What happens to grow up to suck so hard?
Why can't we just look at each other and imagine the child that person once was, then maybe we'd care more about others like your 4 year old does.
Why can't we just look at each other and imagine the child that person once was, then maybe we'd care more about others like your 4 year old does.
Everyone with power ends up losing it, or acquiring some strife, maybe if we cared less we'd find out it wasn't that much of a concern anyway.
I mean, do people chose power or does power choose them? Would you appreciate it if you had it?
I’ll edit this comment at some point but for now, thank you friend. This is beautiful and poignant. :)
Edit - I notice you edited your reply but I’m happy I got to read the original. You’re a beautiful writer.
On a negative note, I think most people convince themselves of being much more grown up than they actually are. Really it's far easier to just get meaner and more calloused to survive while suffocating the core self. Maturity is more like a deliberate and careful edifice built with a lot of work, self-reflection, and self-forgiveness. It's not a given that just getting older does that, other than the inhibitory part of the brain getting better at restraining the emotional part after adolescence. (Usually, unless trauma happens that's sufficient to get stuck in a particular development stage.)
We may not be able to solve the problems created by our species, but if we learn to live with respect for the planet then we can at least know we are doing as much as we can with our own existence.
As hard as it is to generalize, I'd say it's because sometimes our needs aren't getting met, particularly our need for safety. When we feel like we're in danger, it's very hard to appreciate wonderful things. ("This person feels like they're in danger" is also a decent way to broadly sympathize with other folks, along the same lines as "imagine the child that person once was.")
Sometimes this happens, sometimes not.