When Did Life Become Something We Were Supposed to Have Figured Out?

I'm in my forties. This means I have now been an adult for more than two decades.

Only in recent years was it brought to my attention that, my entire life, I’d had the two hands on the Play School Rocket Clock mixed up.

I still cut along the dotted line on packets of pasta while holding onto the top — meaning that, the moment I finish cutting, the bottom of the packet and all its contents fall straight onto the floor.

You would think that somewhere during the past two decades I would have figured out what I'm doing.

Well, I haven't.

So, no. I’m not entirely convinced I’m getting better at this adulting thing.

What's slightly more concerning is that I'm beginning to suspect nobody else has either.

We thought adults knew things

When you're a child, adults seem like a completely different species. They drive cars. They have jobs. They pay bills. They know how insurance works. They make appointments — and then attend them. They understand what interest rates are doing. They confidently walk into places and somehow know where they're supposed to stand.

And you assume that one day, something happens. Some switch flips, some ceremony occurs, and you become one of them.

As children, we assume adults possess answers. Our parents know where we're going. Teachers know what they're teaching. Doctors know what's wrong. Politicians know how to run countries. Bosses know how to run companies. People in suits definitely know something important.

Then you become an adult. And slowly, you make an alarming discovery.

Everyone is just a person.

The doctor goes home and wonders whether they made the right career choice. The boss lies awake worried they're making it all up as they go — because, in fairness, they largely are. Your parents almost certainly had moments when they looked at you and had absolutely no idea what to do next. And people in suits, it turns out, are sometimes just people who happen to own suits.

One of the strangest discoveries of adulthood is realising that the adults you trusted as a child were probably improvising too.

There was no graduation ceremony

Here's the thing nobody warns you about: adulthood happens without you noticing.

There's no moment when somebody hands you a certificate. Congratulations. You now understand life. No induction day. No orientation session with a lanyard and a laminated map.

Instead, you leave school. Maybe you get a job. You start paying bills. Perhaps you get married, have children, buy a house. And because you're doing adult things, everyone around you assumes you’re an expert at adulting.

Including, most confusingly, you.

But inside? You're still the same person. Older, yes. More experienced, certainly. Hopefully slightly wiser. But fundamentally still trying to work out what's happening — now with a mortgage.

We don't become adults because we figure life out. We become adults because time keeps passing whether we've figured it out or not.

Everyone looks more certain from the outside

Now, here's where it gets properly unfair.

You know every doubt you have. Every mistake. Every moment of indecision. Every time you changed your mind. Every night you've lain awake wondering whether you're quietly wasting your one and only life.

But you don't see any of that in other people. What you see of other people is the promotion. The house. The marriage. The holiday photos. The thriving business. The confident post announcing the exciting new chapter.

You see their results. You live inside your own uncertainty.

We see our outtakes and watch everyone else’s highlights reel.

It's a rigged comparison: the chaos behind the scenes of our own lives, measured against the finished performance everyone else puts on stage. Of course we come up short. We're comparing our rehearsals to their opening nights.

And I want to be clear — this isn't a social media problem, though social media has certainly poured petrol on it. Human beings have always done this. We've been performing composure at each other for as long as there have been front doors to close behind us. Social media just made the illusion cheaper to produce and easier to distribute. The performance is ancient. Only the theatre is new.

The terrifying discovery that nobody is in charge

And then comes the big one. The discovery that arrives slowly, in pieces, and reorganises everything once it lands.

As children, the world appears to have structure. Someone is in charge. Someone, somewhere, knows the plan.

Then adulthood gradually reveals the truth. Countries are being run by people. Companies are being run by people. The economy is being run by people. Air traffic control, hospitals, banks, the electricity grid — people. Tired people. Distracted people. People who occasionally walk into a room and forget why they came in, then return to managing something enormous.

And somehow, civilisation continues functioning. Mostly.

Perhaps adulting is the gradual discovery that there isn't another layer of adults above us who actually know what's going on. We keep expecting to find the room where the real grown-ups sit — the ones with the answers, the ones running things properly. We climb another rung, gain another decade, get let into another room... and it's just more people. Improvising. Same as us, but with better chairs.

Depending on the day, I find that either terrifying or strangely liberating. Usually both before lunch.

