I'm 39. Still working on it. Every so often I'm shocked in either direction.

When I was younger, I was deeply shocked to learn that fathers do not usually pester their sons about getting laid. I was also quite annoyed to learn that "just be yourself" was code for "chill out immediately or be ostracized". Those two realizations took me nearly half a decade total to process.

On the other side, I get amazed at what other people never had to learn. Perhaps I simply had to put up with more crap as a kid because I was fat. I learned everything I could. I also lived in upstate New York, where you added skills immediately to avoid being fired from the few lousy jobs that existed. I am amazed that people cannot clean hair out of clogged sinks, cannot figure out the tip in their heads (one buck for every five and round up -- where's the skill? $67.29 is $13.50 because 65/5 is 50/5 plus 15/5 and then some).

"Adult" is a b.s. term. It only makes sense when you have a Transactional Analysis model: child/adult/parent, similar to id/ego/superego except that the parent is about as useless as actual ego -- the 'parent' wants to teach everyone a lesson whether it's appropriate or not.