Emerging Adulthood

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage

The above article has not waned in popularity on the New York Times for over a week now, and with good reason.  Whether it's a product of the societal time I find myself in, my own personal background, birth order, or my biological makeup (or some combination), I certainly struggle everyday with defining myself in any available category:  Am I child?  No, but I don't mind feeling like one at times.  Am I a teenager or adolescent?  No.  Am I student?  No, but I wish I still was.  Am I an adult?  No, well, kind of.  I have a job; that's adultish.  So I work with adults every day, but I feel different than every single one of them.  I long for weekends chiefly because it's a reprieve from forced adult interactions.  As their bodies balloon, aspirations plummet, and their lives resemble robots in daily routine, remarks, abandoned "thoughts", and reactions, I vow to never fully enter adulthood.  Why should I want to be an adult?  When it's not forced on you through life circumstances, what is the reason for one to willfully choose full-on adulthood?  I eschew the thought of focusing too much time on the practical; I prefer that my mom handle these things like she always has.  Yes, my CPA-mathematician mother still does my taxes, helps me remember to get my oil changed, pick insurance options, etc...  This is very comforting for me, and I see no reason to change. I don't want to make decisions about things like life insurance and mortgages and IRA's and the like.  I don't keep a calendar.  If I remember it, I remember it.  If I don't, maybe I will next time (if there's a next time).  Let my mind be free for some moments of the day; let me feel alive, not chained to duties, deadlines, and responsibilities!  I don't ever plan on entering a practical, businesslike marriage just to have kids and fit into some uppercrust of society more neatly (not that all marriages are like this, but I certainly believe that as people age, looks fade, expectations decline and die out, and career, familial, and temporal pressures rise, so too do marriages of this type surface in greater number).  I don't want to have to hang out with married people all the time, or worry about the location, size, and appearance of my house just so it makes a more desirable setting for social affairs and enhances my general adult world status and standing, or make some truly inchoate concept of a "career" become the most important goal in my life.  I don't want to give up potentialities for shuttering certainties.  That is, the adulthood I see popping up all around me with my peers happens so fast.  Within what seems like a couple of years it's all about marriage, wedding, house, cars, children, schools, and, most importantly, extra-specific careers chosen in terms of decades, not years or half-years.  I like to believe that I'm this agent of thought -- that I can change my path at any second if I want to.  I like to fully examine each relatively important decision before me.  I like to make these decisions one-at-a-time.  If I feel like I'm losing too many potentialities and too many things may be cemented in a single decision, I will do anything to put that decision off as long as possible so as to feel that I have manifold options and, hence, possibilities before me.  I may be extremely individualistic and independent.  I may overvalue independence and freedom of thought and time and possibilities.  But is this just another way of saying I'm immature?  If so, what's so wrong with immaturity?  Some will say that this will probably change with time -- something gradual and uncalculated on my part and, poof, several years later I'm a full-fledged adult.  I'm not sure that would be for the better.  I will vigorously avoid what I know as adulthood for as long as possible.