Why are so many adults acting just like children?
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aeon.co
Over time, I’ve come to see many “senior” or “success” behaviours as refined versions of childhood ones. Political sniping, business competitiveness, standard hierarchical power dynamics, etc. These are all “playground tactics” but grown up. I don’t see (many) “successful” or “leader” type people publicly engaging in so called “adult behaviours” - supporting, sharing, collaborating, taking time out to understand one another’s needs, looking for win-wins.
Of course, many adults do all these things. However, the higher up the power/success ladder you look, the harder these behaviours are to see. In a lot of situations, many people feel they need to win, or at best draw. Few enjoy losing, and the more they have riding on it (money, reputation, power), the more most people will aim to win. At the level of nations (or gangs), this gets deadly. The ways to win are just the same ways kids explore. The people most likely to win are the ones who lean hardest into those tactics.
So, I’m saying “we’re all children”. If you want to complain about adults playing games and wearing bright colours, you also need to complain about adults using armies to take resources and businesses blocking others out of markets.
Don't we do that all the time?
I don't have strong evidence for this, but I always feel like this is true until you get right to the very top - the individuals and organisations that are considered leaders in their fields. The difference between those people/organisations and the rest is often exactly that they are supportive, collaborative and doing things for the right reasons relative to the big picture rather than their local political context.
It's harder to succeed if you don't engage with the "playground tactics", but those who do are the ones pushing society forwards.
And in many cases, some of them are holding us back.
But your point still stands and I'm gonna think on it in coming weeks.
> But as the legendary Midcentury Modern designer Charles Eames put it, ‘toys and games are the preludes to serious ideas.’ Grownups who play with Lego, dump fortunes into JPEGs of cartoon characters online or dress like overgrown toddlers force us to question long-held assumptions about adulthood and society as a whole.
What the article does challenge successfully is whether the negative connotations are merited. i.e., childish.
And it uses a real life example to argue that it’s not merited at the big picture level.
For example:
> By framing the embrace of childish sensibilities purely as a moral failing, and lumping all forms of it together, critics like Sasse and Andersen miss two important points. One is that there is a nourishing form of regression that harnesses the playfulness, creativity and diversity of childhood, but there is also a destructive form that manifests as blind rage. Both forms of regression are fuelled by a certain disappointment with society. Both crave the creation of something new. But one delights in transgressing boundaries through play, while the other polices boundaries through hate and violence.
I feel the same, but, this is one of those all or nothing things, and the irony is that our own barbaric origins are holding us back from ‘evolving’ so to speak.
We have armies and nuclear armaments because, when it boils down; our species is full of agitated hungry animals, liars and cheats.
You’d need to organize a whole species around a single-world order if you ever wanted to stop wars and denuclearize.
Unipolarity isn't the only solution but it's the most apparent one, and also the most terrifyingly totalitarian one.
There will come a time when taking from others because of the unwillingness to be a creative member of society is seen as a curable mental illness.
1) Someone demonstrates a bigger stick. At this point a bigger stick is effective counter-nukes, or perhaps the presence of an alien civilization.
2) What you call unipolarity, although I think both are unipolarity. Mass behavioral transcendence towards a higher form of morality. Maybe achieved via BCI, or improving standard of living, or subtle coercions by AI, or looming threat of climate change prompting transformative cooperative efforts.
The latter was omitted for brevity, due to its unlikelihood. Of course it’s not binary, there’s a bit of each in the other.
If you can't man up and drink something gross without grimacing, or have the self control to play the most frustrating game in history, you don't have the self-mastery to be near the lever of power.
Just try to ignore the social pretences of the group. All three beverage communities have their extremists who can be quite annoying. But on the other end of the spectrum you’ll find some warm, down-to-earth people who just want to have fun exploring different flavours and textures. That’s really all there is to it!
Does tweeting funny memes or light trolling make you child? If yes, is that not negated by raising multiple children, founding multiple businesses, and employing hundreds of people?
