6 ms·

Are grownups just giant kids?

31 points by thm 2y ago

HeuristicsCG 2y ago
No, young kids are sociopaths. they do not yet have well developed faculties of empathy. They will kick you in the head one second and ask for a sandwich the next.
- madcaptenor 2y ago
  and then insist they never asked for the sandwich, and then say they're hungry.
- tombert 2y ago
  I've certainly experienced that, but I've also seen a fair bit of kindness from very young children as well. For example, a few years ago, one of my nieces, when she was four, got a bunch of candy for some reason, and desperately tried to give everyone a few pieces. She wasn't asked to share, she just decided that she'd give everyone a bit of candy, and as far as I can tell it was purely just to be nice. That said, kids are often sociopaths, I was definitely a little shit when I was a kid.
- taeric 2y ago
  Have you seen most adults? I thought it was generally held that empathy is a learned facility. Not just the ability to feel empathy, but who and what you feel empathy towards.
  - HeuristicsCG 2y ago
    no, it's hardware. this is why sociopaths exist, they lack it
    - taeric 2y ago
      I thought that was psychopath? Regardless on terms, the thought for them was that they were unable to learn empathy. That does not mean that others get it automatically. You only need to look at how we treat animals to see examples of learning empathy.
- perigrin 2y ago
  I've been an engineering manager, I'm not sure that argument is as strong as you want it to be.
- csa 2y ago
  > They will kick you in the head one second and ask for a sandwich the next. As long as this example is taken figuratively, I think it makes a better case for “yes” for many/most people. I pretty regularly see people shit on others and then expect favors —especially in work contexts, but also in social contexts.
  - HeuristicsCG 2y ago
    I mean it literally. 3 year olds literally do not have the brain development required for empathy and will literally kick you in the head one moment and ask you for a sandwich the next
- channel_t 2y ago
  Sounds like a lot of the adults in my world lol, although there is more subtlety in the ways that they will kick you in the head and ask for a sandwich.
  - HeuristicsCG 2y ago
    move somewhere else
- ramoz 2y ago
  Adults do comparable things to each other all the time. I think many (probably most) adults miss the life experiences needed to really grow up, become self aware, open approach to learn, etc.
- carabiner 2y ago
  I do that as an adult.
  - ranger_danger 2y ago
    Have you thought about not doing that?
- LinuxBender 2y ago
  I am certainly not an expert in this area so this is just observational anecdotes but I suspect environment and parental input is a big factor. When I was in California in bigger cities I would agree with what you said for the vast majority of kids/teens I have interacted with. When I moved to Wyoming in a very rural area my opinion changed significantly. The kids for the most part that were born and raised here have empathy and are very polite especially to adults. Just as one example a large group of teens blocked each other from ordering from the deli and made me go in front of them. I had never seen anything like that before and that was just one example, there are many more.
  - HeuristicsCG 2y ago
    3 year olds literally do not have the brain development for it
- throaway2501 2y ago
  [flagged]
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  A sociopath might hurt some one and not care. A child(well, until a certain age) hasn't made the connection that flinging their leg around and hitting someone can hurt them and thats bad. So, it's different. It would probably be more correct to say children are more akin to mentally retarded adults than sociopaths.
- skyechurch 2y ago
  My experience is the opposite - kids have a natural sense of fairness, which is of course heavily bent by self interest. Assuming you yourself are not transparently full of sh_t, you can usually get them to appreciate your position if you can explain it to them on their level. Adults, having the advantage of decades to cultivate our twisted bonsai tree neuroses, can be literally impossible.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Some of this can last into adulthood—a common problem for small business owners and contractors is charging too little, because they know their costs and time and what a fair price seems like it should be. They have to have that innate child’s sense of fairness trained out of them. The notion that “what the market will bear” is fair rather than (often) screwing people over is something that has to be taught, more often than not, from what I’ve observed.
  - HeuristicsCG 2y ago
    it's just biological fact, it takes time for the brain to build the areas of empathy
- vkou 2y ago
  Adults behave this way all the time.
  - goatlover 2y ago
    Adults commit assault all the time? I've never had anyone kick me in the head.
    - vkou 2y ago
      No, they generally outsource inflicting suffering to a third party. One of my inlaws, for instance, sees no issue in themselves using a bathroom inappropriate for their gender, and also in having trans people imprisoned for doing the same. Many people feel that rules do not bind them, but are a great weapon for beating other people with. It's a core pillar of their political philosophy.
- talldayo 2y ago
  There's something richly ironic about calling your former self a sociopath. It's like a line you'd hear in a Mel Brooks movie.
  - throaway2501 2y ago
    [flagged]
falcrist 2y ago
If you define being a kid as "the ability to express emotions and enjoy playing", then yes. I feel like that's a terrible definition, though.
