I don’t know about you, but my 18th birthday came and went three years ago and I still don’t feel like an adult. I still call my parents when my paycheque doesn’t come in and stare in fear at a clogged toilet. If you’re anything like me, and I’m pretty sure most university students are, then I’ve got the perfect YouTube channel for you.
How to Adult is an educational YouTube channel created in February, marketed as a how-to guide for young people struggling to manoeuvre their way into adulthood. Hosts Emma Mills (known on YouTube as elmify) and T. Michael Martin have a quirky maturity that suggests they only recently entered adulthood too. It’s reassuring to watch them, as grown adults in their mid-to-late 20s, share their own experiences at the end of each video and learn that it’s all right to make mistakes in life.
The most popular video, besides the channel introduction, is “How to Ask Someone Out on a Date”, featuring helpful tips like deciding on an appropriate location, clarifying that it’s actually a date and not just a hangout, and building confidence to ask that person out. My personal favourite was “20 Tips to Ace Any Job Interview”. I’d recommend checking it out around summer job-hunting season to jog your memory.
I also love that the channel focuses on the more enjoyable parts of adulthood too, like making new friends once you graduate and baking chocolate chip cookies. The channel outsources select content to guest hosts for expert advice, so you never quite know what you’re about to learn.
The channel’s success—over 1 million channel views and 79,328 subscribers—is not only due to the usefulness of the content, but also the popularity of its executive producers: famous vlogbrothers John and Hank Green.
New videos are posted once a week, typically on Mondays. Why these life lessons and skills were never taught in high school I’ll never understand, but it’s good to know that someone’s finally taking a stab at it. Frankly, I think learning to change a car tire is way more useful than grade 12 math, but that’s just coming from a humanities student. I’m sure there are plenty of classes we would all sacrifice to learn how to pay taxes.
