In this solo spoken‑essay, Akun Ding deconstructs the pervasive myth that adulthood comes with a hidden rulebook and that somewhere, “real adults” possess perfect knowledge about life, work, and relationships. He opens with a childhood memory of watching his father drive in the rain and assuming the adult in the front seat had all the answers. He then shows how that illusion persists: we imagine a magical manual delivered at 25, we idolize founders and executives who appear to have flawless routines, and we believe there is a secret room where competent adults make rational decisions. Through vivid anecdotes—a senior executive freezing at a coffee counter, people using buzzwords to signal competence, and the curated perfection on LinkedIn—he illustrates that even the most seemingly confident figures are improvising and often clueless. He argues that this collective over‑compensation (blazers, jargon, mentorship quests) is a performance to hide the underlying uncertainty. The essay culminates in a liberating reframing: if no one truly knows what they’re doing, there is no “wrong” way to live, and our guesses belong in the conversation. Embracing the lack of a manual reduces anxiety, encourages authentic mentorship, and offers freedom from the endless search for a perfect adult identity.
Chapters
Welcome back, or welcome for the first time. I'm Akun. Today we need to talk about the biggest scam in human history. Not cryptocurrency, not the five-second rule for dropped food. I'm talking about the myth of the adult. When I was about seven, I used to sit in the backseat of my dad's car, raining outside. Dark, streetlights blurring against the glass, windshield wipers making that hypnotic sound. I'd stare at the back of my dad's head and think, he knows exactly where we're going. He knows how this metal machine works. He knows how to pay the electricity bill, how to talk to the angry neighbor, how to fix the broken toaster. To a kid, an adult is basically a god in a slightly poorly fitted suit. You assume that somewhere around 25, a fairy drops out of the sky and hands you the official manual of life, a heavy leather-bound book that explains taxes, houses, and what to say when someone asks about your 5-year plan. Then you turn 25. Then 30. You look around your apartment. The toaster is still broken. You're eating cereal for dinner at 9 PM. Because cooking requires a level of executive function you do not currently possess. And it hits you with sudden clarity: there is no manual. The fairy never came. You're just a slightly taller 7-year-old with a credit card and lower back pain. Spoiler alert: nobody gets it. We spend our lives believing that somewhere in the high-rise glass buildings, Someone finally knows what's going on. A mythical room where the real adults sit around a mahogany table making perfect, rational decisions that steer the world. I've been in some of those rooms. Mostly it's a group of well-dressed people staring at a slide, secretly hoping the person next to them understands what the graph means. They don't either. Think about the people you look up to, the founders, the thought leaders, the ones who post their flawless 5 AM routines. Cold plunge, matcha, gratitude journal, all done before the sun's fully up. It looks so put together. I guarantee you, by 2 PM, that same person is sitting on the toilet, frantically Googling how to tell a client their idea is terrible, Without getting fired. I once watched a senior executive, a guy who signs checks that could buy a small island, completely freeze at a coffee counter because he'd forgotten his own zip code. He, uh, just stood there, staring at the barista, brain fully buffering. Nobody in that line knew that 30 minutes earlier, he'd been in a boardroom, making a decision that would affect 400 employees. In that moment, he was just a 7-year-old too, standing in the rain, hoping someone else knew the way home. We're all just winging it, every single day. But we're terrified of being found out, so we overcompensate. We buy the blazer. We carry the leather notebook we never write in. We say synergy and bandwidth and pivot in meetings, just to signal to the other confused primates in the room. I belong here. I know the rules. It's the same instinct that makes a kid use a word he heard adults use, without quite knowing what it means, just to see if it lands. Even me? Sitting here, wearing a minimalist white mask, speaking calmly into a microphone, pausing at just the right moments, pretending I have some deep wisdom to impart. I don't. I'm just a guy who talks to a microphone because it's cheaper than therapy and slightly less awkward than cornering strangers at parties with my theories about adulthood. I think about my own dad sometimes, the one driving the car in the rain. For years, I assumed the silence in the front seat meant certainty, that he was quietly calculating the route, the bills, The whole machinery of being responsible for another person. It took me a long time to consider the other possibility. That some of that silence was just him, also 7 years old somewhere inside. Also guessing, just further down the road than me and better at hiding it. School really did this to us, didn't it? 20 years of being trained to believe there's a syllabus. A right answer, hidden in the teacher's desk, waiting to be found if you just study hard enough. We quietly map that onto life. We assume there's an A+ way to have a career, an A+ way to be in a relationship. But life doesn't come with an answer key. Half the map is still rendering as you walk on it. That anxiety is exhausting. The nagging fear that everyone else got the rulebook and you were sick that day. You scroll LinkedIn, and it looks like everyone's winning. Launching, promoted, buying a house with a perfect lawn, mastering a 3rd language on the side. But you're only seeing the trailer. You're not seeing the 3 AM panic, the deleted drafts, the 10 minutes someone sits in their car, in the driveway, gathering the energy to walk inside and pretend everything's fine. Nobody posts the version of themselves standing frozen in a coffee shop line. Authority is mostly theater. Competence is just recovering from your mistakes slightly faster than anyone notices. The people running countries, companies, your family— they're the same 7-year-old in the back seat, older now, better dressed, still occasionally wondering if anyone's actually driving. So, what do we do with that? If nobody actually knows what they're doing, doesn't that mean the world is just chaos with better lighting? Maybe. For a second. But sit with it a little longer, and it starts to feel like the most liberating thing you've heard all year. Because if there's no manual, you can't be doing it wrong. If the experts are just guessing based on their own limited experience, your guess belongs in the room too. We're all improvising, you know, on a stage with no script. The people who seem the most confident are usually just the ones who've made peace with that. I still catch myself waiting for the feeling, the one where you finally arrive, Finally qualify, finally get handed the badge that says adult. It hasn't come. I've mostly stopped checking the mail for it. It explains a strange thing we do too: the way we hunt for mentors. We corner someone ten years further along and ask, half joking, half desperate. How did you figure it out? And if they're honest, the answer is almost always some version of, I didn't. I just made a decision on a random Tuesday and then spent a decade pretending it was a plan. We want them to have a map because it would mean maps exist. Most of the time, they're just a few steps ahead of us on the same unlit road, occasionally turning around to shine a phone flashlight backward. So we don't trip on the same rock they did. Maybe that's the whole trick— not becoming someone who knows, just becoming someone who stopped waiting to find out and gets a little more comfortable each year with the particular kind of vertigo that never fully goes away for anyone, no matter how good their blazer looks. There is nothing here but freedom. See you next time. Whenever that is.