- OmarShehata 2y ago
  I think the important point that isn't yet well accepted in our culture is that maturity doesn't happen automatically with age. There are extremely competent, mature, and smart 14 year olds, and there are 29 year olds who haven't emotionally matured yet. Education is slowly shifting towards "mastery learning" (instead of just taking a test and moving on, you keep practicing a thing until you get better). This is clearly the superior approach and how people learn things anyway (this is how people pick up skills on the job). We will hopefully see a similar shift in maturity, and accept that someone people get very far in life without necessary skills, remove the shame, and help people level up
  - nradov 2y ago
    Mastery learning works great for some subjects but not as well for subjects best learned in groups. If you put 14 year olds and 29 year olds together in the same class then that's likely to be problematic. We can't really state that any one pedagogical is "superior"; the data doesn't support that.
ocschwar 2y ago
If you want to know the answer, read "The Disappearance of Childhood" by Neal Postman.
JPKab 2y ago
Anyone with kids knows the immediate answer to this is no. Depending on how jaded you are with the adults you interact with on a daily basis, you may think otherwise, but a fully developed pre-frontal cortex is a big differentiator.
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  Give a laser to a kid and to an adult and then measure the time between them receiving the laser, and them going blind. The delta between the two measurements is what a fully developed brain does for a person.
  - tombert 2y ago
    I hear this all the time, but I actually am a walking counterexample. I had a laser pointer when I was eight years old, my parents made it pretty clear not to point it into my eyes or anyone else's, and I managed to not blind anyone.
    - leptons 2y ago
      I was gifted a powerful blue laser pointer from a laser enthusiast friend of mine, when I was in my 40s. It was powerful enough to light things on fire. It was far too dangerous. If that thing reflected off anything and hit my eye, I'd be at least partially blind. I also lived near an airport, so if it got pointed towards the sky, I'd be asking for trouble. I gave the laser pointer back to my friend. I kind of doubt the laser pointer you had was capable of blinding anyone, most laser pointers years ago were very low power. I just bought a couple hundred red diode lasers (around 5mw, or less) and they won't blind anyone. But today there are also extremely powerful laser pointers available to anyone that will blind someone in an instant.
      - tombert 2y ago
        Yeah, I have one of those things too, and they're terrifying. I wear special goggles when I use it to pop balloons or light matches. That's fair enough, this was a pretty typical "office" laser pointer you could buy in the late 90s, not terribly bright.
nextworddev 2y ago
Most adults die without achieving individuation
pkoird 2y ago
I should think so. I forget the source but I seem to have once heard (to my satisfaction) that all global diplomatic maneuvers can essentially be explained in terms of kids playing in a playground.
- munificent 2y ago
  Conversely, all kids playing in a playground can be seen as rehearsals for later global diplomatic maneuvers.
bell-cot 2y ago
There's the old saying that everyone is, at most, a toddler inside. But the older ones have fancier filters (between their impulses and actions) and usually better language skills.
prophesi 2y ago
I think there's enough evidence that psychologically our personality becomes tied to a certain age, for some it might be the peak of your time in highschool, others college, and we stick with it despite the cognitive dissonance from aging. It wouldn't necessarily be a stagnation of maturity, but simply how we perceive ourselves as lessons learned in adulthood merge and compound with your idealized younger self.
tombert 2y ago
I think part of it comes down to how you define "grown up". When I was 19, I felt like I was 19. I'm not entirely sure how to explain it, but that's just how I felt, I felt like I was the appropriate age. When I was 20, I still felt 19. When I was 21, 22, 23... etc, I still feel 19, and now I'm almost 34 and a small part of me is still kind of convinced that I'm 19 years old, despite my desk job, mortgage, and rapidly thinning hairline. I didn't really feel like I got a lot of my shit together until I was about 25-26 though. I think a lot of things changed, but the most obvious thing from my perspective is that I got a lot better about managing my personal finances, saving money, and making sure things were paid on time. I think drawing a firm dichotomy between "kid" and "adult" is a malformed premise.
- adamc 2y ago
  When my mother was in her early 70s, she told me that she still felt 17 inside. She said you always do, you just learn to behave in a way that doesn't elicit negative commentary. Aging is largely a role we learn to adopt. I'm not dismissing that we do gain some experience. But our emotions don't change that much.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Yeah, I have no idea how much of this is hormonal vs genetics vs environmental vs anything else, but I know that 19 is when I became a lot more empathetic [1], a trait I still keep up now. I'm sure I've learned and developed my emotions since then but I think 19 year old me was the beginning of my "current" personality, if that makes sense.
