WHO SAYS THAT ADULTHOOD STARTS AT 27?

A 2017 Nationwide study showed that the average Briton doesn’t consider themselves to be a grown-up until the age of 27. According to scientists, it’s the age that our mental abilities start to decline and, essentially, old age begins. I just turned 27. Am I an adult?

A couple of weeks ago, I spent £40 on a houseplant. I could have bought a cheaper plant, but this one (a pachira aquatica, also known as the malabar chestnut, or a ‘money tree’) called out to me from across the street. It has plaited branches and the leaves are the richest of greens. This was a plant that had lived, this was a grown-up plant, for a grown-up flat, or someone else’s grown-up flat because I’m not quite grown-up enough for my own flat yet. I’ve always seen buying things you can’t wear or eat as a kind of badge of adulthood. Plaited pachira, fabric conditioner, travel insurance: they’re all one and the same, like being friends with exes or going for dental check-ups. A collection of markers defining maturity and, in my meagre four months of becoming an adult (aged 27), I’ve proudly racked up quite a few. But then for every box I tick, there’s another set of questions that seem ever further away. Qualifying for a mortgage? Getting married and having kids? Right now, I’d rather nurture a family of sea monkeys. But does that mean I’m not an adult, or just that I’m not a homeowner with a second bedroom?

I pay my bills on time and I no longer steal loo roll from restaurants: ergo, I am an adult. But my speech is still littered with, ‘like’ and ‘um’, prefixes that real adults don’t use. Trying to decipher my degree of adultness is impossible. Every backache or casserole is followed by a shared meme or a packet of Super Noodles.

My conclusion? Age alone does not an adult make. We’re living in a world where 14-year-old entrepreneurs and Instagram glam-mas happily coexist, and I’m somewhere in the middle. Adulthood? That whole thing is, like, a myth anyway. Want to know more? Join ELLE for our new event series, beginning on 14 November with The Conversation: The Future of Us. For tickets, visit hearstlive.co.uk/the-future-of-us

‘I just turned 27. Am I an ADULT?’