stages
Explanation
This comic presents a graph titled "All Life Stages Explained with One Variable."
The X-axis is labeled "Your Age" (from 10 to 100), and the Y-axis is labeled "How Well You Know How to Be the Age You Currently Are."
The graph shows a dramatic spike peaking around age 10, indicating that children feel highly competent at being their current age. This confidence then plummets sharply during the teenage years and bottoms out around age 20. From the 20s onward, the line stays very low and flat, only gradually and unevenly creeping upward through middle age and old age, never coming close to the childhood peak.
The joke captures a widely relatable human experience: as a child, you feel like you have life completely figured out. You know how to be a kid. Then adolescence and early adulthood hit, and suddenly you have no idea what you are doing. The comic suggests that this feeling of incompetence never fully goes away -- adults spend the rest of their lives only slowly and incrementally figuring out how to be their current age, and by the time they start to get the hang of it, they have aged into a new stage they are equally unprepared for.
The slight upward trend in old age suggests that elderly people finally start to regain some of that childhood confidence, perhaps because they have accumulated enough experience or simply stopped caring about getting it "right." The noisy, jagged line in the later years also suggests that this late-life competence is inconsistent and fragile.
Weinersmith distills the universal human experience of feeling perpetually unprepared for adulthood into a single, elegant graph.