Avoiding adulthood

Who wants to be an adult?

Going to work, raising kids, clawing your way up a career ladder that now looks much more like a snake. It’s exhausting just thinking about it.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that people of an adult age are looking at both kids and grandparents for inspiration on how to live a little better.

First, Nonnamaxxing. This is luxuriating in long lunches, fresh air and the imagined wisdom of an Italian grandmother, not speaking with your hands and having a vague but undeniable connection to the mob.

Aside from a culturally relevant excuse to eat a lot of carbs and add generous helpings of olive oil to everything, it’s also a supposed means of living longer. Italy, and Sardinia in particular, is considered a ‘Blue Zone’, where people live a lot longer.

If that doesn’t appeal (and quite frankly, why not), then you could always go the other way.

With Labubus now a distant speck in the zeitgeist rearview, we’re now onto hyper-realistic fruit accessories. No, really.

We’re talking peeled banana keyrings, broccoli bag tags, or even whole bags made of plastic pretzels. It’s all part of the continued trend of embracing kidult aesthetics and leaning into absurdist, infantile accessories. They may weigh down your handbag, but they’re designed to lighten your life.

The problem with both of these approaches is that they’re entirely surface level. 

Zoomers are taking to social media to prove their Nonnamaxxing credentials, despite a core tenant of such a lifestyle being to go absolutely nowhere near an algorithm. Kidult aesthetics rarely extend from expensive bits of plastic to embracing your inner child.  

Rather than perform on socials, it may be best to just dive into real life. Even if that involves the terrifying reality of adulthood.