I first came across Jed McKenna’s term Human Adulthood after I’d come to know it experientially. I instantly recognized what he was describing and it gave me language to contextualize and articulate the state itself as well as the terrain required to reach it.
Jed’s treatment of the topic is characteristically simple and disruptive. He posits that what we ordinarily call adulthood is actually just a physical adulthood carrying forward the mental, emotional, and spiritual architecture of childhood. He calls this condition the Segregated State of Human Childhood, with Human Adulthood being the Integrated State. Not an exalted spiritual attainment, but the natural continuation of human development. McKenna describes the distinction as being asleep in the dreamstate (conventional adulthood,) versus awake within it, (Human Adulthood,) and Truth Realization as awake from the dreamstate.
In my book I describe authentic adulthood as existential maturity characterized by authenticity, inner autonomy, and a clear recognition of reality beyond the stories and frameworks through which ordinary human life is organized.
That definition is more clinical than Jed’s, but I’m describing the same developmental territory.
Where I think my work can add something is in showing what this looks like once you get it out of the realm of philosophy and put it back into a Tuesday afternoon. Because very few of us have seen it modeled. We’ve seen competence modeled. We’ve seen success, discipline, emotional restraint, moral conviction, confidence, and spiritual sophistication modeled. We’ve seen all sorts of examples of people becoming functional. But the transition to Human Adulthood is different and offers almost no models.