrary dated threshold that lead to "growing up". It was the event of having kids. I'm still able to look at my current life through the lenses of a 25 year old me and hell, that looks bleak. But I can say with confidence that I'm content. Of course there are little things here and there but mostly everything is fine.
I only wonder if there is going to be a next stage, the magical "midlife crisis", where I'm going to question all my decisions up to that point and I'm curious how I'm going to handle that.
also its a lot easier to have kids at 20 if the kids grandparents are only 40 instead of 70
Maybe also because the life spent leading up to the child having was much different earlier - I mean society, jobs, distractions... I'm sure this has an important role as well in setting up expectations and kicking up responsibilities.
People that tell you you need to be ready are lying. The only thing you need to be able to sustain is feeding them, and the rest mostly works itself out. As it has for millennia.
The only reason this would not be the case is if you have specific requirements for the life of your child.
I would encourage you to look at the medical costs of children in the US. My children's braces alone will cost ~$7k-10k over the life of each of them, with insurance, and to do without will cause irreparable oral damage into adulthood. Certainly, this doesn't apply to other developed or developing countries, but to say "you just need to feed them" wildly differs from reality. You're just ignoring suffering at scale by saying "it'll work itself out." It doesn't, and I can provide pages of citations to support this assertion. Also, having served in a short stint as a Guardian ad Litem to advocate for children going through family court, I have anecdotal observations as to failure scenarios of failures to adequately provide for children, both materially and emotionally.
"Everything before 40 is research" I once heard, and every day, I find it to be more true.
I'm a great parent because it is what is necessary and my children had no choice or consent in existing, but I also tell anyone younger that unless they are absolutely sure they want kids and are ready for decades of suck, don't do it [1] [2] [3]. Live your best life, be true to yourself, find your passion and joy exploring and being curious; one can do this without children. If one needs kids to mature or become a better human, find a therapist first. Also, maturity is optional. You have to grow old, you don't have to grow up (take on responsibility unnecessary to take care of yourself, broadly speaking). Religious beliefs aside (potential reincarnation and whatnot), enjoy life, you only get one run through your part of the timeline. Don't waste it on the expectations or belief systems of others.
[1] (lack of support systems, both social and familial, ~$380k in 2025 dollars to raise a child 0-18 in the US not including daycare and college, etc; n=1, ymmv)
[2] Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Mental Health & Well-Being of Parents - https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu... - 2024
[3] The American dream will cost you $5 million, report finds - https://www.axios.com/2025/09/22/the-american-dream-will-cos... - September 22nd, 2025
I would describe the age of 40 as the time when my brain truly started to function but unfortunately, I feel ashamed of that.
If it makes you feel any better, that's about the age I started functioning mostly like an adult. It started around 30 but took a good decade to take hold.
Just because people can physically, biologically have children does not automatically imply that they can - or should - be the only ones to raise the children. Children used to be a community effort; the US strayed from this a long time ago. Of course it would be much harder to raise a kid at 22 (or 16, or) than 40!
Yet our physiology is tuned to become parents at 16 rather than 40.
I think nature doesn't care whether it's easier or better or whatever. It only cares for _more_ children to survive until their own time to have children.
We used to have grandparents around and extended family. Think about how different life was 50,100 or, 500 years ago. Not enough time for evolution to respond
100 years ago a lot of people (like my grandparents) left their extended family in Europe and emigrated to the USA.
> Not enough time for evolution to respond
And we have to guess that evolution didn't "respond".
Sooooo, we have some lack of fit, evolved over 10s of thousands of years for life as it was then and for the last ~5000 years in selected cultures faced with something quite different, powerful governments and armies, metals, weapons, tools, sailing ships, agriculture, domestic animals, ....
Supposedly for those 10s of thousands of years in parts of Europe people formed tribes and had some communal living, that is, in a long house, maybe 50-100 yards long 10-20 yards wide, with walls and roof forming a semi-circle. So, women and children got their socialization, security, lessons, skills, not merely from a couple, a bonded husband and wife living just as a couple, but from the tribe as a whole. I.e., now, for a lot for a person to learn and have, including shelter, we are depending heavily just on the mother and father.
As the authors mentioned, ~30 years is the age many people have kids, and it is already well known that female brain changes after giving birth, for example. The authors didn't research if being a parent can explain a part of the difference (and also if parent brains are any different than childless people brains).
