Human Adulthood

Preamble:

Humble brag here, but if you’re ever doubting that I’m finding obscure, hidden, and buried treasure: the video we’re talking about today has 642 views and the channel has 121 subscribers. A perfect example that life is unfair and that you need to dive for jewels.

Jed McKenna is my favorite “spiritual teacher” there is. I say he’s the only self help author you’d ever have to read, because after him you’ll never be capable of getting into bed with the other slop out there peddling euphoria for a check. Eventually there will be a tremendous write up on him here, but I’m a tad fearful of the work it’ll be.

However, if there’s one takeaway from all his works, it’s that the goal of “waking up” is spiritual adulthood. And this concept of adulthood is always drenched in fog… it’s never clear what it actually is. So I searched it on YouTube and found this after multiple rabbit holes.

For starters, the creator opens with a 5 minute preamble on how you can’t take advice from people. You can’t let others define your terms. You need to do the work yourself.

Which is such a fantastic way to open a video on Jed McKenna, whose entire philosophy is tearing everything down, destroying it, and rebuilding it your own way. Not finding someone else to tell you what to do… but YOU finding out what YOU should do, simply through who you are.

It’s advice everyone hates and no one follows. Which is why Jed McKenna is relatively unknown and this YouTube creator doesn’t have a following. It’s brutal work but it’s worth it.

Human adulthood, as defined here, is the ability to accept it all, play with life, and not take feelings too seriously. The closest thing to a human adult is a child. But Jed’s point is much bolder: that the real children are the people from age 3 to 88 who never got the point.

We’re all throwing on masks, egos, prescriptions, and calling it our life. But… none of that is us.

He makes a fantastic point that you “wake up,” leave the herd, and join a group where anti-conformity is the “rule.” But that’s still… a rule? It’s all recursive.

This video is best stopped five minutes in to retool your life, and better stopped 25 minutes in to blow it all up.

Hope you enjoy, and hopefully this teaches you to stop swallowing your advice pills.

The Video:

My Notes:

Most People Argue With Words They’ve Never Owned

“They use what I would call dead words. Words that have no meaning to them. They just pick them up and use them, thinking they’re looking in the right direction, but really confusing themselves and confusing the one they’re talking to.”

Ego. Non-attachment. Disidentification. Presence. These words get passed around spiritual and philosophical circles like currency nobody has ever bothered to check for counterfeits. Two people can have an entire conversation about “the ego” where neither one has done the private work of deciding what the word points to in their own experience. Both nod. Both leave more confused than they arrived, but with the warm feeling of having discussed something deep.

The danger isn’t having the wrong definition. The danger is having no definition while believing you have one. A wrong meaning can be corrected. A dead word is invisible; it sits in your vocabulary doing nothing, and because you can use it fluently, you never notice the hollowness. This is why so much reading produces so little change. The concepts pass through without ever being metabolized.

The fix is unglamorous. Before you ask how to disidentify from the ego, sit down and answer what you mean by ego, in your own words, from your own observation. If you can’t, the question was never real. It was borrowed.

Wanting to Be an Adult Is Proof You Aren’t One

“The whole essence of human adulthood is that it has to do with some sort of independence. So if you’re trying to live up to my idea of human adulthood, well, that kind of clearly shows you’re not a human adult.”

This is the trap built into the concept itself, and it’s elegant in a cruel way. Adulthood, as McKenna and this speaker frame it, means internal validation. Being your own authority. So the moment you go searching for someone to certify your adulthood, to hand you the criteria and grade your progress, you’ve disqualified yourself by the very act of asking. You cannot be given independence. The gift would contaminate the thing.

Most seekers never see this. They read the books, decide enlightenment sounds like too much trouble, and set off after adulthood the same way they’d pursue a certification: find the syllabus, meet the requirements, collect the credential. But there is no external checkpoint. Understanding what adulthood actually is and being able to be it turn out to be the same event. Until then, you’re just saying words about it.

Whoever Defines Your Terms Becomes Your New Problem

“If you look at someone else to define your terms for you, then they become your new problem.”

The pattern is nearly universal. Your parents and your schooling handed you a model of life that never sat right. So you went looking, and you found a guy who wrote some books, or a guy on YouTube, whose model felt truer. And without noticing, you performed the oldest move in the seeker’s playbook: you swapped one external authority for another. The lean is identical. Only the wall changed.

This is worth sitting with, because it indicts almost everyone who reads seriously, Brenden included, me included, anyone who has ever built a canon of mentors. The figures are not the problem. Leaning is the problem. The tell is simple: if the new framework isn’t feeling right, if you’re still asking clarifying questions of the framework’s author, you haven’t found truth. You’ve found a more sophisticated landlord.

The books and the videos can only ever be inspiration, a starting point for work that happens in you and nowhere else. Take what’s said, break it, remake it. Anything less is consumption dressed up as growth.

The Answer Is Not Your Solution

“There’s no point in an answer. The answer is not your solution. It’s being able to do the math that will get you to where you want to go.”

