For a long time now, I’ve thought that you’re never really a grownup until you realize that there are no grownups. We all have a fantasy, inherited from childhood, that somewhere, someone, is truly in charge and knows what they’re doing and has got things under control. I remember the moment when I realized that’s not true. There is no such person. It’s on you, me, us, to try to be a little wiser than we are, which involves, as a first step, giving up the fantasy that anyone in the actual world knows entirely what they’re doing.

I was thinking about this last night as I watched Andrew Cuomo repeatedly try and fail to belittle Mamdani as a kid, a novice, an inexperienced and wet-behind-the-ears fledgling, well meaning at best, dangerously naive at worst. Cuomo’s shenanigans on stage are the telltale sign of someone who hasn’t gotten the memo about adulthood, who’s playacting at being a grownup.

You know the type, and probably have encountered them in your own life: that person who affects wells of deep experience and worldly wisdom, who reminds you that the’ve been around the block too many times, that they’ve seen it all and done it all. I’ve always found that person so cringey because it’s so obvious that they are a child.

They’re like the academic who performs the judicious, careful scholar, who’s learned enough to know to use words like “precise” and “cautious” but who is anything but, who is a complete mess as a thinker and a writer, prone to all sorts of extravagance, untempered by judgment or fact.

I see it in parents who are children, teachers who are students (and not in a good way), and leaders who are followers. I see it at weddings (sorry!)

And it all comes back to people who never realized that there are no grownups, that we’re all bumbling through as best we can. Again, the telltale sign that you haven’t realized that is when you perform the way Cuomo did last night.