The Inner Adult

In a difficult situation, one question helps:

How would an adult act here?

Not a perfect one. Not a fearless one. Not one who always knows the right answer. Just a person capable of taking consequences, other people’s interests and his own limits into account.

Sometimes the adult action is to admit a mistake. Sometimes to say no. Sometimes to ask for help, even though the inner teenager has already prepared a speech about independence.

The question is especially useful under group pressure. Peers may treat as proof of maturity exactly what requires the least of it: getting drunk, humiliating someone, risking your health or breaking a rule for the sake of a reaction.

The reverse question, addressed to someone with power, is useful too:

Would you do this in my place?

Are you prepared to take the consequences of this decision?

Would you advise your own child to do it?

It does not guarantee an honest answer. But it forces a separation between an order and moral responsibility.

The inner adult does not have to be forty years older than us and speak in the voice of a headmaster. Sometimes it is simply the version of us that will be dealing tomorrow with the consequences of tonight.

The question has a domestic version that works without any philosophy: who exactly will be dealing with this at nine tomorrow morning. Not an ideal adult but a specific person — the same one, with the same phone, the same job and the same rent payment. The company that is insisting right now will not reconvene at nine tomorrow morning. This is not a moral point but a question of who gets handed the bill.

The same construction works upwards. A manager’s request said out loud in the corridor and the same request set out in an email over his name are different requests. What differs is not the wording but who is left holding the consequences.