3 ms·

Because childhood is spent waiting to become an adult. Everything is forward looking with the desire to get to experience the next big thing, which gives the im

Because childhood is spent waiting to become an adult. Everything is forward looking with the desire to get to experience the next big thing, which gives the impression of a long wait. In the micro you can experience the same as an adult by standing in a long lineup waiting for something you want. That wait in line will feel like it takes forever. But, in the macro adults stop wanting the future to come.

em-bee 2y ago
i didn't have that feeling in my childhood at all. i feel this is a cultural problem. in some cultures children are not allowed to make their own experiences, and are told they have to wait until they are grown up. if that is your experience, you have my pity. and i want to scold your parents for denying you a happy childhood. i joined scouts and other groups as a kid, and we went hiking with a tent almost every holidays and 3-day weekends. when i was 15 i started traveling through europe on a bike alone. that's probably on the more extreme side of freedom, but i didn't have the impression that my classmates were longing to be grownup either.
- randomdata 2y ago
  Sorry to hear that your childhood had no hope for the future. Of course, adults could maintain hope! But in practice I expect you will find that the typical adult reaches a certain pinnacle of their life expectations and growing older still only seeks to, at best, maintain that state or more likely see it start to erode as the body starts to decline. Which means that the typical adult would rather time stand still or even reverse. And so it does, in some kind of twisted way, and all of a sudden you're elderly before you know it.
  - em-bee 2y ago
    you may have misunderstood what i meant. i was talking about the idea that my life as a child is bad now and i have a vain hope that life will be better in the future when i am grown up. my life was bad, and i missed out on many childhood experiences growing up, like i didn't have friends until i joined university. but i didn't know that it was bad. on the contrary i felt that eg not having friends protected from bad influences and the misbehavior i saw in my classmates. life was what it was and i had no idea it could be better. and frankly, it was for the better. i felt that i had a happy childhood. hoping for a better future would have made my actual childhood experience worse. it took me decades as an adult to even understand what i was missing and how it affected me. and the most important part, now that i understand that i can fix it and my life now is so much better than i could have even hoped for just a decade ago. i don't see how children can have a hope for a better life unless they compare their life with that of other people or worse with what they see on tv. (we didn't have a tv, and we preferred it that way), which creates a false hope because you are not those other people and your life will never be like theirs. only as an adult you can realistically understand which of the bad things in your life are in your power to fix. and in my opinion that is the time where you develop a hope for the future and start working on it. it took me decades to understand the bad things, and i have more hope for my future now than i have ever had before

em-bee 2y ago

i didn't have that feeling in my childhood at all. i feel this is a cultural problem. in some cultures children are not allowed to make their own experiences, and are told they have to wait until they are grown up. if that is your experience, you have my pity. and i want to scold your parents for denying you a happy childhood. i joined scouts and other groups as a kid, and we went hiking with a tent almost every holidays and 3-day weekends. when i was 15 i started traveling through europe on a bike alone. that's probably on the more extreme side of freedom, but i didn't have the impression that my classmates were longing to be grownup either.

randomdata 2y ago
Sorry to hear that your childhood had no hope for the future. Of course, adults could maintain hope! But in practice I expect you will find that the typical adult reaches a certain pinnacle of their life expectations and growing older still only seeks to, at best, maintain that state or more likely see it start to erode as the body starts to decline. Which means that the typical adult would rather time stand still or even reverse. And so it does, in some kind of twisted way, and all of a sudden you're elderly before you know it.
- em-bee 2y ago
  you may have misunderstood what i meant. i was talking about the idea that my life as a child is bad now and i have a vain hope that life will be better in the future when i am grown up. my life was bad, and i missed out on many childhood experiences growing up, like i didn't have friends until i joined university. but i didn't know that it was bad. on the contrary i felt that eg not having friends protected from bad influences and the misbehavior i saw in my classmates. life was what it was and i had no idea it could be better. and frankly, it was for the better. i felt that i had a happy childhood. hoping for a better future would have made my actual childhood experience worse. it took me decades as an adult to even understand what i was missing and how it affected me. and the most important part, now that i understand that i can fix it and my life now is so much better than i could have even hoped for just a decade ago. i don't see how children can have a hope for a better life unless they compare their life with that of other people or worse with what they see on tv. (we didn't have a tv, and we preferred it that way), which creates a false hope because you are not those other people and your life will never be like theirs. only as an adult you can realistically understand which of the bad things in your life are in your power to fix. and in my opinion that is the time where you develop a hope for the future and start working on it. it took me decades to understand the bad things, and i have more hope for my future now than i have ever had before