It seems that within the past decade memes have rapidly entered our public displays of feelings, emotions, and thoughts, allowing us to find humor within even the bleakest aspects of life. For the younger generations who’ve lived the majority of their lives with the instant communication and information of the digital age — talking to you millennials and zoomers — making memes to communicate feelings can range from a silly gif to a darkly humorous stan lingo that shows a fatal affinity for a favorite celebrity.
We share memes with friends and family to make each other laugh and even offer a lowkey and encouraging method to cope with challenges we may encounter everyday. We save memes on our phones and computers to capture the humorous takes on daily life or a world phenomenon and preserve it for a time where we may need a laugh.
The journey into adulthood is often a bumpy and rocky period of transition where there seems to be a new encounter with adult struggles and realization at every turn. It can be an overwhelming time, feeling entirely foreign for anyone who has never faced independence in a true form. If you’ve found yourself struggling with aspects of being an adult — or becoming an adult (because who really can confidently say they feel like a full adult) — memes about the struggles of adulthood and independence can bring you a little bit of comfort, letting you let go of a much needed laugh as well as know you’re not alone in the passage of growing up. Here are a few of our favorite memes about being an adult.
Realizing Work is, Like, a Lifelong Thing
Having the realization that work is what is needed to maintain life for most of us can be a pretty dreary one, particularly when your current job is not one you’d label as a dream career. It’s a common adult dilemma: work can bring misery and the thought of work can bring even more misery. Hopefully you are not in this camp, but most adults can most likely relate to the sense of dread that comes alongside a desire to finally be free from work, whether that be the end of a long shift or that sweet taste of a Friday afternoon.
The Way Imposter Syndrome Can Hit at Any Age
The older I get the more I wonder if it ever gets easier. All those milestones I thought would make me feel like an adult... didn't. I still feel like I'm winging it, and I get the sneaking suspicion that most of the other adults I know find themselves in the same boat. Do you ever start to feel like an actual adult? I'll let you know if I ever get there.
Budgeting is not a skill you develop overnight :')
It's a biweekly occurrence. Yes, part of the issue is most definitely the job market, my student loan payments, and inflation. But like, it feels like an adulting gold star when you actually get to put some money into the savings account. Even if it doesn't last for long.
Living is expensive enough without trying to have a life too
Being an adult is tough for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest is that everything feels like it has a price tag. Maintaining friendships? Means dinners, nights outs, or even flying across the country. Maintaining hobbies as an adult? You're responsible for the planning, the supplies, driving to meetups... so sometimes, the most affordable option is literally just to rot in bed.
Cleaning Your Room is Now the Pinnacle of Having Your Life Together
Your room has been dirty, filthy even, for the past few weeks. Life’s been busy, you’ve hardly had time to be at home, and your room has taken the damage of weeks worth of clothes thrown offhandedly as you flop into an unmade and unkempt bed. But then, after weeks of living like a teenager, you find inspiration on a Saturday or Sunday morning and clean your room. Do your laundry. Wash your sheets. Marie Kondo your closet. Make a box of clothes to donate. And your life somehow has found its way back towards order and progress, and you feel unstoppable. A clean room feels glorious and can motivate you to make lifestyle changes, short as they may last, that compel you to feel optimized at levels that Gwyneth Paltrow tells people they should aspire to. (Don’t buy into being an optimizable thing, however, because you’re a human being.) Nevertheless, a clean room can inspire you to try habits you’ve been trying to establish, from reading everyday to making your bed every morning, and these changes can make you actually feel better. But, then life catches up to you, and your room accumulates disorder to the point of being cluttered, and the vicious cycle repeats.
I get it now.
Sometimes it's the only recourse to deal with adulting. Just gotta zone for a sec. Or longer. How long have I been out here? Anyway, better go back in and figure out what to make for dinner.
Do you guys ever think about dying?
Margot Robbie might've been smiling when she popped the question "Do you guys every think about dying?" in Barbie, but it's so spot on. The answer is yes, Margot. Randomly, I do.
