Adulting

This is my family’s first proper summer camp summer, schlepping both kids all over the place to do stuff and cramming both work and rest time into the gaps. It’s only two months long here — the school year starts the last week in July, and this is also our first proper two-child school year — so I’m treating it as a sort of intensive. I’m actually finding it quite satisfying to use up everything I’ve got just making things seem fun and normal for my kids. Kinda makes me wonder how important all that stuff I “don’t have time” to do actually is.

This guiding concept of householding around which I’ve constructed my whole website thing bears a tricky relationship to my society’s concept of adulthood, and perhaps more specifically to the embarrassing pseudo-concept of “adulting” with which my generation appears to struggle mightily.

Now, it may be fair to say that one of the key discoveries by which my generation has come of age is that the 1990s version of adulthood we were pointed towards is impossible, and that all we can really do is attempt — day in and day out — to contend with adulthood through some effortful process of “adulting” until we croak. But I find that idea sort of self-impoverishing. Householding, to me, is a choice to reclaim adulthood, but to do so at the scale that is sensible to oneself, rather than struggling to perform the adulthood of some grander narrative that history has already demonstrated to be false, unsustainable, impossible.

What’s been difficult for me, though, is to reconcile that scale which is sensible to me with the scale of the internet, the medium to which we have all turned in this century for some rapid reassessment of what it is to be human by — I suppose — attempting to consume the output of everything that it is to be human all at once. But I feel like I’m beginning to figure both out simultaneously, just now, as the grander rhythms of parenthood and childhood begin to finally take shape in my household.

The key is that the internet does not come first. It serves the householder life. And with those priorities completely in charge, the choice to use the internet only in ways that serve those ends seems far less fraught.