This depends on the public pressure to do so I believe. As a counterexample one could name German ex-chancellor Angela Merkel. You can hardly name any decisions she carries full responsibility for, her role was mostly to mediate finding a compromise between interests of different parties.
I’m confused how that’s fundamentally different than cosplay at a convention.
It also seems it missed a big part (unless they talk about it later). Sure, some people might be doing stuff because of hardships and responsibilities (like living at home to save money). But I think there are also those who were not given responsibilities as a child and don't know how to be responsible and act like an adult now that they are one. I think the delays are even evident in our laws (age of many things continues to increase).
"The seemingly extreme ways in which adults now play, from Zillennial runway models dressing like kindergarteners, to ‘cuddle parties’, to grownups who choose to marry at Disney resorts – all of it, and more to come – is a reaction to the extreme times in which we find ourselves living. The entire planet may be experiencing its own lost decades now – young and old are suffering. But, as the Japanese experience shows us, embracing our inner child isn’t necessarily a denial of reality. It can pave the way to an entirely new one. The Great Regression isn’t really a regression at all. It’s a sign of resilience in the face of profound adversity. When a child is born, it’s impossible to predict what they might become. Who can say what will emerge from our second childhoods?"
That is basically the opposite of what it said.
The author had quite the opposite conclusion:
> The Great Regression isn’t really a regression at all. It’s a sign of resilience in the face of profound adversity.
Just as I was fading a few paragraphs in, one of the straw men (IMHO) thrown out caught my eye.
How had I not heard of Alexis de Tocqueville's 1835 critique, Democracy in America?
If you want to wrestle with someone making a much better form of the argument you (understandably) thought was in the article, check it out: https://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/DETOC/ch4_06.htm
Honestly, you and Tocqueville are saying something very similar at the core. A polite society has a known exploit: not behaving politely. The exploit is used by those seeking to amass power and influence.
The result, he posits:
> It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
It isn't very hard though to find plenty of people acting out those behaviors, both in their own behavior and in the perception/description of the behavior of their in-group members. Adults in 2022 can be conceptualized as being a lot like children "playing house", except we lack a physical frame of reference representing superior competence and wisdom to humble us, as adults provide for children.
I mean, the ability to go to war, together with being a father, has always been considered as the maximum level of adulthood for men, as far as I understand.
And to be clear, I’m not even say that latest generations are “less adult”, ie “less aggressive”, because they are somehow “better”.
In my view, this is a direct consequence of the fact that in the current society, aggressiveness is simply a less effective strategy, on average.
Civilization is too complex now, and there are simply too many people around, for aggressive war-like behaviour to be succesful. Even the most hypercompetitive youth today, say in startups or such, are usually extremely diplomatic persons, that are able to navigate people.
“We are all children” because there is simply no more room to be aggressive!
This is the part I think we all need to be talking about more. It’s a huge root cause of everything else the article discusses.
I have come to understand adulthood as being centered on responsibilities, and adult behaviour as handling those responsibilities well. The transition to adulthood is the gradual accumulation of responsibilities, and the cultivation of adult behaviour is the process of learning to handle them.
Living with parents is a barrier to that progression. It defers basic responsibilities like funding your own food and shelter. It makes relationships harder to start, and having children of your own seems out of reach.
Now, there are other sources of responsibility that are attainable while living in mom’s basement. You can still go out to work. You can still have a responsibility to a cause. And maybe the reason you are still at home is to care for your parents. But for a great many people, seemingly including the article author, living at home is a source of shame - a failure to launch.
I can see two ways forward here. Either we manage to address the economic issues that make independent living unaffordable. Or we rediscover multigenerational households as a virtue. There are many advantages to having grandparents, parents and children all together as a unit. If we can destigmatize living with parents, perhaps we can stop treating it as a waiting room for responsibility, and unblock progress towards adulthood.
Personally, I blame/credit the internet. Internet culture is perpetually stuck in the 16-25 range and I'm "terminally online".
