Stylist columnist Lucy Mangan tackles just how hard it is to be good at #adulting in 2016

Adulting, or at least #adulting, is everywhere – on Twitter and Instagram, on blogs, in articles and even, occasionally, in conversation (you know what I mean: I just bought a sofa/made ceviche/didn’t cry in front of my boss). Probably more than occasionally if you’re an actual millennial and not someone who, like me, missed the m-boat by at least five years and just wants to hug you all and tell you everything will be alright (although not necessarily this side of your 50s).

I suspect adulting has come to prominence because being an adult in 2016 lies somewhere between “baffling” and “impossible”. The traditional markers of holding down a 9-5 job, paying the rent/mortgage on time, getting married, having kids, having savings and all that shizz (as I believe not even the young folk are saying these days) no longer marks you out as an adult but a lucky bastard baby boomer; those smug accidents of birth and history whose lives make anyone born after 1965 weep bloody tears of envy.

“Modern adulthood: we’re still working it all out” Lucy Mangan on being a grown-up