Adulthood and Not Getting Enough Sleep Are a Dynamic Duo
The alarm has been set. Soft lighting achieved. Bed freshly made. Electronics turned off. Book on your nightstand marked. Tonight’s the night you’re finally going to get an extra hour or two of sleep. And then, as if prompted by the smell of freshly laundered sheets, your psyche says, “LOL, not tonight!” and rushes your mind with that last email you sent. Was there an embarrassing typo in there? This leads to an unsubstantiated fear that today somehow was your mom’s birthday and you forgot, only to then realize that, no, her birthday is not even in this month. Before you know it, it’s two in the morning and you’re supposed to wake up in five hours. Welcome to adulthood: a constant rush of worries, thoughts, and overthinking about the responsibilities that come along with it! Don’t you love it here?
It's called compartmentalizing okay
My therapist would be super impressed.
It seems like a lot of effort for not a lot of results, no?
Square this circle for me. I spend all my time adulting. I go to work, I pay the bills, I try to work out and have a social life and remember to fold my laundry. And yet I don't feel like you can even tell.
Responsibilities? I Don’t Know Her
Sometimes, when especially overwhelmed with the pressures adulthood demands of us — emails, deadlines, buying greeting cards for every random event for every random acquaintance in your life, the list can go on — it can feel tempting to just shut down. To pull a My Year of Rest and Relaxation and quite literally take a year off from the daily pressures of adulthood. Too bad this isn’t feasible for most of us, so the best we can do is delude ourselves into thinking that a Saturday is Sunday so we can feel the rush of realizing there’s an extra day in the weekend. Delusional!
Being an Adult Means Juggling a Few Different Personas
“Must we document ourselves all the time? Must we?” If you’ve found yourself asking this Gerwig-ian question, the answer most likely will disappoint you because for many adults, staying connected online is no longer an optional endeavor but a fact of life. Of course, you can still opt out of a platform here or there, but when employers look for things like personal networks and professional images online, you kind of have to give in. Thus, the online persona is born, or rather, the online personas are born. You play the part for each platform, showing your audience a different facet of your personality. It may be exhausting and feel disingenuous but has become a regular aspect of being an adult in the digital age.
Nobody Told You Responding to Emails Would Be This Painful
Ah, email. The land of spam offers from that website that you inadvertently visited three years ago, random messages from your parents that very well could’ve been sent in a text, and actual work information. How do we juggle it all? It’s definitely not by creating a self-imposed aversion to opening, reading, and responding to emails, but somehow that seems to be the normal reaction to the culture of emails. Seem contradictory? That’s because it is! Adulthood and emails are like cookies and cream, good together but also still good on their own, however their combination has been defined as concrete and irreversible. Don’t try and resist emails — you don’t want to be known as the bad emailer, do you? — but don’t live on Gmail. Find a balance or keep up unhealthy patterns until one of them bite you in the butt. You’re an adult — figure it out!
Finding the Time and Energy to Tailor a CV for Every Application… Not Possible!
You’re probably a real adult if you even know what a CV is, so if that’s the case: good for you for that, I guess? You know what it is and now you have to write one. You write one and submit it, but then you have to do it all again? Even when job descriptions differ entirely, you may find yourself tempted to fudge your applications a little by using an ahem “generic” or templated CV and resume to save a bit of work. Hopefully one of them works out, right?
When the meeting could have been an email
They don't pay me enough to contribute to this.
Always a new crisis
I don't even know if it's the unprecedented times anymore. This might just be the precedent now.
Middle Age is closer than I thought
Haha, oh no. I'm still not sure I'm an adult at all. But there's time, right? You can't have a midlife crisis if your whole life is an ongoing crisis, right?
Social battery is permenantly on empty.
Sometimes adult problems require adult solutions.
Target counts as home, right?
When I'm "online,"Â I mean I'm within cell service, probably. Not that I'm "sitting at my desk"Â or "working."
When memes about the struggles of adulting are a form of therapy
It's a valid form of self-expression, and I will die on that hill.
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Being an adult is an exciting, frightening, fun, and overwhelming time. Entering the professional workforce is very much the same thing — well, we can only hope it’s fun. Using memes as a method of cathartic connection to strangers struggling with the same problems as yourself is a good way of knowing you’re not alone, that your difficulties with being an adult are most likely not isolated issues specific to you. Hopefully these memes have made you laugh or smile or at least know that we’re all in this together — nobody’s got it down perfect.
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Originally published 08/28/2020. Last updated 06/11/2026.