However, I think it's also important to distinguish between a facade of seriousness and actual maturity. I know many older (boomer) adults who, while acting "adult", are manipulative, self-centered, or constantly stirring up drama. Basically, not able to manage their own emotional states. I'll take an emotionally balanced 40 year old cosplayer over that any day and would argue that the cosplayer is more mature despite outward appearances.
i think this is the key. not just internet culture, but culture in general. older generations had to start working in that age range and were generally expected to stop behaving like children. but over the years, the need to work as a teen reduced and childhood got more protected and prolonged. the age range at which we are expected to stop acting like children gradually rose.
i am not saying that we take longer to mature. but that maturity looks different, and allows for more seemingly child-like behavior.
then there is a concept that i believe that the personality that we develop in our late teens and young adult years is the personality we generally keep for the rest of our lives.
so if our young adult years are playful, then we will continue to remain playful.
it's not internet culture that's the cause here, but simply that the internet generation coincides with the time that our society gained the ability to give our children more freedom from economic pressures.
add to that as we get older we gain more autonomy and the financial ability to spend on things of interest, and suddenly it makes sense why we have people in their 30s and 40s or even 50s enjoying computer games, cosplay, being a furry, or build models from lego bricks. it's all about the ability to enjoy what we did enjoy in our childhood and youth.
and those adults that are playing now will continue to play and so the age at which we see this playfulness is going to go up
I don't think you have one without the other, personally.
I do improv on the weekends. Sometimes I produce music. Edgy, electronic stuff. I like to dance and do strange, funny gestures and voices with my kid. Its a riot when my nephews and nieces are over.
I like to dress up in bright, colorful clothes. I work from home and see no point in even pretending to look serious. Lately, I’ve grown my hair out and even had a failed attempt at a proper long rip van winkle beard.
Maybe this isn’t what adults are supposed to act like. This is certainly not what my dad acted like when he was my age.
But who the hell cares?
It seems a lot of people believe the need to be responsible is inseparable from looking like you fit into a narrow definition of what is perceived as responsible.
But maybe I am just observing the result of living your life being concerned about how you look in general and not specifically about adult-ness.
These days, you can do your own thing, and people are generally cool with that as long as you don't bother them with your hobbies. There's less judging, less expectations to fit the norm, and more self-expression in a lot of "modern" behaviour.
Certain people in the older generation seem to lament this; "back in my day, we didn't play dress up and go to conventions" and other such nonsense. I don't know if it's inability to let other people have fun or envy of the freedoms (young) adults have these days, but it feels like the main focus of their complaint seems all about how modern things weren't considered proper and right back when they were young, rather than provide some reason why people shouldn't do what they do for fun.
Another change is the internet: my dad didn't have the internet when he was young so many hobbies he developed were based on social activities (sports and such) and collecting (records, CDs, etc.); you were very unlikely to run into someone who was as much into painting tiny figurines as you are online.
I also think childhood media plays a role: kids' shows have moved away from random violence towards a more constructive, positive role. The message of "just be yourself and you can do anything you want" that children's media repeated has seeped into kids of yesteryear, just like many shows about accepting people for who they are and being kind to another is changing the way kids act these days. Compare that to the old magazines from the 50s and 60s where children were told how to prepare for adulthood, how to be a good husband/wife, it was all so dang militaristic!
None of this is universal, of course; there are always people who will oppose the mainstream, who will do their own thing, or who will cling to old, outdated norms. However, you can find many discussions online about how kids are more caring towards each other than before, and you can find many news articles about "millenials" doing all kinds of things "wrong", written by angry old people who failed to keep up with the world.
Your last sentence is exactly right: who the hell cares? That's what makes the millennials different from the generation before it, and I'm sure their grandchildren will bring their own unique twist to society!
A person can take being an "adult" too far, however. They can say that anything that doesn't help you earn money is a waste of time, that anything creative is also a waste of time, and chase status and money. Maybe many of these people got burned at some point for being childish (e.g. they were criticized by a manager or partner and made to feel shame), which explains the behavior.
It depends on your goals, but a nice moderate view is to discard with the labels, and aim to be responsible and have self-control, while also being curious and open to creative pursuits. It's also great to enjoy whatever media you like without caring about what others think (whether it's obscure or mainstream).
