The 2013 coinage of adulting marked a generational ethos of anxious self-reliance

Evidence

This dogged pursuit of consumerist sophistication tended to alienate millennials from traditional domesticity. Basic household chores required a rebranding of their own. In 2013, Kelly Williams Brown coined the term adulting in a book about the bewildering responsibilities of adulthood, such as folding towels and cleaning toilets. Brown’s playful framing resonated deeply, transforming mundane tasks into heroic feats of self-reliance. Writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton believed that “adulting sums up the anxiously self-reliant ethos of early-aughts millennials as accurately as the Whole Earth Catalog summed up the back-to-the-land fantasies of early 1970s boomers.” It was also quite pathetic: Jezebel’s Madeleine Davies wrote, “An award for fulfilling your basic responsibilities as a human is pretty much the most childish thing imaginable.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 312

Categorization

• DEFINE: The adulting coinage and its date (2013, Kelly Williams Brown) is a concrete definitional anchor for millennials’ self-reliant ethos.
• CANDY: The whole adulting-as-heroic-chore framing, with the Jezebel dismissal as pathetic, is a light conversational nugget.