I'm personally curious about this: I'm slightly above 30, I observed significant changes in my behavior recently... and I became a parent this year.
Just a heads up, the female brain changes are reverted 1 year after giving birth (that's what the health professionals told us). They also discovered that the male brain changes too.
I felt way more empathetic during the first year my son and my daughter were born, but I feel like I lost that part of me. I kinda miss it
Are you insinuating that childless people never fully mature? Because as a childless person I've noticed that a lot of the distance I felt with my friends with kids disappeared as soon as their kids were grown. Essentially we're all childless now, and think of the world in the same terms.
I think it's not about maturity just about socio- and bio-logically induced re-prioritisation.
I can accept that the brain changes after becoming a parent.
I'm not convinced it's automatically, or even usually, for the better. Many of the parents I know are deeply and profoundly unhappy.
> Many of the parents I know are deeply and profoundly unhappy.
As a childless person, I believe this is a societal problem, not a biological one. We've broken apart the tribe and made just two people (at most) responsible for most of child rearing. And worse, we pretend the parents are directly responsible for a child's safety and development at all times, even though we all know some kids are just way easier or harder to raise, right out of the box.
Smart take. Parenting used to be more communal in some ways. Now it's up to two (maybe) working parents to deal with kids.
43-yr-old parent of 2. I love them. They're amazing. But there are so many challenging moments. So many.
In those deep/profound moments of stress, I try to remind myself that the only thing I really need to do is stay calm. Allowed to have emotions, course.
But to execute some level of calm really helps resolve so much of what you experience.
With the amount of sleep new parents aren't getting, I'd be shocked if there weren't changes to the brain.
Maybe they are unhappy but on the flip side, most people with children will tell you that if you haven't been a parent you don't know what happiness is. The happiness of being a parent is just unimaginable, cannot compare with anything else.
Strangely enough, I think I do understand. As near as I can tell, life's two greatest pleasures are 1. Love (both loving and being loved) 2. Voluntary hardship
I'm mean, what is parenthood if not love and voluntary hardship?
On the other hand, I think you are describing your subjective experience. I've talked with some "one-and-done" parents who deeply love their child, but wouldn't want another one if you paid them.
No, I'm not insinuating anything.
The authors charted human brain and divided it into "eras" where they saw significant changes based on age. Major life events can affect brain structure, and becoming a parent is one of the most important adult life events. Becoming a parent in early 30s is common. Just these facts combined mean that being in early 30s correlates with brain changes somehow. The authors explicitly mention that they know about this, and that they didn't control for this it yet.
Back to your question, I never said anything about maturing. It is a well-known fact, that female brain changes after childbirth. There is also research that suggests that first-time fathers brain changes too. This doesn't necessarily mean becoming more mature.
i think its incredibly difficult for a male to truly become a man without children. it is very easy and seductive to be a manchild forever, whereas society seems to force women to grow up. And its certainly possible for a father to remain a manchild, but i think without that kind of responsibility and focus of having to mentor and keep another human alive its difficult to fully mature.
edit: I am a man
This has to be satire right?
You don't need to have kids to nut up and take responsibility for yourself and others.
notice how I didn't say that
Seriously can't tell if this is satire.
I don't think it's satire. It makes some kind of sense even if I don't agree with it
Anecdote: I became a parent at 25 and didn't feel these shifts until 30/31.
So .. the thing is, this is a descriptive account of the biology of the brain. However, I sometimes see the "discourse machine" building narratives around pushing the age of majority later, and I suspect this will get used in ammunition for normative purposes.
Seems a stretch to use this as the basis of any radical change like raising the voting age to 32 (although maybe it supports reducing the minimum presidential age from 35 to 32!), but it does perhaps suggest looking at what kind of soft-paternalistic structures might help “adolescents” make better life choices. It is a little absurd that we expect an 18 year old to navigate the world with the same competence as a 40 year old.
I think it's weird having an arbitrary minimum age to be president. I would probably never vote for someone in their 20s anyway, but I don't think there should be a legal barrier. In my country (Brazil) it's the same age, but we usually just copy US in think kind of policy. I wonder how common it's in the rest of the world.
I'm more bothered by the geriatric politicians in various democracies than I am that you're missing out on some amazing politician in their twenties.
The UK has a practical minimum of 18 for Prime Minister (technically there is no minimum but practically there is) but realistically never elects a PM under 40.