I know a few "NEETs" in my life that are "manchildren" and few of them are happy, and I know a few workaholics that also feel miserable. The thing is, success does indeed make people happy, and so does free time. To feel satisfied one must find work that feels somewhat meaningful, or at least shows some kind of success, and have enough time to enjoy life itself.
TL;DR: too much of anything is a bad thing. Being a manchild or a workaholic is equally bad. Find a balance between fun and work.
I think there are also substantial geopolitical forces in play. Consider the hippie movement in the 60s as an example: yes it's true that there was no shortage of silliness and plain dumb ideas, but there were also a lot of genuinely enlightened ideas. But letting those bloom and spread at that point in time (considering what was going on geopolitically) could have had genuinely disastrous results. But then at the same time, if it hadn't been snuffed out the very opposite could have also occurred, in which case we might now be living in a much better world than the one we ended up with.
They don't have enough perceived capital to start a family, hence why so many give up and spend it.
And in several countries, saving was a net negative on one's ability to purchase a home unless you lived immensely frugal. For several years, potentially still ongoing.
I read that growing up means finding yourself in circumstances where there are often no other "adults in the room," but you can step up and take the responsibility to manage any uncertainty.
Ice cream and pizza taste better than salad. If you let them, children will always pick them. Adults know that doing that all the time will actually make them sick and miserable, so they start making choices that are less pleasant in the immediate term because they want to optimize value for the long-term.
Sure, some things are bullshit even in the long-term, but most of the things that seem "boring," like doing the laundry and paying the taxes and making the meal plans, are actually ordered toward optimizing happiness on a much larger scale than children have the life experience to see.
[1]https://robkhenderson.substack.com/p/i-have-yet-to-hear-a-sa...
If I had to pick two things that have led to adults acting like children, it would be:
- the lack of any real “coming of age” ritual in Western culture. The closest we get is going to college, which has developed into something deliberately removed from adult reality
- the slow removal of cultural rules that indicated a space was to be taken seriously. For example, wearing a suit and caring about your appearance, not using swear words in public, keeping details of your private life to yourself, and so on.
I read somewhere that memes are the artform of the contemporary Zeitgeist, which makes a ton of sense to me. Memes are funny but ultimately just easy, fast-food-style culture. They would not be the predominant art form in a society capable of building something more complex, spiritual, and long-term, like a medieval cathedral or an Italian Renaissance sculpture.
There are a million causes and effects one could talk about here, supporting all manner of ideologies, and of course I've got my own. But that people are increasingly preoccupied with meaningless, child-like consumption, of fun over joy, is actually a problem.
I say this as a big nerd who likes games and comics and so forth, which I think is where some of the defensiveness comes in. I don't think the problem is located in liking comics. It's in making comics your identity. It's adopting the identity of a fan, a consumer, of making that your outward image, that makes people more childish and less trustworthy, less serious, and easier to control.
Memes, the non-visual ideas kind (inaccurate generalizations, "fact"oids, figures of speech, cognitive norms if you don't mind stretching the definition a bit, etc) play a huge role in human communication, but this is so fundamental that it seems to be sub-perceptual and thus evades our attention and consideration.
https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/aut...
Which is true of all empires. You don't get to run the world - at least the parts you can access - by having empathy for the people you're exploiting and abusing.
One of the popular forms of gaslighting is labelling empathy and concern "childish", "unrealistic", and "unserious."
Neoteny - "also called juvenilization,[5] is the delaying or slowing of the physiological, or somatic, development of an organism, typically an animal. Neoteny is found in modern humans compared to other primates."
> Neoteny is seen in domesticated animals such as dogs and mice.[25] This is because there are more resources available, less competition for those resources, and with the lowered competition the animals expend less energy obtaining those resources. This allows them to mature and reproduce more quickly than their wild counterparts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny
The point of being human is to change the environment to permit a more relaxed and enjoyable life.
