Adulthood: Expectation vs. Reality

I really thought there'd be more ninjas and quicksand

When I was a kid, I had a lot of big ideas about what things would be like when I grew up. First of all, I was going to be a professional baseball player. I mean, obviously. But that wasn’t going to be all I did—heck, that’s not even a year-round job. I was also going to have a wildly-successful syndicated comic strip, and it definitely wasn’t going to just be a thinly-disguised ripoff of Garfield. I was going to live in a mansion and fight crime and I was going to have a robot butler and a Dodge Viper.

These were reasonable expectations.

Of course, I knew that adulthood wasn’t going to be all sunshine, roses and domestic supercars. No, I understood that there would be obstacles standing in my way, and I was mentally prepared for some struggles.

I just, uh, might’ve been a little bit off in predicting exactly what those struggles were going to be.

Today, I’d like to review the differences between my expectations and reality for what adulthood was going to throw at me.

Expectation: Quicksand

I think we all expected this to be more of a problem than it turned out to be.

From Super Mario Brothers 3 to The Princess Bride to The Land of the Lost and countless other TV shows, movies, video games and comic books, I was absolutely convinced that I needed a plan for getting out of quicksand.

I would remain calm—definitely not struggle—and I would wait for someone to swing a vine my way, at which point I would hoist my way to safety and resume my quest for the pharoah’s cursed amulet. (The curse being a separate struggle that I would deal with in its own way.)

Getty Images / Matt Mawson

Reality: Lawn Care

I don’t mean mowing the lawn. I mowed the lawn as a kid. I understood what that entailed.

I just didn’t think I’d have to think about the lawn so much.

Now, there are people—mostly men—who really love lawncare. They’ll happily spend their weekends meticulously tending their pristine patches of prize fescue, seeding and watering and weeding and treating and rolling cris-crossing lines into it until it looks like the outfield grass at Wrigley Field.

I am not one of those men.

Shortly after we bought our first house, a guy from a lawn service company knocked on the door and asked me what my “plan” for the yard was. I shrugged, pointed at the lawn, and said “I dunno, basically this?”

This was seven years ago. It turns out that I needed to have a plan for my lawn.

(It’s mostly clover now, but I’m thinking about putting in some quicksand.)

Expectation: Ninjas

Once again, it appears that the pop culture of my youth may have left me misinformed.

I didn’t expect that I'd have to deal with ninjas often, mind you—my business ventures were going to be almost entirely above-board, and I’d surely have hired goons of my own for the parts that weren’t—but eventually, I was sure that I’d be ambushed by a guy in black pajamas wielding nunchucks.

I was prepared for it, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to it a little bit.

I’d done plenty of backyard bo-staff training with an old broomstick, and I felt good about my chances.

Reality: LinkedIn

It turns out the only people sneaking up on me are third-degree business connections who want to offer me a great new job in Turkey’s Carcass, Tennessee, discount 3D rendering services from overseas, or ~*~ThOuGhT LeAdErShIp~*~.

Just once, I’d prefer they whizz a shuriken at my head instead.

Expectation: Killer Bees

They were coming.

Every couple of months in the mid-’90s, there was a newspaper article about how Africanized honey bees were progressing up the North American continent, soon to arrive and kill us all.

(I was reading the newspaper for research on my comic strip, which I must again state for legal reasons bears no resemblance intentional or otherwise to Jim Davis’ Garfield.)

Killer Bees Reach Mexico, Expected in Texas Soon

Killer Bee Spotted in Texas, Hitchhiking North

Leaders Debate Whether to Fight Bees or Surrender to Their Rule

I lived in Cleveland, mind you. It regularly snowed in April. We weren’t getting killer bees.

Getty Images / jamesbenet

Reality: Carpenter Bees

I have a fifty-year-old stacked-stone retaining wall at the end of my driveway, and those little bastards love to bore their nests into the grout.

I was taught in English class that “Man vs. Nature” was one of the archetypal struggles, but I didn’t realize that the ultimate manifestation of this in my life would be making a third trip to Home Depot in a single day for more bee-killer and spray-foam. (That nest was deeper than I thought.)

Expectation: Wearing a suit and tie to work

Okay, so not all of my expectations were as dire as quicksand, ninjas or bees; I also figured there’d be some day-to-day drudge that I’d have to deal with. You know, like wearing a suit and tie to the office.

‘80s Dads always wore a suit and tie to the office, and it looked really uncomfortable, but also really serious. I’d have to have a whole rack of ties, maybe even a motorized one so that I could peruse my many ties and pick out the perfect one for locking down the Peterson Account.

Reality: Dressing casually and never actually leaving work

The last time I wore a tie in a professional setting was a job interview five years ago, and I’m not even sure it was necessary then.

Office dress codes are far less strict these days. I wear jeans to the office on a regular basis, and that’s when I go to the office. If I’m at home, I can work in basketball shorts and a t-shirt.

1980s me: wow that must be so cool

2020s me: yes, well, you see—

[my phone pings]

1980s me: what was that

2020s me: Microsoft Teams

1980s me: [reaches for phone] what’s that

2020s me: [smashes bo staff in between him and the phone] go as long as you can without finding out

Expectation: Being abandoned at the store

I have very attentive, loving parents who would never have left me at the store, accidentally or otherwise.

That doesn’t mean that losing sight of my mom behind a clothing rack at JC Penney didn’t leave me at least briefly convinced that I was going to have to start a new life where I lived in the store and occasionally fought off robbers at night using my bo staff skills.

Reality: I would actually love to be abandoned at the store

Please. Just for a couple of hours. Drop me off at Cabela’s. I’m not even outdoorsy but I could have a great time wandering around there for the afternoon acting like I might buy a camp stove or a kayak or whatever.

If my wife is reading this: this is what I want next Father’s Day.

(Take my phone away when you drop me off, too. I’ll put up an out-of-office message on Teams.)

Expectation: Guillotines

Okay, now, this one might be specific to me, but I had a genuine childhood fear of guillotines.

At some point, I read something about the French Revolution or I watched a violent cartoon (as was the style at the time) and I learned what a guillotine was. For several years after that, I had no small degree of concern about the likelihood of my head being separated from my neck, despite the fact that I was a little kid living in suburban Ohio and not a member of the House of Bourbon in 1793.

Reality: A society without guillotines

I’m just saying that the French had some compelling ideas that shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. I visited Versailles last summer, and my major takeaway while walking the vast gardens was “oh, yeah, I can see why they got killed when people found out about this.”

Anyways we’ve got a whole bunch of Versailleses these days and most of them aren’t even pretty.

Expectation: Artificially-intelligent machines rising up and annihilating humankind

Technological progress was going to be the end of us, but we were too arrogant to save ourselves. At some point, we were going to develop an equivalent to the Terminator movies’ Skynet. It would become self-aware, realize that humanity was a threat to the planet, and rise up and annihilate us all, because that’s just how those things go.

Getty Images / Michael Heywood

Reality: “Artificial intelligence”

This was the first question I thought to ask it, and the purportedly game-changing technology came back with the news that Queen Henrietta Maria was an animal. It’s trillion-dollar Zoltar, just with a lower hit rate. Of course, it dumped twenty gallons of water into the ground and burned an acre of virgin rainforest to give me this answer, so maybe it’ll annihilate us yet.

I guess we’ll just have to be patient.

(We can practice our bo-staff skills while we wait.)

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

Getty Images / Ben Gingell - 500px