Adulthood Lite

If adulthood is economically defined as the ability to cover all your own expenses, then the longest stretch I’ve ever truly been an adult was the winter of 2021—living alone in central Paris with a panoramic view that framed both Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, regularly meeting friends, ignoring the discounted hours of sex saunas, and watching every play I was curious about. In addition to that three-month phase of global citizenship, during which I met both my bodily and emotional needs with minimal savings, I had short bursts of full-time adulthood in a few other places: twenty days at the Ibis Budget Hotel in Berlin’s Potsdamer district, two weeks in a middle-class apartment complex in Warsaw, forty days at The City Walls Hotel in Diyarbakır, and in various cat-sitting gigs across Istanbul’s Kurtuluş, Nişantaşı, and Kadıköy neighborhoods. Outside of these, I remained financially dependent on my parents throughout boarding school, five years of studying in Paris, and the two years of post-student life in Dolapdere. For the past eight years, I’ve been living under their roof. This dire state of affairs, which already posed a threat to personal liberation, now raises concern due to its broader social implications.

Let’s say I’ve moved beyond the question: “Is this really a life?” But can someone like me—who has only partially experienced how harsh real life can be—really be considered an artist?

After studying theater in Paris and returning to Istanbul, I became a well-educated bohemian, combining a cultural allowance from my father with the earnings from temporary jobs in the arts sector—the equivalent of being a runner in the cultural scene. In 2018, when I got a freelance editor job at a magazine, I stopped asking my family for money. I became what I call a adult lite—someone who pays no rent or utility bills and has modest food expenses. Even during months when I wrote nearly the entire magazine as an uninsured, part-time employee, I was happy enough with the creative freedom that I ignored how little I was earning. I explored unfamiliar corners of Istanbul, was graciously hosted at new restaurants, attended more exhibitions than I would’ve on my own, and had long conversations with people I wouldn’t have otherwise met through my social circle.

During this period, as I began to better understand Turkey, I underwent two types of professional deformation. My language became duller in social life, as I was used to writing in the format of a city magazine, and the job’s routine made me more disciplined. But the financial instability of it all pushed me to write plays. When the pandemic hit, my magazine work ended. That job, which didn’t leave me with severance pay, did teach me a lot: how media relations work, that PR people are human too, the landscape of Istanbul’s gastronomy scene, and that even someone like me—who doesn’t think of themselves as especially social—can navigate nearly any social context. It also taught me that someone who’s passionate about their lifestyle can easily have their labor exploited.

Since the pandemic, I’ve made a living through art. The constrained, sedentary life during COVID lockdowns actually propelled my career forward. I wrote my first play in French and was selected for an international artist residency at Paris’s Cité Internationale des Arts, which covered all my expenses and provided a stipend for three months. The magazine job, with its immersion in local society, had confused my class consciousness. This dreamy simulation of an economically free artist life in the heart of Paris only deepened my class dysphoria. A sense of possibility was reborn in me: maybe the future I had learned not to even dream about while in Turkey could still be attainable. The emotional state of this long-term but hard-to-reach lifestyle imprinted itself on my memory.

After leaving the progressive thought bubble of Galatasaray High School’s theater club—where we staged Jean Genet with a view over Istanbul’s historic peninsula—I set my youthful fire ablaze in the gay clubs of the Marais. Then, I got used to commuting by metrobus to Avcılar and sharing my sex partners with women. But after getting drunk on the laughter and applause my pornographic play reading received in Paris, could I really return to Istanbul, learn mainstream screenwriting, and perform a sweet, agreeable version of myself for capitalist circles that embraced my queerness not for its artistic potential, but for the added value it brought to their institutional branding?

I’m thirty-three years old, not yet earning enough to sustain a fully independent life, and—if I were heterosexual—would likely be cited in a Meral Akşener speech as a case study of the modern Turkish man. I’ve never had a long-term romantic relationship, I have a driver’s license but don’t know how to drive, and I stammer when a famous comedian I bump into at a party asks me, “So, what do you do?” I’m the kind of modestly-tempered profile that self-taught hustlers with more real-life experience at a young age would look at and feel like winners. In the world of art I’m part of, we’re used to the blurring of disciplines—this flexibility should apply to defining my class background, too. The correlation between my income level and my social position has become increasingly incoherent. My cultural capital grants me access to VIP events in Turkey’s art scene, while the factory workers I flirt with at night earn more than I do. As people talk about the disappearance of the middle class in Istanbul and the widening gap between the lower and upper classes, I’ve begun to wonder: where does that leave me? Somehow, this economy is turning a sober person like me—who barely drinks, doesn’t smoke or do drugs—into a contemporary representative of the edgy artist archetype.

For years, I’ve been someone who wakes up whenever they want, organizes their time without compromising intellectual curiosity, and feels extremely free—or extremely lonely—because I move independently of society’s larger organization. But this lifestyle needs to change. The business world rewards increasing stress and responsibility with money; the art world does it with prestige and praise. In the past few years, I’ve earned enough prestige and praise to coast on for a while, even if I don’t get anything new. But I must now resist the urge to anchor my self-worth solely to professional validation.

Even if I aim for my work to bring in just enough to cover basic needs, I’ll have to carve out more time for paid labor. That doesn’t scare me. The necessity of making money—and the ongoing tension that will come with it—almost excites me, because it promises a more pragmatic relationship with life. What does worry me is this: I feel a creative energy within me that I sense will last a long time, and I’m afraid I won’t be able to channel it the way I want to due to factors beyond my control. If adulthood’s social definition is the alignment between one’s professional discourse and daily life, then I’m a far more mature adult in that sense than in the economic one. But the money I’ve long set aside in order not to compromise my dreams could now, if I’m not careful, become the very thing that paralyzes me.

Sometimes, when interpreting my financial state, I blame the circumstances I live in to ease the psychological burden of my adulthood lite. I try to console myself with the idea that my experience and insights could offer me a far higher standard of living in another country. But societies can’t be compared solely based on their economic conditions. I lived in Paris for five years as a university student. I might not know what it's like to navigate adult relationships or harsh survival realities abroad, but I do know what it means to live in a high-welfare European city. The hypothesis of an alternative life abroad does not soothe my discontent or anxieties.

My Turkishness, my queerness, my long walks to avoid paying bus fare to the scholarship-funded prep center in Avcılar, the discomfort I felt seeing real Tommy Hilfiger sweaters for the first time after entering Galatasaray High School in knock-off Leke jeans, the nagging feeling that reading books meant I was missing out on a more fun life, and the women who—even knowing I was gay—still wanted me to desire them... all of these will follow me wherever I go. The reason I can’t yet earn enough to live independently isn’t just Turkey’s worsening economy or some inescapable class fate. Who knows? Maybe I’ve been moving at a strategic slowness, consciously remaining in observation mode. As my generation stares down divorce, burnout, and existential crises, someone will need to embrace them with the healing power of art. The doctrine that treats your thirties as your second twenties will be put to the test in the coming years.