What we call "adulthood" is the adjustment to a harsh reality, but that reality is not immutable. Science and technology (developed by our "neotenous" brains) gives us the leverage to literally remake the world in our image.
I like to think of the inner child in mathematical terms: if I am 40 years old, then it also holds true that I am 6, 10, 16, and 21. At all times, I carry with me the memories (with implicit feelings and attitudes) from each of those distinct years. The person I am today consists of those years strung together.
It’s no wonder things like Pokemon and CRTs intrigue me. Six year old me likes them too, and he never left.
We got to a point where we can get away with the majority of our population being self-centered and living, at least part of their time, in a fantasy world as en escape from getting their life in order.
As the article claims it can be "nourishing", but nourishing for what. If you need parents, builders, engineers, philosiphers it won't make that out of them.
(im aware at least a bunch of the people who engage in this behaviour are actually contributing massively and this is their way of blowing off steam)
I've stopped going to see movies since the Superhero Wave began — which means for like the past decade or more. I have to go back to earlier eras in film to find what I would call "adult" films (at the risk of enraging a number of people).
Hey, I love LEGO, like building plastic models of space ships, all of that. But I like some vegetables in my diet as well.
Pre-world-wide-web-in-your-pocket, what were your options when you needed a break from your regular life? There were definitely unhealthy ones, like drinking to excess, but even that often took place around other people, and it wasn't as easily available as doomscrolling. It's not half as easy to pull out your flask when you're on the train or in an elevator or standing in line at Chipotle for more than 3 minutes and become uncomfortable.
We're the first generation that never has to stand still and be uncomfortable, basically ever. If something is emotionally difficult, we can run from it.
Maybe this stunts us. Maybe it keeps us from gaining the perspective that the discomfort normally either resolves on its own, relatively quickly and in a positive way (i.e., the line quickly leads to lunch), or it inspires action, which might lead us to prove our own efficacy to ourselves when we realize we can do something to address the situation rather than just running away.
Adulthood is characterized by having the perspective that enables us to do unpleasant things in the short-term for the sake of long-term benefits. But if we continue not to need to face even the mild tedium of standing in a line without distraction, how are we ever going to convince ourselves of the benefits of doing anything we don't immediately want to do?
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-008-x/2007004/10311-e...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/extended-adolesce...
"Seriousness" or calcified melancholy?
I’m not sure how much Latin and Church play into things (I did both growing up and it’s not much to write home about) but I think the decreasing opportunities for a rich life have more to do with the systematic de-skilling of the professional and academic middle class. Society can not countenance regular individuals with that much leverage and influence so it does everything in its power to reduce engineers, teachers, etc to cogs in a machine
If you were to ask a pre-modern human to group a chicken, a crow, a stick, and a tree. They might group the chicken and the stick together because they would use the stick to kill the chicken and make a meal. Whereas a modern human would most likely group the chicken and crow, and the stick and tree together.
The tendency to think abstractly has exploded over the last hundred years or so, and it has fundamentally changed how we see and react to the world. A great explanation of this comes from the Ted-talk of James Flynn.
So bad for him for missing out on the adult experience - that said, who’s who to tell you how to behave ?
Nobody asked to be born - we all just showed up, be yourself and try to get through this life as best you can without hurting others
Maybe modern adults just suffer small enough amount of scarring that their actual child selves are still recognizable under that when compared to older generations.
Coincidentally, it is this time, at this moment in history, that the author of this article is starting to get old.
People are stressed, wages lower than we deserve and no sign of changing, competition is now global with benefits going to a fraction of society, economic news which just gets darker.
I don't blame people for regressing and "lying flat".
My escape is watching people fishing and diving on deserted Indonesian islands on YT.
Then I remember I have to cover my kid's £100 per day nursery and private school fees..... I need a heavy blanket.
1) The article specifically mentions emoji.
2) Emoticons and emoji are extremely related concepts and emoticons influenced the development of emoji.
3) Neither emoji nor emoticons were invented or popularized by women AFAICT.
