Being the Adult in the Room: Emotional Immaturity in an Unhinged World

There is something quietly alarming about the way people behave in public these days. It’s not just the spectacle of it — the yelling on airplanes, the tantrums in customer service lines, the entitled disregard for rules, norms, and other human beings. It’s the underlying current of emotional immaturity that no longer feels like the exception, but rather the new baseline.

We have all seen the videos. An adult melts down over a mask mandate. A tourist climbs a sacred monument for a selfie. A politician launches a tirade on live television, not to persuade or inform, but to humiliate and provoke. We watch these moments play out again and again — viral, absurd, disturbing — and still, they multiply. Something in our collective behavior is coming undone.

This isn’t about manners. It’s about emotional regulation. About the growing absence of people who are willing to be the adult in the room — the person who stays calm when everyone else is spiraling, who chooses composure over spectacle, who understands that their feelings are real but not always right, and that not every impulse deserves an audience.

Emotional immaturity has become both normalized and monetized. Our cultural appetite for conflict, mockery, and meltdown has made it easy — even profitable — to act out. But that ease has come at a cost. Because when no one is holding the line of maturity, decency, and grounded behavior, everything gets shakier. The boundaries between personal emotion and public action blur. Narcissism is repackaged as confidence. Outbursts are reframed as authenticity. And in the process, we lose something essential: our ability to hold space for each other without losing ourselves.

To be the adult in the room today is not about being older, smarter, or more important. It is about choosing regulation over reactivity, substance over performance. It is about knowing how to manage the heat of the moment without spreading it to everyone else. And it’s about asking ourselves, honestly, what kind of example we are setting — not only for children, but for other adults who are looking around and wondering if anyone still knows how to behave.

This essay is a reflection on what happens when emotional immaturity becomes the default, and why choosing to show up with maturity — even quietly, even alone — is a radical act of cultural repair.

The Rise of Emotional Immaturity

To understand how we arrived here, we have to move beyond individual incidents and look at the broader emotional atmosphere we’re living in. We are not simply dealing with a handful of rude people or a few hot-headed politicians. What we’re witnessing is the widespread erosion of emotional maturity as a social standard. And like most declines in cultural behavior, it didn’t happen overnight.

Emotional immaturity is not a new phenomenon. But it used to be something people tried to grow out of, or at least conceal. Now, it’s often worn like a badge. Performative rage, public meltdowns, and impulsive outbursts have not only become more common — they’ve become a form of currency. One that is rewarded with attention, shares, retweets, and sometimes even political power. The louder the tantrum, the more visibility it garners. In that landscape, it’s no wonder that being calm, thoughtful, or measured is often seen as weak, boring, or irrelevant.

Part of the problem lies in the cultural confusion between authenticity and immaturity. Somewhere along the line, we stopped distinguishing between emotional expression and emotional control. To express anger, sadness, or frustration is healthy. But to erupt in a way that disregards others, to weaponize those feelings for spectacle or dominance — that is not authenticity. That is a lack of discipline. And we’ve stopped holding people accountable for it.

There’s also a social learning component. Behavior is contagious. When people see others acting out and getting away with it — or worse, being rewarded for it — they begin to mimic that behavior, often unconsciously. The threshold for what’s acceptable begins to shift. What once would have been embarrassing is now expected. What once required an apology now comes with applause.

We see it in every sphere. In politics, where cruelty is no longer disqualifying. In media, where outrage is engineered for clicks. In public spaces, where entitlement trumps respect. And increasingly, in everyday life, where people speak and act as if no one else’s experience matters but their own. It’s not just that bad behavior has gone unchecked. It’s that the very idea of emotional maturity has been downgraded — from a virtue to a punchline.

Of course, not everyone is behaving badly. But many people are exhausted from being around those who are. It takes energy to hold your center while others lose theirs. It takes strength to stay grounded when everything around you is chaotic. And without enough reinforcement, even those who know better can begin to fray. That is why emotional maturity must be reclaimed, not as a private trait, but as a public good.

This shift we’re witnessing is not just inconvenient. It’s dangerous. When people can no longer tolerate discomfort without exploding, when disagreement becomes dehumanization, when personal offense becomes justification for public cruelty — we are no longer in a healthy society. We are in an emotionally adolescent one.

What It Means to Be the Adult in the Room

The phrase “the adult in the room” used to evoke a sense of calm authority — someone who could hold space without adding to the chaos, who could absorb tension without collapsing into it. It referred not just to chronological age or hierarchical status, but to someone who embodied steadiness, perspective, and restraint. In today’s cultural climate, that kind of presence feels increasingly rare. And yet, it is more needed than ever.

