As with many things in life, adulthood is on a spectrum. Legally, we’ve come to recognize those who have reached 18 years of age as bona fide adults, imbuing said young bucks with most of the legal rights afforded to those with aching knees and gray-peppered manes.

With my own years stacking up, that’s a line in the sand that seems increasingly questionable when spelled out: an 18-year-old can enter any legally binding contract, serve in the armed forces, buy or sell property, vote, and marry, to name a few life-altering decisions. Conversely, the same teenager cannot drink alcohol, own certain types of firearms, or rent a car. The logic doesn’t exactly connect with me, especially since society views certain entitlements listed in the latter as coping mechanisms for the former.

Flick through your mental Rolodex of associates, colleagues, friends, and family for a moment. Whatever names and faces pop up are just as viable as the next for this mental exercise, so don’t put any stock in it yet.

Now, let’s add a qualifying layer to the conversation. In that laundry list of personalities, are there people who have always appeared wise beyond their years? Or, just as likely, a few figures who are naïve for their age?

We’re sure to come up with a few examples. Weigh that against rising life expectancy, and it starts to raise deeper questions. Speaking broadly, had we all known then what we know now, we’d all probably make wiser choices.

Alas, we can chalk up the law chat by throwing up our hands and reluctantly admitting that the law isn’t perfect. A line in the legalese needs to be drawn somewhere, and apparently, 18 felt right to those who set it in judicial stone. The courts, sadly, don’t account for my personal loss of innocence and coming-of-age story. It wasn’t learning that Santa Claus wasn’t real (my brother and I had our suspicions), nor was it the pain and disillusionment of receiving my first paycheck. It started long before I unwillingly joined the capitalist rank and file.

See, the cartoons and general media of my youth riffed on cavemen quite a bit. Long before the GEICO caveman, there was the lovable family sitcom known as The Flintstones — likely the most successful cross-generational example of this trope — which rose to prominence in the 1960s and endures in various forms to this day.

They, as so many others did, depicted a world where loinclothed men and women would frolic together with easily the coolest reptiles known to us: dinosaurs. If you wanted to take a grim view of the show, you might notice that said dinosaurs were often forced into brutal subjugation, with the Pterodactyl’s beak as the needle to play vinyl records. At the same time, the long-necked Brontosaurus was turned into various forms of heavy machinery. Life has a way of wearing away at whimsical fancy.

Unfortunately, this was a farce, an earth-shattering one at that. Dinosaurs are cool. There is no worthwhile argument against that fact, and if you hold a differing opinion, then I will speak for the rest of us and ask that you keep your terrible opinions to yourself. Perhaps your education had a rigidly enforced library time, during which children would be set loose in the school’s repository and allowed to pick books that appealed to them. Instead of indulging in a fine vintage of Elmer’s Glue, like some of my classmates, books with awesome dinosaur illustrations carried me through these afternoons.

It was then that I’d learned the ugly truth: The Mesozoic Era, in which famous reptiles such as Tyrannosaurus Rex ruled the roost, did not overlap with the Cenozoic Era, which has given rise to furry little mammals (us included). It was then that I realized the life of The Flintstones was a lie. Around that time, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park was published, providing a far more realistic account of what would happen if my favorite dinosaurs and humans ever broke bread.

Still, much of a farcical world where early Homo sapiens rode dinosaurs to work makes far more sense to me than a legal adult being deprived of one of the only true freedoms a person can experience: a fully insured rental car is only limited by your imagination.

Once the chains of financial liability are removed, then, friends, the world is your oyster, and true creativity takes over. I’m sure a disproportionate number of our readers know that plastic food trays from fast-food restaurants can turn any front-wheel-drive (FWD) with a conventional e-brake into an unhinged drift machine.

Adulthood is certainly on a spectrum of some kind. Some lean into it, some don’t. A more accurate measuring stick might be to ask, “When do we feel old?” That will vary from person to person.

Jumping on a bike or motorcycle certainly doesn’t make me feel older; quite the opposite, in fact. Meanwhile, thinking about how to pay for them does make me feel my years.

The same honest sensations of ripping along on trails or the track have the same effect on me as they always did, even thinking all the way back to when I learned to balance on two wheels. There’s no catch with certain things in life. They’ll be as pure no matter when we greet them, even if lifting a small load of laundry is enough to tweak my back now.