A student who copies the answer key knows the answers and cannot do the math. Hand him a new problem and he’s helpless. This is the condition of most spiritual readers: shelves of answer keys, zero capacity to solve.

The distinction matters because it explains the strange phenomenon of people who have read everything and changed nothing. They mistook possession of conclusions for possession of the ability that generates conclusions. Watching video after video, reading book after book, feels like progress because information is arriving. But information about adulthood and the capacity for adulthood are different substances entirely. One can be downloaded. The other has to be built, privately, through friction, and nobody can do the reps for you.

Freedom of Action Is a Funnel, and You’re in the Narrow Part

“Your freedom of action starts out really wide, becomes very narrow, and becomes wide again.”

Here’s the model. A baby does whatever it wants. Then the world starts saying no. Parents, school, peer groups, professions, each one narrowing the range of what you feel permitted to do, in exchange for belonging. You comply because you want validation, and the compliance works; you do become the thing. But the funnel keeps tightening, and somewhere in the narrow part you notice there’s almost no room left to be yourself. That claustrophobia, that friction, is what sends people searching.

The same shape governs every skill. You want to be a good basketball player, so you submit to the rules of shooting form, arc, repetition. The narrowing isn’t oppression; it’s how competence gets built. The mistake is thinking the narrow part is the destination. It’s the middle. The funnel is supposed to open again on the far side, into improvisation, into a width you author yourself. Most people never get there, because when the narrowness starts to hurt, they do something that feels like escape but isn’t.

Switching Identities Just Restarts the Funnel

“Whatever identity you look at, it has this set of rules, this external validation. In order for you to carry around this identity, you need to behave in a certain way, or you cannot identify as that thing.”

The kid burns out on sports, ditches the jocks, and goes to hang with the cool kids who don’t care about anything. It feels like liberation. Fewer rules, more air. Except the cool kids have a dress code too. Wear black. Don’t care, and definitely don’t be caught caring. He hasn’t escaped the funnel; he’s re-entered it at the wide end, where new members get leeway to make mistakes because they’re new. The width will narrow again. It always does.

This maps onto adult life with uncomfortable precision. The career change, the new city, the new scene, the new philosophy. Each restart delivers a genuine hit of freedom, and each one decays on the same schedule as the last, because the structure was never the problem. Any identity, by definition, comes with an external rulebook. You can shuffle rulebooks forever. Breaking through is a different move entirely, and it happens at the narrow point, not by fleeing it.

You Have to Earn the Right to Break the Rules

“You have to do the things to be the thing you want to be before you can decide not to be that.”

Improvisation is not the absence of skill. It’s what skill does when it stops needing permission. The painters who broke painting first mastered painting as it existed; then they turned their formal training on its head, and their rebellion became the next generation’s formal training. You cannot skip the child and declare yourself the adult. The adult is born from the child’s formalization, breaks through it, and carries it forward. The child doesn’t die. It gets absorbed.

This is the part the shortcut-seekers hate, because it means the boring years count. The compliance, the reps, the submitting to standards you didn’t set, all of it is load-bearing. A rule broken without skill is just noise. A rule broken with skill is a new language. The difference between the two is the entire apprenticeship you were trying to avoid.

The Child Asks Who Am I. The Adult Asks What Am I

“The child focuses on the message and the adult focuses on the medium. I have thoughts and feelings. What’s important: the fact that I have those and that they influence me, or what the contents of those thoughts and feelings are?”

This might be the sharpest cut in the whole talk. The child is obsessed with content: this thought is good, that feeling is bad, this identity is me, that one isn’t. The adult drops down a level and watches the machinery instead. Thoughts arrive. Feelings arrive. They play with your being, and you can’t stop them, so the judgment of each individual arrival becomes absurd, like grading the weather.

The payoff is what the speaker calls the see-through way of being. Stop believing your thoughts and they don’t stop coming, but they lose their intensity, because intensity was always borrowed from your belief in them. Smoke you take for a wall stops you cold. Smoke you see as smoke, you walk through. Nothing about the smoke changed. Only the validation you were feeding it.

Contentment Is Overrated

“Sex is friction. Pain is friction. It’s all friction. So don’t judge pain, don’t avoid pain. Learning is pain, and that’s great.”

The talk ends by kicking the legs out from under the seeker’s final fantasy: the frictionless state. The monk on the mountain who feels nothing, wants nothing, is attached to nothing. How long do you think that stays fun? Feeling itself is friction, contrast, the movement between states. You don’t feel warm; you feel becoming warm. Hold your hand still on your arm and the sensation vanishes. A life optimized for stillness optimizes itself out of feeling anything at all.

So the adult doesn’t solve the puzzle and retire. The adult realizes the fun was always in the solving, and starts oscillating on purpose: engaging, making it real, playing as the child plays, then disengaging, seeing through it, improvising as the adult does. Resistance and allowance, alternating like a current. The one-sidedness of spirituality, the fantasy of arriving somewhere and staying, was the last dead word all along.