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" It seems we live in a world ruled by kidults.  There&amp;#039;s 28-year-old Katy Perry, who&amp;#039;s obsessed with nail art and sings about getting drunk and posting silly pictures...or 26-year-old Ke$ha, with her face paint and technicolor wardrobe. And every woman I know is hooked on cheesy young-adult fiction. St. Martin&amp;#039;s Press is even launching a new genre of book\u2014New Adult\u2014to appeal to the legions of 20- and 30something YA fans (these books include real sex, but the plots are just as simple as YA ones). On TV, there&amp;#039;s New Girl&amp;#039;s 30-year-old Jess, who, when confronted with her waning fertility, says, &amp;quot;Tonight, I used a bread roll to wipe butter off my face. And then I ate the bread roll. So I essentially used my face as a butter knife,&amp;quot; as proof of her irresponsibility. Jess is played by girlie 33-year-old Zooey Deschanel, cofounder of the website HelloGiggles, which sounds like something a third grader might doodle. Adulthood used to be simple. You finished school, got hitched and pregnant, moved out to the &amp;#039;burbs, and bam!\u2014you were a grown-up. But that path seems quaintly retro, a black-and-white vision of the way things used to be. &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;re a young woman today, your mother was likely to have been married, had kids, and owned a house at your age, and we still tend to think of those things as the markers of adulthood,&amp;quot; says Robin Henig, coauthor of Twentysomething&amp;amp;gt;: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck? Now, we&amp;#039;re waiting longer to say &amp;quot;I do&amp;quot; (the average age of first marriages for American women is 27, up from 25 just 10 years ago) and delaying motherhood. And in 2011, the average age of first-time homeowners was an elderly 34. Guess what it was in the 1960s? About 23! So at the same age that Great-Aunt Sally was picking out tiles, you&amp;#039;re likely slamming shots and fighting with your roommate over dirty dishes. This freedom from early domesticity is, for the most part, awesome. Unlike Great-Aunt Sally, we don&amp;#039;t have to settle down with a guy by 23, and we can explore career options before kids. But experts say that the slipperiness of modern adulthood can be detrimental if you let the adolescent mind-set linger too long. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a lot to be done between 20 and 40,&amp;quot; says Meg Jay, PhD, author of The Defining Decade. &amp;quot;Not everyone wants the same things, but you&amp;#039;d better get on achieving what you think will make you happy.&amp;quot; For inspiration, look to Mindy Kaling, creator and star of The Mindy Project, whose character is a successful ob-gyn who has Hunger Games\u2014themed checks and eats cereal out of wine glasses. Mindy&amp;#039;s an example of a kidlike adult who&amp;#039;s making it work, on her show and in real life. Jay&amp;#039;s advice? Don&amp;#039;t think of these transition years as throwaways, and start making some goals. You don&amp;#039;t have to be fully there to be a grown-up; you just have to live your life in an intentional way. And you can do it while devouring YA novels and listening to Katy Perry.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/advice/a4237/what-it-means-to-be-an-adult/?click=rel>