Everybody knows being an adult is hard. You have to get up on time, work all day, feed yourself, maybe fit in some exercise — and then you have to do it all again, at least several times more! Talk about exhausting. But you can make adulthood way more fun by joining forces with pals. Here’s how.
Furniture Assembly Party
Getting a place of your own is a big step on the road to becoming a real adult. But listen: Hand-me-down furnishings are only tolerable for so long. Eventually you’re going to have to buy some new pieces of your own. This can be fun, allowing you to inject some of your personality into your living space … but a lot of the stuff in your budget (and design sensibility) is probably going to hail from one of those retailers that leaves the assembly up to you. So, yeah — I foresee a lot of allen wrenches in your future.
You can have a good time with it, though! Invite your friends over for a BYOAW (that’s “bring your own allen wrench”) furniture assembly party. It’s kind of like a moving-day party, but everyone can sit down and drink beer and eat snacks, instead of schlepping couches up and down stairs. Be sure to assign your friends tasks they’re suited for, though. Assign the (relatively) simple bookcase to the English major, and leave the complicated loft bed to the civil engineer.
Applying to Jobs
The irony of trying to get a new job is that doing so is in itself a full-time job — and a particularly frustrating one. There are only so many trying-to-be-clever-but-not-too-clever cover letters you can write, and job-specific resume tweaks you can make, before you’ll want to run screaming from your apartment building.
In addition to getting out of your bedroom/off your couch during your job search, it’s best to tag-team this thing. Get thee to a coffee shop with a friend who’s also on the hunt, and set up shop with your laptops. This isn’t a hangout session, though; mostly you should be quiet and focused as you rabbit away at searching online job boards, writing emails to hiring managers, and so on. That said, you should definitely bounce stuff off each other, trading off reading drafts of cover letters and resumes (both for typos and for tone), and also just pausing every once in a while to refresh and clear your head.
Sunday Family Meal
Now that you’re living on your own, it becomes even more important to get together with your pals and spend some quality time with the people you love most. So plan a rotating Sunday family meal! The idea here isn’t to host some elaborate dinner party that’s going to stress you and everyone else out; no, you want to prepare a meal that is simple and comforting, and easily scalable for a big group. To make the proceedings even more worry-free, ask each person to bring an appetizer or finger food with them, like Pagoda® egg rolls. Each week, rotate the venue so that no one feels too much pressure, and everyone can bask in the glow of hearth and homies before the work week kicks into high gear.
Group Workout
Waking up early Mon.–Fri. is hard enough, without trying to fit exercise into your busy schedule. Working out in the morning is a great way to maximize your time, as well as to energize yourself before the day begins, but it’s easy to talk yourself into hitting the snooze button when the only person counting on you to wake up is yourself.
A great way to make getting fit in the mornings both less easy to blow off and way more fun is to make a commitment with one or more friends to meet up for an early-a.m. group jog or calisthenics session. If you don’t know what to do, no worries — you can ask the most fitness-minded among you to lead the class, or consult some fitness magazines, tear out some general workout pages, and go to town. This is more about togetherness than hardcore training, so if you’re one of the stronger ones in the group, take it easy for the newbies; or, alternatively, if you’re a slower member of the pack, kick it up a notch, both for general group enjoyment and for your own fitness. If there’s enough time after the workout, you can all get breakfast together at a healthy cafe.
Do you have any favorite ways ways to make adulthood more fun with friends? Let us know in the comments! In the meantime, another great way to make being a grown person more enjoyable is by having some delicious snacks in your freezer, ready to go — just like the ones made by Pagoda®. Pick some up when you’re next at the supermarket, and you’ll have even more time to plan group activities with your buddies.
Hunter Slaton is the Content Director for Studio@Gawker.
Illustrations by Ramóna Udvardi.
This post is a sponsored collaboration between Pagoda® and Studio@Gawker.