Advice for the ‘Accidental Adults’ in life
Published 6:07 pm Saturday, August 7, 2010
“The Accidental Adult: Essays and Advice for the Reluctantly Responsible and Marginally Mature” by Colin Sokolowski, $12.95
You probably know an accidental adult. He’s the guy — it’s almost always a guy — who is perplexed by people who give tools as gifts.
He’s the guy who glides on the grocery cart like a scooter, mortifying his kids. He’s the guy who regards athletic pursuits as goofy fun, instead of as competitive benchmarks of personal worth.
You may even be that guy.
It’s not that accidental adults have never grown up; it’s that they refuse to accept that adulthood means taking everything so seriously. Home maintenance, office politics, the virtues of pinot noir — leave all that to those whom Colin Sokolowski calls “assimilated grown-ups,” or people who “understand the proper ratio of comprehensive vs. collision on their auto insurance.”
Still, at 40, Sokolowski has done kind of a grown-up thing: He’s written a book, although it is nonfiction and has only 12 chapters. “The Accidental Adult” is about those people whose age connotes adulthood but whose behavior still leaves fully evolved adults shaking their heads.
“It’s OK that there are other people who do certain things well,” said Sokolowski, an affable father of three from Vadnais Heights, Minn. “Yeah, I forget from season to season which oil goes in the lawn mower and which goes in the snow blower. But I don’t beat myself up over that.”
The implication is that real adults care deeply about remembering proper oil weights. Perhaps they do. What, then, happened to Sokolowski and his ilk? He’s not sure, but he floats the theory that Gen Xers such as himself have watched as baby boomers’ loyalty to their companies, once a two-way street, has become a dead end.
“We saw that it’s about the skills you have in your toolbox, and you’ll take that from job to job to job,” said Sokolowski, who works in public relations for a suburban school district. “It creates a sense of detachment that may carry over into not embracing responsibilities.”
Yet Sokolowski stressed that accidental adults like himself don’t dodge responsibility. “It’s cool to vote. You need to register for the draft. Show up for jury duty. Volunteer when you can.” Accidental adulthood is more of an interior monologue that you have while role-playing your way through life.