Pointing out that they are not the same thing doesn't mean that emoji or emoticons were invented by women or for women, which is what the article basically said outright.
My original point was: if the article gets silly things like "emoji are feminine" completely wrong, why can I trust the other things it says?
It wasn't intended to, it was intended to correct your assertion that emojis were first used by American men, apparently on the basis of having glanced at the result of a Google search. The article itself never claims women invented emoji, nor that they are specifically feminine. It does claim that Japanese women were, by virtue of Japanese culture allowing them to follow 'childish' trends more so than their male peers, a predominant force in the shaping of kawaii culture and the adoption of emoji, making their usage more associated with feminine than masculine behavior.
It's honestly weird that you're so hung up on this.
It does, it is included in a paragraph about things that women created/popularized.
> It's honestly weird that you're so hung up on this.
Yeah I'll admit that. I was thinking about it when writing my comment. I think I have seen too many 'just-so' stories about Japan and become hypersensitive to them.
Whether this qualifies for being worth it is largely (but not necessarily entirely) a subjective matter.
This is false, because I have not actually done any such thing (it is not contained in my text, or the ideas behind my text). In fact, what physically/objectively occurred is that I explicitly did the opposite: "I think it's worth considering whether...").
I might respond by saying that you are engaging in rhetoric:
Rhetoric: language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content.
...but then, this would be to assume conscious (and perhaps nefarious) intent.
Rather, I suspect most likely what is happening is that you are (or, something is) engaging in perception.
Perception: a way of regarding, understanding, or interpreting something; a mental impression.
What do you think about this perspective?
Your conclusion is that I should consider whether I am being childish in claiming that it is childish for someone to support Trump. When I asked you why you would think this you said that it is because it would increase the likelihood of my perception being aligned with reality. So you are starting with the assumption that my perception is not aligned with reality and then concluding that I should reconsider it. So your premise is that I am wrong and therefore you conclude that I should reconsider. That is what it means to beg the question.
Well, unless you have a direct connection of some sort with God / The Oracle / The Universe, I suspect that you are in the same boat as the rest of us: an instance of consciousness that runs on the brain, whose access to "reality" is via your senses, and subject to some substantial subset of the various imperfections that science/psychology have documented over the years.
> Your conclusion is that I should consider whether I am being childish in claiming that it is childish for someone to support Trump.
More precisely, I said: "I think it's worth considering...."
> When I asked you why you would think this you said that it is because it would increase the likelihood of my perception being aligned with reality.
More precisely, I said: "A motivation would be to increase the likelihood....".
I also noted: "which is what Trump supporters are often criticized for", because of the potentially delicious irony (in that you were criticizing the cognitive capabilities of Trump supporters, yet when someone dares to challenge you, you deny any flaw, confidently, and respond with objectively inaccurate counter-accusations).
I also noted: "Whether this qualifies for being worth it is largely (but not necessarily entirely) a subjective matter."
From my perspective, you are describing what has happened as if I am making confident statements of fact, whereas the actual text I have written (shared/documented reality) demonstrates otherwise....which I think lends credence to the possibility that your take on reality is not actually perfect.
> So you are starting with the assumption that my perception is not aligned with reality and then concluding that I should reconsider it. So your premise is that I am wrong and therefore you conclude that I should reconsider. That is what it means to beg the question.
But only if one's premises are correct! (Yours are not.)
Further, marvel at how many unforced (I speculate) errors you've made - for extra effect: consider what percentage of the things you've said contain error.
I think it is interesting how dynamic people's interest is in a topic, and how this interest level can be deliberately altered by their counterpart in a conversation by speaking in very specific forms.
I also believe this phenomenon is relevant to the broader discussions in this thread.
Things are different, they always are.
The parts I see actually worthy of concern of childishness are disregard for how things work and what it takes to achieve them. Relatedly there is a third issue of dependence but it has too many other non-attitude causes. These are my own admitted biases.
Childishness is a rather useless conflation of all. Humans are childish compared to great apes. Curiosity and tinkering are also childish but they have brought us the furthest forward.