The self-aware performance of basic grown-up responsibilities, usually with the implication that doing them is impressive, exhausting, or novel. "Adulting is hard." "I adulted so much today — I changed the air filter AND filed my taxes."
Paul: "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways" (1 Cor 13:11). Previous generations became adults, not performed adulthood. The millennial framing treats being a grown-up as a role one plays occasionally — implying the default is extended adolescence. This is symptom and cause: the culture that produced permanent-adolescent vocabulary also produced permanent adolescents. Biblical manhood and womanhood involve real, irreversible transitions: leaving the father and mother, cleaving to a spouse, providing, protecting, procreating, producing. "Adulting" treats these as guest-appearances. They are supposed to be one's identity.
A generation that delayed marriage, homeownership, and children has built a vocabulary that makes basic adult tasks sound remarkable — a linguistic confession of arrested development.
Every previous generation had a transition into adulthood marked by marriage, mortgage, and responsibility around age 20-25. Millennials, for various economic and cultural reasons, pushed those markers into their 30s or beyond — and developed a vocabulary that made the extended in-between feel cute rather than arrested. "Adulting is hard" treats routine obligations as impressive accomplishments. The Bible's language is blunter: grown men are to be strong, responsible, and functional (1 Cor 16:13, 1 Tim 5:8); women are to manage the home wisely (Titus 2:5, Prov 31); parents are to raise the next generation in the LORD (Deut 6, Eph 6:4). These are the default assignments, not extraordinary achievements. The cure for "adulting" is actually becoming an adult — getting married, raising children, taking responsibility for a household, and no longer considering paying one's own bills noteworthy.
1 Corinthians 13:11 — "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways."
1 Corinthians 16:13 — "Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong."
1 Timothy 5:8 — "But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever."
Ephesians 4:14-15 — "So that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves... we are to grow up in every way into Him who is the head, into Christ."
"Adulting" sounds cute; it is a confession. If routine adult tasks feel remarkable to you, you are not yet an adult — you are a child who did a chore. Grow up. The word should be retired the day your second child is born.
“Whew, I adulted all day. Paid rent, got groceries, called my insurance.”
“When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”