Don’t Touch the Thermostat, Lift With Your Legs: Advice for Young Adults Goes Mega-Viral

As a kid, there is nothing more frustrating than when an adult tells you that “you’ll understand when you’re older.” At the time, it’s difficult to comprehend the audacity of anyone telling you there is something you can’t comprehend merely because of your age. But then you grow up and one day you realize that you now understand all of those things adults told you that you would understand when you’re older.

A thread on Reddit encouraged people to share the things they now retroactively get due to adulthood and it’s packed with wisdom you can only appreciate through life experience. A lot of the best answers revolved around the simple idiom: don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today. And that includes doing the damn dishes.

“It’s best to wash dishes before you get out of the house every damn time,” u/waterlemon_champ commented.

One of the hardest things to explain to a kid is how much a bad night of sleep can ruin your entire day as an adult because they dream of staying up all night and watching TV.

“As a kid I never understood why anyone wanted to sleep when they could be out having fun, now I understand,” u/Slimpurt92 wrote.

Another commenter wrote, “lift with your legs, not your back” which every adult with chronic back pain will wholeheartedly agree with. And while you can run around as a kid and lift from any which way you please because you won’t feel the pain, the older you get, the more that back aches!

And of course, a dad couldn’t resist coming in to re-emphasize the importance of not touching the thermostat, an annoying thing many of us had to deal with as kids but didn’t understand why it mattered so much until we started looking at that electricity bill.

“As a Dad, I seem to spend my life switching off lights in empty rooms and turning down the thermostat.” u/jolloholoday wrote.

Perhaps the biggest misconception kids have about adulthood is that most people like their jobs and one of the most popular answers addressed that.

“I remember asking an adult, ‘If you don’t like your job why don’t you get a new one you like?'” u/flexminisystem wrote.

If only it was that easy.