For British Sovereign there is also no limit, any particularly young Sovereign has effectively delegated to a council of regents historically. In practice this is also unlikely - although in theory of course we are two untimely deaths from a 12 year old taking the throne.
The US could really do with a maximum age for Presidents, and a retirement schedule for the permanent government on the Supreme Court.
There should absolutely be a minimum and maximum age. Preferably an IQ test as well.
Between 35-60 at start of term, IQ above 130.
> It is a little absurd that we expect an 18 year old to navigate the world with the same competence as a 40 year old.
I don't think it is. 18 year olds are smarter than most people give them credit for. They probably know math better than most 40 year olds just given their adjacency to math practice in school.
Knowing math specifically and intelligence generally are orthogonal to the skill of wise decision making.
Some of the smartest people I’ve ever known at any age have been among the worst at “life skills”.
The older people get, the less they want youngsters to vote, drink, and drive--unless they believe they have something personally to gain from it
I'm not sure about the evidence for that gross generalization but young people are much less likely to vote than older people.
Plenty of data on this: https://theharvardpoliticalreview.com/gen-z-voter-barriers-2...
This is why you've gotta actually think about what you believe morally speaking at an early age and then stick to it. I don't vote, drink, or drive myself, and never will, but I hope I will always defend the rights of the youth to.
How do you plan on defending those rights if you dont vote.
I’m in my early 40s and went through a really intense, almost midlife crisis type period at the start of this year that turned out to be surprisingly transformative. I have come out of it feeling more patient, focused, confident, kind, and much better at honest self‑reflection. It’s just one anecdote, but my working theory is that people hit these developmental turning points at different times; some earlier, some later. studies like this make me wonder how much of that is brain wiring catching up with the lives we have lived so far
I don't know if it was adulhood, but after 30 I started feeling calmer & more adult than before.
There was no special event in my life that kickstarted this, it was tge beginning of a more mature way to look at things & people. I started to see some repeated events & behaviours that I had already experienced and this also contributed to have a more tempered way to manage things.
As you age of course you still face unknown things, but you star to see that supposed new things rhyme with things you already know.
So midlife crisis has not hit yet.
Let’s continue dividing that into 15 distinct eras, then 60 eras, until we finally end up with a smooth, continuous process that I suppose we could call “aging”.
Fascinating study.
The stats warrant some caution, though. The main finding is based on figure 4 [1] and I wouldn't be surprised if the number and location of these 'eras' varied a lot if the authors use 40,000 people instead of 4,000.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65974-8/figures/4
Especially the last era - over 83 - is suspicious. With 4000 people and ages 1-90, how certain can we be about this? But I don't want to cast unjustified doubt, I'm sure they did the math.
Having seen a lot of research papers lie, or simply use incompetent math, I'm not sure at all.
at some point when i was 32 it hit me: "ive accepted the idea of giving up perceived freedom and having a kid" (adoption or old-fashioned-style)
my spouse is 3 years younger and when i told her my conclusion i added that i feel no urgency, only that something shifted
this was 3 years ago and now my spouse is 32 and said the same thing to me, someone who previously had NEVER wanted to go through the process of childbirth[0]. had to remind her that we had the same convo when i was her age
incredible that shift has been pinned down with research
[0] 10 years of big hospital nursing can be like "scared straight" for pregnancy
Yeah I could distinctly feel my brain shifting into its adult era over the last couple of years (I'm 31)
It was kind of odd. I'm more serious now (but at the same time.. less?). I'm way more easily able to focus on what actually matters in this life. (In saying that, I think it's more likely that my brain has finally decided what's important... in a way I feel like a passenger)
I question the correlation and causality. I wonder how much of these eras are caused by brain physiology and genetics versus changes in the behavior with age, which can even be caused by external sociological factors, for example. Or a mix of both.
> From 32 years, the brain architecture appears to stabilise compared with previous phases, corresponding with a “plateau in intelligence and personality”.
For example, here - is this *caused* by genetics, or is it because in today's society this is about the age when you have finished your schooling and first working experiences and have simply less to learn?
I know my examples simplify the reasoning, but the question about causality still stands, I think.
I am personally supportive of any research that continues to define my age as having just achieved adulthood.
This study seems like finding a way to quantify the well known and then twisting it to make a good headline.
People don't grow up until they need to. Of course you're gonna see college educated rich westerners delay whatever mental markers you're looking at. And likewise people who "stay active" seem to stave off the mental decline of old age.