To be the adult in the room is not about suppressing your feelings. It’s about regulating them. It’s about recognizing that you may feel offended, angry, or afraid — and still have the capacity to choose your response. It’s about being in charge of your emotional state, rather than outsourcing it to the behavior of others. This is the core of emotional intelligence: not the absence of feeling, but the integration of feeling with reflection, self-awareness, and interpersonal respect.

It also means knowing when not to react. In a world that rewards instant responses, viral rage, and impulsive commentary, restraint can look like silence. But it’s not emptiness. It’s a deliberate choice to step out of the emotional contagion spiral. It’s the ability to pause before acting, to assess the temperature in the room and decide not to raise it further. That pause is not weakness. It is maturity in motion.

Being the adult in the room also involves the willingness to see past your own perspective. It requires empathy — not as a soft sentiment, but as a disciplined practice. When someone else is behaving badly, the emotionally immature response is to match their energy. The emotionally intelligent response is to remember that someone has to stop the spread. Someone has to hold the line. And sometimes, that someone is you.

There is also an element of personal responsibility here. We cannot control the world. But we can choose how we show up in it. If we expect our leaders, neighbors, and fellow citizens to behave with decency, then we must model it ourselves — not just when it’s easy, but especially when it’s not. Emotional maturity is not performative. It’s not something you turn on when people are watching and discard when they’re not. It’s a way of moving through the world that says: I understand my impact. I know how to manage my emotions. And I refuse to become the very chaos I’m reacting to.

There’s a reason children need adults around them. Not just to make rules, but to make sense of the world. To provide the emotional scaffolding for how to navigate hard moments. The same is true in adulthood. We still need models of steadiness — people who can show us that it’s possible to disagree without destruction, to feel deeply without becoming unhinged, to hold power without abusing it.

Being the adult in the room today may not earn you applause. It may not go viral. It may not even be noticed. But its absence is felt profoundly when it’s gone. And its presence, however quiet, makes all the difference in a world that feels like it’s unraveling.

Case Studies of Chaos

It’s one thing to talk about emotional immaturity in theory. It’s another to witness it unfold in the wild. In recent years, we’ve seen an almost surreal level of public behavior that defies common sense, basic decency, and any semblance of emotional regulation. The examples are endless — and increasingly absurd.

Take the American tourist who carves their name into the Colosseum in Rome, smiling for a photo like it’s a rite of passage. Or the influencer who jumps into protected waters to get the perfect shot, oblivious to the ecological damage or the rules meant to preserve sacred spaces. Or the airline passenger screaming at flight attendants because they didn’t get the seat they wanted, as if discomfort justifies cruelty. These aren’t isolated events. They’re part of a larger trend — a kind of emotional freelancing where personal desire overrides collective responsibility.

And then there are the political figures who seem to operate entirely on impulse. Name-calling in press briefings. Weaponized outrage at town halls. Public tantrums framed as leadership. Rather than modeling maturity, many elected officials now perform dysfunction as strategy. It’s not just tolerated. It’s rewarded. Constituents are no longer looking for steady hands. They’re looking for someone who yells on their behalf. That is not representation. That’s emotional co-dependency on a national scale.

In everyday life, the chaos is less dramatic but no less corrosive. The parent berating a teacher in front of a child. The customer filming a cashier for a perceived slight. The neighbor who escalates a noise complaint into a personal feud. These interactions may not make headlines, but they take a toll. They erode our shared sense of trust and safety. They signal to everyone in the vicinity: “I will make my emotional state your problem.”

There is also the “Karen” phenomenon — a term that, while often misused or overapplied, originated as a shorthand for a very real pattern of behavior: the entitled, performative insertion of oneself into situations that have nothing to do with you. Whether it’s calling the police on someone simply existing in a space or demanding to speak to a manager over a minor inconvenience, these actions reflect not just prejudice or arrogance, but deep emotional underdevelopment. It is a desperate grasp for control, identity, or validation — at the expense of someone else’s humanity.

What connects all of these examples is not just bad behavior, but the total abdication of self-regulation. They illustrate what happens when people are ruled by impulse, external validation, and the belief that their emotions are more important than the impact they have on others. In psychological terms, it’s a breakdown of boundaries — between self and other, feeling and action, private frustration and public responsibility.

We’re witnessing what happens when people no longer internalize the idea of restraint as a strength. And in its place, a new kind of social capital has emerged — one built on spectacle, escalation, and emotional dominance. But that capital is unstable. It depletes our trust in one another. It leaves no room for grace. And eventually, it collapses under its own weight.

The Social Cost of Abdicated Maturity

When emotional immaturity becomes widespread, it doesn’t just create uncomfortable moments or viral videos. It reshapes the fabric of daily life. It changes what we expect from each other. It erodes the quiet agreements that make shared spaces livable — the implicit social contract that says: I’ll manage myself so you don’t have to.

