The illusion of being a grown-up
What does that actually mean? The dictionary doesn't help here: being outgrown, adolescence... Bullshit, what is that? I would like to focus here on what resonates when we commonly speak of being an adult. Above all, we mean to reach a certain level of reason. Doesn't that prove sentences like "When will you finally grow up? Being an adult not only in the sense of a certain age and the legal treatment that goes with it, but in the sense of a vague degree of maturity that is difficult to define. Generally, most people would say, "the more mature, the more reasonable, " although we know that enough adults prove this statement wrong. Nevertheless, this prejudice(?) is precisely what people mean when they say, "It's about time you take responsibility. This is also what we mean by being an adult.
And all that is bullshit as well. Being an adult, in this sense, is an illusion. We don't become more reasonable when we get older. We function more adapted to our environment, not always to our advantage. Being grown up in the sense of a higher degree of reason is ridiculous. Instead, we "adults" are significant, older children, people with more experience and more ingrained patterns of behavior, including those that are not helpful to us but sometimes also make us constantly screw up the same way.
There has never been such a thing as being an adult.
We grow, experience the world, react to it, and adapt our behavior to our environment. Finished. The reason, the ratio is entirely overrated. Hasn't psychology shown us for many years that there is no such thing as a purely rational decision? Don't we have to admit to ourselves that many "rational" decisions don't fly us to where we actually want to land in the long run?
This makes me wonder Where is the point, or points, in a person's life where they begin to undermine and deny themselves chronically? Roger Willemsen, a german author, wrote the beautiful book Der Knacks. The Knack is understood as a point in life at which something fundamentally changes, something happens and we won't be the same person ever again. This is incredibly exciting because it is becoming more challenging to perceive and feel the crack's moment due to our increasingly noisy external world. And even when we do perceive it, so many of us immediately fall into defense or fight mode, pause in brief confusion - What is this now? - wipe it away instead of recognizing it for what it might be, namely an opportunity for positive development, a hint from fate. Hey, calm down! Do you get what's going on?
My son is not yet an adult. My son is five years old. How do I, as a father, recognize at which points I am not bending him, not breaking him, NOT telling him that something doesn't work because that's the way it is? Yes, certain things in life must be accepted because we can't change them. But where is the boundary between an acceptance of the outside world in a positive sense and this destructive crack that leads us to adapt to a diseased world? Why is it so difficult to save even a spark of childlike curiosity, openness, and confidence into adulthood, which would enable us to continue to hear our own voice within us?
Through more experience, we "adults" have fallen into the illusion of being able to see into the future. In small things, that may be, but never in the big picture. And even if a hundred times x followed y, this does not prove that it will be the same again the hundred and first time. This is the old story of confusing correlations and causation. The former has to do loosely and not compellingly with each other; the latter says that something follows compellingly the other. If I heat water to 100 degrees, it will boil. If I take a note in the calendar on the 17th of October "Build a snowman." because grandpa always built a snowman on the 17th of October for the last thirty years, there will not necessarily be snow in the coming October.
The older we get, the more deeply we feel hurt by the misunderstanding between correlation and causality. The more convinced a person is, the greater the pain. So I like to remember old wisdom:
- do not always believe your own thoughts
- be even more cautious with convictions
- be careful with opinions
Children can still do that. Adults no longer.