Exactly this. With a comfy life, you can mature later. The more hardships and adversity one must overcome the faster that maturation happens. Particularly so when the hardships put one on an abnormal path.
Losing a close relative or a job is normal adversity that everyone will go through but not everyone has. Going through those other things while having a different philosophy or life ethos than those around you, thus also causing you to prioritize and pursue different things in life adds a different layer of challenge. That causes you to have to figure stuff out on your own and thus contributes to maturing in a different manner and at a different rate.
I definitely felt older back in my early thirties, but I feel like I got younger now in my mid 40s. I think it's because my kid is in college and doesn't need me as much as they used to. Plus, I'm debt free and make enough money to not worry about the cost of going out.
In my late 20s/early 30s I was under water on my house, not getting paid enough, and had a small child. It was clear that I had to step up and "be a man." Which, I intuitively think had a bigger effect on me than simply getting older.
I do have felt similar shift around that age, but I wonder if it is due to reaching certain points in career where you are put into more leading position and have more confidence in what you do even if you don't have children? Easy to go into horoscope style confirmation bias here though.
Nonetheless I am never going to stop saying I still feel like I am 16. Just more confident 16.
As some point you're going to stop saying that because you'll realize that sixteen year olds are generally dumbasses.
Anecdotally I’ve felt this shift over the past few years. I am 33 and have always been a huge proponent of personal growth, change, pushing yourself to be better. In the past few years Ive felt the opposite urge, an urge to accept myself, flaws and all, as the hand I’ve been dealt and I must merely play that hand, not focus so much on what-ifs, etc. Perhaps this is my brain solidifying.
29 and feeling the same. It's kind frustrating and freeing at the same time. I feel like I'm making less progress, but at the same time don't feel the pressure to make progress.
There is wisdom both in trying to change what you can, and realizing that you maybe can't change everything. If you've been trying to change things, by 33 you may have a fair idea of what you in fact cannot change.
I'd also like to add anecdotally that a lot of people develop burnout at that age, probably because they keep pushing themselves and/or get sucked into their own enthusiasm / passion instead of set limits and the like. But then, I also think people get less resilient to stress and the like after 30, less able to compartimentalize or bounce back quickly.
What you end up getting is people ~10 years into an exciting career where suddenly they can't perform or cope as well as they used to. But they can also be in a pretty senior position by then and be pushed out of their comfort zone.
> based on the brain scans of nearly 4,000 people aged under one to 90, mapped neural connections and how they evolve during our lives.
That is an absurdly small sample size to make such a conclusion.
It seems this age range could at least partly be culturally attributed. In modern industrialized life, many people don't have to "grow up" until a later age. At the risk of generalizing, people have more support from family, friends, and society at large.
Is the forming of those neurons based on some natural law, or is that people just haven't had to live the experiences that do so until their 30's nowadays?
As far as I know, forming neurons isn't something that "just happens". It happens due to catalysts in life. In pre-modern society, and indeed most likely in under-industrialized nations today, those catalysts, those experiences, would happen earlier. As others mentioned, there is a clear correlation with the typical age in which modern society gets married, settles down, and has kids.
I wonder what that era age would have been 200+ years ago.
Not sure why this is downvoted. The authors themselves not that parenthood could be a catalyst for the change at 30-- in previous centuries, when parenthood happened much earlier, why could it not affect the brain's timeline? This study is simply descriptive of a particular dataset, a collection of snapshots at a particular time and place. Certainly the brain is elastic and responsive to external conditions.
What I noticed is that the 4000 samples are all from England and the U.S. Replicating this study with a greater geographical and socio-cultural diversity would be very useful in supporting or expanding these results.
Wasn't it 25 that the prefrontal cortex matured and people could be considered adults? We will have to infantilize people until their 30s now?
The problem with such reports (the studies themselves method-wise etc are in general fine I guess, but how the results are interpreted and disseminated is the issue) is that unless we find some specific correlations with behavioural and such measures, it makes no sense to give these kind of meanings such as "adolescence", adult mode", behavioural/mental/cognitive matureness or whatever cultural or other norms one may think a "mature/adult person" should abide to. Especially since these abstract topological measures, while interesting, are not that trivially linked with real outcomes in a causal sense, and instead of eg simply reflecting rather environmental or other changes in a person's life.