We mistake uncertainty for failure

Here's where the joke stops being a joke, because this belief — that we're supposed to have it figured out — quietly does real damage.

If we believe adults should have life sorted, then uncertainty stops being a normal condition and becomes evidence that something is wrong with us. I don't know what career I want. I don't know whether I should stay or leave. I don't know whether I want children. I don't know where I want to live. I don't know what I'm doing next.

And underneath every one of those sits the same corrosive little phrase: I should know by now.

By now. By 25. By 30. By 40. By 50.

There's always some imaginary age at which uncertainty was scheduled to disappear — and the deadline keeps politely relocating itself just past wherever we're currently standing. It never arrives. The questions don't vanish with age; they just change costumes. The twenty-year-old's what should I do with my life? becomes the forty-year-old's is this what I was supposed to do with my life? Same question. Better vocabulary.

Perhaps the reason we feel behind isn't that we lack the answers. It's that we mistakenly believe everyone else has them.

Experience doesn't give us answers. It gives us better guesses.

Now, I'm not claiming nothing improves. Obviously we get wiser. You know more at forty than you did at twenty. Hopefully.

But here's the distinction that took me an embarrassingly long time to see: wisdom doesn't mean certainty.

What experience actually gives you is this: you've seen more things go wrong, and survived them. You've made more mistakes, and discovered they were survivable too. You've worked out what genuinely matters to you — mostly by spending years on things that didn't. You've learned which problems aren't actually problems, which is possibly the single most valuable lesson of midlife. You've become a little better at recognising patterns.

But you are still, every single day, making decisions without knowing how they'll turn out. That never stops. The dice never leave your hand.

Maybe wisdom isn't knowing exactly what to do. Maybe it's becoming slightly more comfortable with the fact that you don't.

Everyone is living life for the first time

And underneath all of it sits one very simple fact we somehow keep overlooking.

Nobody has done this before.

You have never been your current age before. You have never faced precisely this decision, in precisely this situation, as precisely this version of yourself. You have never lived in this exact world — nobody has; it only just got here. Even someone who is eighty years old has never been eighty before. They're as new to it as you are to whatever you're facing this morning.

We are all permanently arriving in new territory. And then criticising ourselves for not having a map.

Think about what we're actually attempting: something extraordinarily complicated, with enormous stakes, no rehearsal, no practice run, and no do-overs — and we've collectively decided the appropriate response to this situation is to feel embarrassed that we're not better at it.

There's something both ridiculous and deeply comforting about that, and I've decided to mostly go with comforting.

Maybe improvising is the point

So here's where I've landed.

What if we're not failing to figure life out? What if life simply isn't something that can be figured out — any more than a conversation can be figured out before you have it?

Look at what actually happens, to all of us, over and over: you make the best decision you can, with the information you have, as the person you currently are. Then something happens — often not the thing you planned. You learn. You adjust. You change direction. You try again.

We treat that sequence as evidence that we don't know what we're doing.

It isn't. That is what doing it looks like. There is no other version. Nobody is executing a flawless plan somewhere; the people who appear to be are just improvising with better posture.

Maybe everyone is improvising because improvisation isn't a failure of adulthood. Maybe it's the very nature of being alive.

Nobody knows what happens next

So — back to the bloke from the opening. The one in his forties, more than two decades into adulthood, still unsure, still changing his mind, still making mistakes, still occasionally wondering whether everybody else received an instruction manual that got lost in the post somewhere around 1998.

Maybe I will figure life out eventually. Although at this point, I'm beginning to have my doubts.

Perhaps there won't be a morning when I wake up and suddenly understand exactly who I am, where I'm going, and what I'm supposed to do next. Perhaps nobody gets that morning. Perhaps the people who claim to have had it are just better at ignoring the follow-up questions.

Maybe adulthood isn't the moment when uncertainty disappears. Maybe it's simply the moment when we begin making decisions despite it.

We try things. We get things wrong. We change our minds. We discover that something we desperately wanted doesn't make us happy, and that something we never planned becomes unexpectedly important. Then we adjust, and try again.

Perhaps that's what I misunderstood all this time. Everyone isn't improvising because nobody has worked out how to live.

Everyone is improvising because there is no other way to do it.

After all, no matter how old we become, no matter how much we've seen and survived and learned — we're all still doing something we've never done before.

We're living tomorrow.