The Myth of the Sorted Adult

I used to believe that one day, way into the future, adulthood would simply arrive. Not like a birthday or a bank statement, but as an awakening — that moment when you’d step out of the shower and, instead of wondering where all the clean towels went, you’d suddenly know how mortgages worked, how to poach an egg properly, and how to stay calm when someone mentions “pension consolidation.” We imagine adulthood as a sort of calm plateau reached after years of climbing — a stage in life when everything finally stops wobbling.

I kept waiting for that day. It never came.

Because, as it turns out, the “sorted adult” — that mythical creature who glides through life with spreadsheets balanced, emotions catalogued, and a wardrobe arranged by season — doesn’t actually exist. They are as real as the Loch Ness Monster, except with poor posture and a direct debit for everything.

Every adult I’ve ever met, when gently prodded, eventually admits to some form of chaos. Some are quietly panicking about taxes. Others have entire drawers — plural — that exist solely to store miscellaneous cables. One friend of mine, who exudes an aura of managerial competence so strong it could lead a small nation, recently confessed that she once used a hairdryer to defrost a frozen chicken.

We are all, every single last one of us, improvising with the enthusiasm of a small child playing the violin for the very first time. They make it up as they go, hoping no one notices when they play the wrong note.

And yet, there’s something strangely comforting about this. The myth of the sorted adult suggests there’s a finish line — a final, polished version of ourselves that’s always just a few “life hacks” away. But the truth is gentler, and far more forgiving: nobody knows what they’re doing. Everyone’s learning, guessing, pretending, and trying again. Even the people who appear unflappably competent — your boss, your doctor, your friend with the colour-coded kitchen — have moments when they stare into the fridge and wonder why they came into the kitchen in the first place.

When I was younger, I thought adults had a secret manual — a thick, leather-bound tome with chapters like How to Understand Your Boiler and How to Answer the Door to Jehovah’s Witnesses. I now know that the manual doesn’t exist. What does exist is a collective conspiracy to look like we know what we’re doing while quietly Googling things like “what is APR” and “is it possible to microwave rice twice without dying.”

Some mornings, I wake up feeling like a responsible, functioning human being — I drink water, pay bills on time, even floss. Then other mornings, I find myself eating leftover pizza for breakfast and using my car keys to open a parcel because I’ve somehow lost all the scissors in the house. Both versions, I’ve learned, are equally valid.

The myth of the sorted adult thrives because we mistake other people’s highlight reels for their final film. We see the calm, filtered exterior and not the frantic rehearsal that happened just out of frame. Nobody posts photos of themselves at 2 a.m., scrubbing a casserole dish and questioning every decision that led to this point.

And yet — there’s something liberating in that. Once you realise that everyone is winging it, the pressure lifts. Life becomes less a performance and more a series of experiments with occasional successes. You stop comparing your behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s edited trailer. You start to find humour in the absurdity of it all — in the endless loop of “getting your life together,” only to watch it unravel again like badly wound Christmas lights.

I once spent half a day assembling a wardrobe from Argos that looked so simple in the manual it might as well have been designed for toddlers. Four hours later, the wardrobe was standing — technically — but with a suspicious lean, like it had recently survived a minor earthquake. I remember sitting on the floor, surrounded by leftover screws that definitely should have gone somewhere, and thinking, “Yes, this feels about right. This is adulthood.”

Because adulthood, it turns out, isn’t about mastery — it’s about persistence. It’s about knowing the Wi-Fi password, losing it, and then pretending you didn’t need the internet anyway. It’s about keeping a straight face while your washing machine makes noises that sound like a dying walrus. It’s about showing up, even when your socks don’t match and your grand plan for the week has already dissolved by Tuesday.

The “sorted” adult is a mirage — a distant figure who seems to glide effortlessly across the sands of competence while the rest of us trudge behind, dropping things. But the real adults, the ones I admire most, are those who’ve made peace with the chaos. They laugh at it. They work with it. They keep the wobble but find the rhythm.

If you ever feel like you’re the only one still trying to figure it all out — congratulations, you’re part of the majority. None of us are sorted. We’re all improvising, half-awake, and occasionally brilliant. Life isn’t a blueprint; it’s a rehearsal that somehow got indefinitely extended.

And maybe that’s the point. The myth says adulthood is about control. The truth says it’s about grace — about learning to laugh, to adapt, and to carry on playing your part even when the scenery falls over mid-scene.

So here’s to the gloriously unsorted — the ones who can’t fold fitted sheets, who sometimes cry in supermarkets, who make lists only to lose them, and who are doing their best anyway. You’re not behind; you’re human. And somewhere in the great, uncoordinated jumble of existence, we’re all just trying to stay roughly in tune.

So perhaps A Life Rewired is really about that — the great unwiring of the myth. The acceptance that life doesn’t come with neat compartments or tidy lessons, just moments of mild triumph scattered between bouts of confusion. Every journey I’ve taken, every project I’ve fumbled through, every new place I’ve landed in, has revealed the same truth: nobody truly knows what they’re doing, but most people are doing it anyway — and that’s what makes them remarkable.

Travel has a funny way of reminding you of this. In one country, you’ll watch someone fix an engine with a spoon and a smile, while back home you can’t even get the printer to cooperate without emotional support. It’s all relative. The further you go, the more you realise that “sorted” is just another word for “faking it gracefully.”

And that’s the heart of it — the rewiring. Learning that being human is not about perfection, but participation. To wake up, to try again, to laugh at the mess and move forward. Because in the end, life isn’t waiting for us to be sorted — it’s happening right now, gloriously, absurdly, and usually wearing odd socks.