At first, the cost is subtle. A sense of unease in public. A neighbor you no longer wave to. A tendency to avoid conflict not out of peace, but exhaustion. Over time, these small fractures turn into larger ones. We stop trusting strangers. We stop expecting decency. We brace for confrontation even in routine exchanges — boarding a plane, buying groceries, walking through a museum. Civility becomes the exception, not the norm.

And there is a contagion effect. Emotional immaturity spreads because it demands a response. When someone throws a public tantrum, everyone around them is pulled into their emotional field. Some people become complicit. Others shut down. A few mirror the behavior. But almost no one leaves the situation unaffected. In this way, immature behavior has a multiplying effect — destabilizing entire environments through a single act of disregard.

The workplace is another casualty. When adults are not expected to regulate their emotions, workplaces become reactive, defensive, and volatile. The loudest voice dominates meetings. The most emotionally erratic person shapes the mood of the team. Feedback becomes unsafe. Accountability disappears. And once that culture takes hold, it’s difficult to repair — because no one wants to be the one enforcing boundaries when boundaries no longer mean anything.

In politics and public discourse, the cost is even more profound. When voters expect theater over thoughtfulness, we elect performers, not problem-solvers. When disagreement is treated as betrayal, dialogue becomes impossible. When every frustration is turned into a public grievance, governance collapses into emotional warfare. And the damage isn’t just institutional. It’s psychological. People begin to internalize the message that maturity is weakness, that composure is submission, that decency is naïveté.

But perhaps the greatest cost is interpersonal. When emotional immaturity becomes the norm, we stop feeling safe with one another. Relationships become fraught. Social cohesion weakens. Even small gestures — a shared glance of acknowledgment, a courteous word, a willingness to wait — start to feel rare, even risky. And in the absence of these gestures, we feel more alone.

All of this leaves a pressing question: who is responsible for resetting the standard? Who holds the emotional line when others have dropped it? If we wait for someone else — for institutions, influencers, or authority figures — we may be waiting a long time. The restoration of maturity doesn’t begin with systems. It begins with people. One person choosing to respond instead of react. One person staying grounded instead of grabbing attention. One person deciding not to spread emotional harm just because they’ve been hurt.

It’s not glamorous. It’s not easy. And it rarely gets rewarded. But it is essential. Because without enough people willing to be the adult in the room, we don’t just lose comfort. We lose our ability to coexist.

Making Maturity Aspirational Again

In a culture that glorifies visibility, volatility, and vindication, emotional maturity is not just undervalued — it’s invisible. Quiet strength rarely trends. Composure doesn’t get likes. Thoughtfulness is often dismissed as passivity. But this is precisely what makes maturity so radical. It doesn’t seek approval. It doesn’t need to be seen to be powerful.

If we are to reclaim the role of the adult in the room, we have to stop treating emotional intelligence as optional. It is not a soft skill. It is a form of leadership, of presence, of cultural resistance to chaos. And while it may not look heroic, it often does the heavy lifting of holding things together — relationships, conversations, families, communities, and sometimes entire institutions.

So how do we make maturity aspirational again?

We start by modeling it. Not perfectly, but consistently. We show others — especially young people — what it looks like to pause before speaking, to own our emotions without unleashing them on others, to choose repair over retaliation. We normalize the language of regulation and self-awareness. We make emotional discipline a marker of adulthood, not just age.

We also stop mistaking loudness for strength. Strength is the parent who diffuses tension instead of escalating it. It’s the teacher who holds calm in a room full of chaos. It’s the employee who chooses professionalism when their frustration could easily justify pettiness. It’s the citizen who shows up to participate, not perform. These people don’t get headlines. But they create the conditions for a livable world.

And perhaps most urgently, we remember that being the adult in the room doesn’t mean being humorless, emotionless, or rigid. It means being able to hold both feeling and responsibility. To acknowledge the frustration, fear, or anger — and still choose behavior that doesn’t harm others. Maturity isn’t the absence of emotion. It’s the presence of internal leadership.

We need a cultural shift — one that stops rewarding tantrums and starts recognizing integrity. That honors the people who stay seated when everyone else is chasing the spotlight. That elevates those who can disagree without degrading. That celebrates those who choose the steady path, even when it’s uphill and unpopular.

The world does not need more noise. It needs clarity. It needs people who are willing to be bored, uncomfortable, or unheard — if that’s what it takes to preserve what is decent. It needs people who can hold boundaries without becoming cruel. Who can stay in the room without demanding to be the center of it. Who can walk away from conflict without needing to win it.

We are not all meant to be leaders in title. But every day, in small and unnoticed ways, we are given the chance to lead emotionally. To show up, to steady the room, to make a different choice. To be the person others feel safer around, not because we take charge, but because we don’t lose ourselves.

This is the work of the adult in the room. And in a world coming apart at the seams, it might just be the work that holds us together.