Are you taught to be an adult?

This blog is a culmination of years of thoughts of just wondering - when are you taught to be an adult?

The story really begins with college - University of Arkansas where folks from all over were thrown together and living on their own. For most, the first time leaving the parent's nest and living on their own.

This is why the phrase - Freshmen 15 exists, as folks are tossed into an eating schedule where they can eat meals (up to their meal plan) whenever they want. Imagine eating that just plain bad high school food, then walking into the below image 3 times a day.

It is an entire circle, basically with the following stations:

• drinks
• entrees
• pasta
• soap / salad
• fruits
• pizza / burger / meats
• sandwich station
• deserts

It was a huge amount of food and some folks just got plate after plate after plate for each meal. Its tough to see a freshmen 15 when you see those folks every day, but it can be obvious when you scroll back through photos.

Lets take another jump though, another year in college where a few move out into the nearby apartments or homes. This is where things get interesting - I watched someone put the wrong soap in a dishwasher and overflow the kitchen with escaped bubbles. A honest mistake, but really begged the question - did they ever do the dishes while at home?

Talking about college though is boring - I want to talk about when you leave college, have a job and truly on your own.

You start running into things that I guess you either have to learn from your folks or take a class during school. In reality, I just pop open Google and start researching everything I stumble upon. What did folks do before the Internet?

Though is there anything you should just know? Let me just list a bunch of things that I've found myself in post college.

• The correct cable setup for jumping a car
• The in/outs of insurance for apartment/home
• Finding an in-network health/eye/teeth/skin doctor
• The need of replacing an HVAC air filter
• What an amortized loan calculation is
• Learning how a fridge/freezer works to defrost
• Hurricane prep for living days without power

So a few of these you might be laughing at, but they indeed happened and I was caught without the knowledge I wanted in such situations.

So this begs the question - when are you taught to be an adult?

Should I continually embarrass myself when I open up Google to remember which cables go where when jumping a car? I think maybe our society with knowledge at fingertips has changed what we need to know.

When I stepped into a dealership to purchase my first car and heard I qualified for a 4% interest rate. I quickly did the math in my head and I thought I knew the total interest I would pay over time. I was wrong. The interest is pulled from each pay cycle based on the remaining amount of principal to pay. Looking back at that - it seems pretty dumb I didn't know what an amortized loan calculation was, but I didn't take any class in school that focused that.

These stories can continue for tons of random other things in my life. Just recently I had to have an insurance agent spend 30 minutes on a call with me just explaining the line items on home insurance.

School needs a class just called "life" where you learn the common everything you'll eventually run into.