The Adulting Gap

A practical guide to the adult-life skills nobody taught us, written with an Indian lens.

The Adulting Gap is a practical guide to the things nobody taught us about adult life: money, marriage and in-laws, ageing parents, raising children in a digital world, and staying steady in an unstable job market. Its argument is simple: adulthood is a set of skills you can learn, not a personality you either have or don’t. Written with an Indian lens for people in their 20s to 40s who are doing fine on paper but never got the operating manual, it ends with eight practical tools, from a Marriage Money Meeting to an Annual Adulting Review.

Ashok Hariharan is the author of The Adulting Gap, a practical guide to the life skills nobody teaches us. Born in Avudaiyarkoil, a village in Pudukkottai district, Tamil Nadu, he was the first in his family to graduate in engineering. He works in banking and financial services technology and lives in Chennai with his family.

Ashok Hariharan was born in Avudaiyarkoil, a small village in Pudukkottai district, Tamil Nadu, grew up between Madurai and Trichy, and was the first in his family to graduate in engineering. He has spent nearly ten years in banking and financial services technology as a full-stack web developer, and almost as long writing digital content on the side. He lives in Chennai with his wife and child. The Adulting Gap, his first book, grew out of conversations with people his age who were carrying real adult responsibilities without anyone ever having taught them how.

Ashok Hariharan was born in Avudaiyarkoil, a small village in Pudukkottai district, and spent his childhood between Madurai and Trichy, moving to Chennai after college for work. He was the first person in his family to graduate in Engineering, with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Engineering.

He now lives in Chennai, happily married and raising a child, and works in banking and financial services technology as a full-stack web application developer, with technical expertise in Java and Angular — nearly ten years in the industry so far. Alongside that career, he’s spent an almost equal stretch writing digital content, a habit that shows up throughout this book in how carefully it breaks things down. He’s also been a reader his whole life, and if there’s a throughline in how he thinks and writes, it probably traces back more to those years of reading than to anything he studied formally.

The Adulting Gap is his first book. It came out of something he kept noticing — in his own life, and in conversation after conversation with people his age: everyone seemed to be carrying real responsibilities without anyone ever actually teaching them how. This book is his attempt to write down what nobody handed him.