I haven't read this paper, but for the "25" paper, it was a longitudinal study that stopped observing people at 25. The result "brain continues to develop up to at least age 25" was misinterpreted as "stops developing at age 25" by media & social media.
I have similar concerns about reporting on this paper - feels ripe for pop-sci misunderstandings.
All research is ripe for pop-sci misunderstandings. Always. But this study at least didn't have a cutoff for ages studied.
> We will have to infantilize people until their 30s now?
People already pick and choose who they feel sympathy for and give a pass to on the basis of their personal experiences, belief system, and social proximity. Think of how many, for instance, ridicule politicians for being too saintly and enabling or mean and without empathy then give their friends and family a pass for the exact same behavior. They'll get angry with celebrities for things that they allegedly did then shrug off a driver running a red light and nearly killing them because they "don't take things personally". Addicts are a blight on society until it's somebody's child or brother or sister in which case they just need help. Et cetera ad infinitum.
People (you and I included) are fickle. This changes nothing.
"Infantilize" is a needlessly hyperbolic verb.
I've always found it interesting that laws are set by politics to allow privileges at certain ages (16, 18, 21), but car rental companies - whose motives are more purely data-driven - won't rent to anyone under 25.
I'm certainly not advocating withholding suffrage until 25, but driving... the data is very strong that it would save lives.
Then when you're not on the era you're supposed to be it's called a "regression" or "skipping stages". People are very stubborn to classify development in terms of age or time.
The feeling is definitely there,but it's hard to say of it was parenthood or aging until 36 that made me more adult. Probably both
Just the headline gels with my experience at age 54.
This is interesting and alarming to me because judging by the changes in my life I appear to have entered the age-66 phase more than a decade and a half early despite remaining intellectually curious and physically fit enough.
In the last year or so I have begun to adjust my life expectations. My father was in his nineties when he died, but I no longer believe I will reach my seventies.
Things like this only tend to confirm my sense that I am neurologically ageing at a rate that is unusual.
Semantics sure. But adult mode starts most likely at 13.
Early 30s is mid-life mode.
Why? Because time and time again research shows we should treat people 13 and up as adults. Even when they get some extra years of youth-judgement in court, and we put 18/21 in place as lawful adult...
I had kids and finally settled into a career at 33. It certainly forced me into adult mode after this.
I just met up with my Brother-in-law and his friends for our yearly gathering. All of them are in their 30s and none of them are in what I would consider 'adult mode'.
They are all un-married/no kids, barely scraping by, partying every weekend/wasting money on weed and booze. Certainly no careers (mostly retail, some unemployed and still living with parents).
I wonder if these numbers will change with the new generation, because so many are not having kids or getting married.
This sounds more like an anecdote of “my brother-in-law and his friends are losers” more than any indication of a trend.
The median income almost doubles between age 23 and 35.
There's definitely a transition associated with becoming a parent - that is well documented.
When I think about my friends and friends of my relatives, what GP described appears to be the norm - also among the educated and in the upper-middle class. They often identify themselves as "dog parents".
Did you read the article (or hell even the title) before commenting...?
>Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I know plenty of people that had kids in their 20's - still didn't 'grow up' until their 30's. Just because they're not partying anymore doesn't mean they still don't act like adolescents when navigating complicated situations they're in (because they're had kids before they were necessarily 'ready') compared with someone in their 30's. I would argue that taking away that time in your late 20's where you can more easily make mistakes and try new things (while also having a bit of stability in terms of money) before having kids will lead to less maturity rather than more long term.
Probably not, the comment read more as a way to rant, self-boast, and judge others' lifestyles than anything insightful.
So you aren't an adult until your early 30's and you are an old slow guy not worth interviewing less than 10 years later.
Where did you get that from? The article mentions changes at age 9, 32, 66, and 83.
It's just the popular wisdom these days. Companies tend to deprioritize hiring engineers in their 40s, especially if their overspecialized. At face value, Companies want high-energy 20-somethings that they can mold into their specialty. More likely, they know that 20-somethings expect a far smaller salary.
So you aren't discussing the article at all? And you imply mythrwy isn't either?
This is another psychology narrative put forth as a quantifiable scientific finding.
Q: "Is this based on a clearly expressed scientific theory?"
A: "Be serious -- it's just an idea, a narrative."
Q: "What would constitute a basis for either statistical validation or falsification?"
A: "You're confusing psychology with science. That's naive."
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33 year olds really should not be allowed to date 28yr olds