In the last year or so, I’ve gotten into the No Stupid Questions podcast, which is a spinoff of the very popular Freakonomics books series. Research psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth and tech and sports executive Mike Maughan ask a lot of questions, some that can, at a glance, appear to be “stupid,” and so they ask each other these questions and delve into them. Many of the questions are suggested by their listeners.

The latest one I listened to that made me think was on “When do you become an adult?” and how it’s been fairly arbitrary that 18 has been the designated “adult” age. Why shouldn’t people ages 16 and above be able to vote? Why can you legally drive at age 16, vote at age 18, but then you cannot drink alcohol until age 21 in the U.S.? They go through all these questions and the historical reasons behind them in this episode.

One of the things that really made think was what Duckworth called the “life history theory,” which says that these things that you think are just fixed, or are on some cellular clock, they are actually profoundly influenced by experience. There’s an evolutionary reason behind it: if you sense that you are in some chaotic, uncertain, and/or dangerous environment, you had better get to adulthood fast. “Get to adulthood, reproduce, and get the hell out of there! You don’t have a lot of time!” Duckworth says. Life history theory says: what if you have the sense that you are in a stable, rich environment where you will live years and years? Then you have an incentive to forestall puberty and whatever line you want to give yourself for adult roles. This theory says you can procrastinate on adulthood if you live in a secure world because then, you have time to learn from your parents, get more educated from your peers and develop skills.

This made me think about two individuals I know. One is a former colleague from my last company who was essentially the biggest child I’d ever known who was my age. Let’s call this person Amber. Amber came from a wealthy, prominent Bay Area family with all the resources and support you could ever ask for. Yet somehow, when she started working at my last company, Amber came across as the most needy and insecure 30-something-year-old adult I’d ever met. She was constantly trying to make friends with everyone and get everyone to like her. It was really confusing to me, and I kept my distance from her. But eventually, I found out that she seemed jealous of the role I played in the office. I was effectively the culture queen in the office and organized happy hours and gatherings, and she did not like it since she wanted that role. She tried to get people to call her the “office mom,” as ridiculous as that sounds. Since Amber was the first and only recruiter in our office, she was the land line to HR in our San Francisco headquarters, and she kept tabs on and falsely reported goings-on and “moods” in the office. I will forever and always remember this stupid incident that happened: She had the balls to report me to HR for not wishing her a public happy birthday message on our team Slack channel. Amber knew I had an office birthday list, and when I happened to forget to ask her when her birthday was, she got upset and actually reported me! On top of that, because I had recently co-organized a happy hour event for a departing employee (who left on awkward terms), she also reported me for being “exclusive” and not inviting her (even though 1) another colleague was helping me organize, who she never reported, and 2) I purposely didn’t invite her because I knew she would be out of town for a work-related conference). Instead of HR looking at this as some senseless, childish, and elementary-school-like behavior and dismissing it, they actually took it seriously (since HR at my last company was full of toxic, drama-instigating individuals who substituted activity for achievement every day). Our “People Partner” (what a joke of a title, by the way, as she couldn’t have been less of a “partner” but an trouble maker who abused her “power”) asked my manager to have a chat with me about it. My manager, who was relatively new at the time, seemed a bit helpless when he confronted me about it. It was clear he thought it was dumb, but he shrugged and said he was simply delivering a message that HR had asked him to share with me. In general, people at the office despised Amber; endless people would say she was childish, bratty, and lacked self esteem (one former employee who was on her way out said to me in disgust, “She is a child! She tried to force me to hang out with her after I left!”), but they were generally afraid of Amber since she was like a pseudo HR-representative in our satellite office.

The second person I think about when I think of this life history theory is a friend of mine who is currently on her second divorce. We met in college and connected over our love of Chinese language and culture, food, and travel. Throughout college, I got to meet and hang out with her parents multiple times. They used to visit at least a couple times a year and were so generous to take me out to many delicious meals together. We talked about all sorts of topics that I’d never dream of discussing with my own parents. They treated me and my opinions with respect. I’d never felt so intellectually stimulated by another person’s parents in my life at that point. I always envied her relationship with her parents, and I had wished my parents could be more like hers. My friend married for the first time in 2011, then got divorced around 2015. The guy was literally a clown, as he was a professional clown artist and apparently a bit of an unstable fraud. She got married a second time in 2017 (to someone who, from any outsider’s view, was the total opposite of her, morally and politically), had a kid with this second guy in 2019, and then filed for divorce last year. Somehow, she has dug herself into a hole where she not only gave up her house that she is still paying bills and mortgage payments on, but she is also paying for a Christian private school that she didn’t want her child to go to. Because medical related decisions need both parents to sign off on them, he rejected my friend’s request to get their child therapy for how to handle the divorce. Their child is struggling and hating the separation, and she’s acting out because she doesn’t understand what is going on. Her ex-husband, who is unemployed, is making no attempt to work again given that he’s essentially living for free off my friend’s hard-earned money. She is so short of money now that her grandparents, who are well off, are paying for her rental payments for her apartment that she escaped to.

I wonder about the two of them, though. Is it possible that both of them were so loved, so supported, so coddled by their parents and grandparents and all the money and resources they had, that they are basically like living examples of people who never felt truly compelled to “grow up”? No one wants their children to feel unsupported or unloved, but according to life history theory, we may need to find ways to instill grit in our children so that they do not feel like they have all the time and endless resources in the world to “grow up” and be independent. No one will really respect you when you are in your mid-30s and crying to mommy when someone won’t wish you a happy birthday. Few people will respect you when your grandparents are paying your rent payments as a nearly 40-year-old.