How to Not Become A Man-Child (or Woman-Child)

We live in an era of adult-children: everybody wants freedom, but nobody wants responsibility. But, the truth is, you can't have freedom without taking personal responsibility for your own needs. Wanna live on your own? You have to be responsible for cooking, cleaning, and managing the house. Want a car? You have to make sure you fill it with gas, maintain it, drive safely to avoid damaging it, and follow the rules to avoid getting your license suspended. Wanna start a business where you can do what you want, whenever you want? Well, you have to manage your own schedule, make sure its profitable, keep your clients happy, hire employees, make sure your employees are paid and taken care of, so on and so forth. Every freedom comes packaged with a certain amount of responsibility.

But what happens if you get freedom without responsibility? Is that possible? When someone else gives you freedom and takes responsibility for your needs—such as some parents might do—you can have freedom without responsibility. But honestly, you don't want it. Because freedom without responsibility will hinder your growth and turn you into an adult-child.

For example, think about a rich, spoiled kid. His parents give him freedom without him having to take any responsibility. He can borrow money whenever he likes and get anything he ever wants, and he doesn't have to take up any responsibility in return. He doesn't have to do well in school, get a job, do any work around the house, cook his own meals, or clean his own space, because his family has money, maids, and chefs. He doesn't even need to make real friends, because people are willing to hang out with him for access to his money.

But one day, because the son is burning through too much of the father's cash, the father decides to cut the son off from his wealth and kick him out. The son, now a grown-man, is left to fend for himself. He has to live on his own, make his own money, and take care of meeting his own needs. And what happens? The man can no longer function in the world. He has no idea how to take care of himself, because he never had too. He doesn't know how to study, how to get a job, how to work for his own cash, how to clean, how to cook, how to develop real relationships, so on and so forth. The man is fully dependent on others: he is a man-child.

And as long as he remains dependent, he will never be free. He will look to others to provide the same lifestyle for him as his father did. And if he does find someone, he will become a slave to that person's expectations of him. And perhaps, in a worse scenario, if he doesn't find someone, he will start using coping mechanisms to try and satisfy the needs which he cannot satisfy for himself.

So can you have freedom without responsibility? In the short term, yes, but in the long-term, no. There is a cost to never taking responsibility for your own needs, and that cost is your own freedom.

But if you start taking responsibility for your own needs, you become more competent, and by becoming competent you become more independent, and by becoming more independent you gain the ability to revolt, and only when you have the ability to revolt are you truly free.

For example, think about a kid who is not rich or spoiled, who increasingly takes more and more personal responsibility for meeting his own needs. He starts by learning to clean up after himself as a kid. Then he starts packing his own lunch for school. Then he starts working a part-time job. He starts to pay his parents a monthly rent to help out with bills, and he saves up and eventually buys himself a car too. He takes care of that car himself, and he uses it to drive himself to school. Then he starts cooking all of his own meals. He takes out student loans, puts himself through college, and then gets a full time job. By now, he's paying all of his own bills and fully pulling his own weight around his parents house. As you can see, this young man has been taking on more and more responsibility, leading to competence, and his competence has lead him to becoming more independent, and by becoming independent, he has gained the ability to revolt.

One day, he decides that he wants to move to another city to get his MBA and live on his own. But when he tells his parents this, what do they say? "No! You have to go to a local college and stay close.” But our kid has become a young man now—responsible, competent, and independent. So he revolts. He moves out anyways and retains his freedom.

And what does it mean to become more free? It means being able to live authentically. Freedom is the freedom to be yourself. And this type of freedom is only possible when you can revolt against others, when you can say "no" to their demands of you. And the ability to revolt is only possible when you become independent of others, when you no longer rely on others to meet your needs. And independence is only possible when you become competent, when you have the capacity to satisfy your own needs.

Because the more incompetent you are, the more dependent you will be on others. And the more dependent you are on others, the more you have to suppress your authenticity in order to satisfy their expectations of you. The more dependent you are on others, the more you have to conform to their ideals for you.

But on the other hand, the more competent you become, the more independent you become. And the more independent you become, the less you have to worry about pleasing others. And the less you have to worry about pleasing others, the more authentic you can be.

And the only way to become competent is by taking personal responsibility for satisfying your own needs. So if you don't want to become an adult-child, then start by taking more personal responsibility.