Welcome to Adulthood
A newsletter about everything they should have taught you in college, but didn't
After graduating from college, many 22 year-olds begin to realize that 99% of what they learned in high school and college has 0 practical relevance to their lives. Even worse: there are many things they do need to know about adult life, and none of them were taught.
I was in those shoes.
Upon graduating from college, I was beginning a job that I wasn’t sure if I wanted. I still didn’t know what my career should be (my degree in theoretical math wasn’t going to help). I didn’t know how to get health insurance, I didn’t have a credit card, and I wasn’t saving for retirement (I didn’t know that was even a thing). I was in a happy relationship but unsure when I wanted to get married, let alone have kids. I didn’t actually know how to be a good partner. I didn’t know how to keep up a good relationship with my parents now that our whole dynamic had changed. And now that I wasn’t chasing grades, I didn’t know what the goal was anymore. I didn’t know how to be happy.
That was just the tip of the iceberg… The following years would bring new adulting challenges: career surprises, financial mishaps (including nearly going broke), moves, and facing loss. As well as incredible sources of joy: finding jobs I loved, getting married, and having children.
I realized I wasn’t alone. My friends and peers were struggling as well. Most newly-minted adults are more educated than ever, yet more lost than ever. They face questions such as:
How do I get health insurance? Invest for retirement? Budget my money?
How do I ace my first job?
How should my relationships with my parents develop as I get older?
How am I supposed to find my soulmate?
How do I achieve a sense of purpose and fulfillment in life?
On average, 0% of these topics are covered in K-12 or college courses. We are magically expected to know them.
In the education world, one common objection goes: “You can’t teach these things. They must be learned through experience.” I disagree.
We don’t hand car keys to a 16 year-old and say: “Go get into a couple accidents, that will teach you how to drive.” We teach Driver’s Ed preemptively.
Similarly, we shouldn’t expect adults to have a wreck of a relationship before learning how to love; or to get audited by the IRS before learning to pay their taxes; or to die with regret before learning how to lead a fulfilling life.
So, after years of complaining about this, I decided to utilize my unique background to do something about it: I created and taught the course Adulting 101 at Boston College. It became the most popular course in the department—but it was limited to a small number of people, relative to how many people graduate from college each year. That is why I’m writing the upcoming book 14 Things You Should Have Learned in College, But Need to Know Now (Chronicle Books, spring 2025)—but 2025 is a long time to wait. Thus, because (as the title indicates) new adults need to learn these things now… I’ve started this newsletter.1
Why now?
If you celebrated Thanksgiving last week, you may have been with relatives or friends who were home from senior year of college, or returning for a visit a year or two after graduating. This newsletter is for them. If you feel comfortable, please forward this to them in case they are interested in subscribing.
Starting next week, and once every month thereafter, I’ll be sharing essential knowledge to set them up for a happy and fulfilling adult life.2 I’ll also be answering reader questions, so this is a good time for someone to reach out for specific advice before the queue gets too long.
I’ve titled this newsletter The Adulting Professor. But I’m not a bona fide professor; I was a Lecturer (teacher) at BC, and I currently run an organization called Dialog, which for 17 years has brought together thousands of leaders (CEOs, high-ranking politicians, public intellectuals, etc.) for off-the-record conversations. In my 4+ years of doing so, I’ve learned a lot about how to have good conversations (the topic of a future post!) and how to be good at networking—even if the term “networking” makes you cringe (the topic of another future post!).
I really dislike the typical “advice” newsletters or books that are framed as “I became successful, and you can too, if you do what I did.” As I often teach in my lessons about investing, that is called “results-oriented thinking”: attributing success to good decision-making rather than to other factors, such as luck. My goal is not to provide advice, it’s to provide knowledge—which I have curated (with the help of my mentors and students) over 10+ years from working in the fields of mental health, finance, education, dialogue facilitation, and management consulting.
I’m 22 years old and found this through your post on Johnathan Haidt’s Substack. My undergrad education has “taught” me about the intricacies of the dosage compensation mechanism in Drosophila Melanogaster and even gotten me into medical school, but I have an intense yearning for the practical knowledge that is at best omitted from undergrad education and at worst purposefully excluded. I am also in a bit of a unique situation since I am engaged, will be getting married pretty soon, and plan on having kids <5 years from now. I look forward to your future posts. On behalf of the Gen Z’ers that still retain some aspects of how normal human beings used to be, thank you.
I am a full-time college professor (19 years and counting), and I have subscribed in hopes that this substack will be a good one to recommend to my students, who no doubt need this knowledge! Please do, though, fix the grammatical error of “graduate college.” A person has no power to graduate a college; only the college has power to graduate the students. A student graduates *from* college, please. :-)