- Clubber 2y ago
  I'm the same except my "feel" age is 23. That's the last year of college before I started working. Did you have a significant life change at 19, like starting work, join military, anything like that?
  - tombert 2y ago
    I started college at 19, so that might be it. I dropped out at 21 and started working desk jobs after that, so you'd think that that would be it, but no, I "feel" 19.
vundercind 2y ago
Yes, except that they’ve mostly learned to not act drunk except when they are in fact drunk. Otherwise, yes. I just figured realizing that (and, not unrelatedly, that at least 95% of people in prestigious and powerful positions, in society, business, or politics, are a lot less remarkably-capable than one might expect… or hope… and are surprisingly often outright idiots) was a common experience for those who’ve been “adults” for a while. The whole thing, top to bottom, is mostly large kids doing dumb shit with things they present as understanding but super don’t. It’s a big fuckin’ game of play-pretend that actually kills people pretty often.
- wat10000 2y ago
  A lot of things make much more sense (with some accompanying loss of hope) when you realize that humanity is about as dumb as it’s possible for a species to be and still develop a sophisticated technological civilization. We’re right on the ragged edge of what our species’ biology allows. This follows from the simple fact that evolution happens on much longer timelines than human history. We’re pretty much the same animals as we were before the invention of agriculture. Once we had enough brain, we almost instantly went from flint arrowheads to inventing computers and hydrogen bombs and mortgage-backed securities. Of course we’re just barely mentally hanging on trying to handle all of it.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    I think this is where you get a lot of stuff about how actually some dumb shit a rich or powerful person keeps doing must be part of some master plan, or working toward some purpose we don't know about. [EDIT] Where you get people coming up with this is their resistance to accepting that the folks with all the power mostly aren't terribly exceptional in the ways one might expect or hope, I mean. "Surely that's not how the world works... right? There has to be another explanation." Maybe, but most of the time they're just a hell of a lot dumber than one might suppose. And maybe a bit mentally ill. And, even odds, have a drug problem ("Winners don't do drugs" and "cheaters never prosper"—grand lies of our childhoods, both are hilariously false)
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throw4847285 2y ago
> Seeing people this way can be condescending, but also gentle: it nods to the basic psychological needs that often drive our behavior. I think the author is on to something. We are far less willing to ascribe psychological motivations to other adults than we are to children. People are happy to say that a child is "shy" or "jealous" or "grumpy because they are hungry." It's possible that the construction of adult identity means hiding one's psychological motivations from others, and we learn this from the shame of having adults reduce our needs and desires to something other than our own self-narrative. This is understandable, but maybe we should be learning the opposite lesson. Every human is a psychological being, and it's actually easier to be empathetic when you're aware of your own motivators and look from them in others.
- nfgrep 2y ago
  This. I’ve learned that being brutally honest with myself and others regarding what I’m feeling and why has been super helpful. It _does_ run the risk of sounding childish, but thus far I’ve found the open vulnerability more rewarding than punishing. Identifying when I’m irritable, I’ll say “I’m grumpy, I’m gonna suck to be around, sorry”. Or when the real reason why I don’t want to do something is just because “I’m feeling shy”, etc. Its hard to break the whole “men should be stoic” expectation but I’ve found people are remarkably understanding when you’re honest about why you’re feeling what you’re feeling.
  - throw4847285 2y ago
    It is very telling that the only vocabulary that many people (especially men) have to talk about their feelings is childish. As children, parents or other caregivers demand that we express ourselves but they also set the constraints for what valid expression is. Those constraints might be something as simple yet ultimately toxic as, "I care about how you feel, unless it makes my life more complicated, in which case shut up." Or my favorite (for personal reasons), "Tell me how you feel but if you say anything other than that you're content I'll panic and start flailing." Kids learn soon enough what the real boundaries of their emotional life are. As a little boy, I was told that it was weak to cry if I lost a Karate match but as long as I lied and said it was because I got punched really hard, it was OK. I'm not sure what the ultimate goal is of this kind of socially engineered lack of self-awareness, but it doesn't seem to be working. At least not for me.
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abeppu 2y ago
> It's possible to adopt “adults are just giant kids” as a lens through which to see other people. A work colleague is unreasonably angry at being left off an e-mail chain—but don’t playmates always hate being left out? An elderly relative refuses assistance—but doesn’t every child insist, “I can do it myself”? Seeing people this way can be condescending, but also gentle: it nods to the basic psychological needs that often drive our behavior. It's interesting that we're more willing to be understanding of adult misbehavior if we start by infantilizing them. Yes, we're predisposed to expect behavior issues with kids without blame, and perhaps to attribute behavior to circumstantial causes (he's cranky because he's tired) rather than stable traits (he's a jerk). But ordinarily we also think of empathy as stemming from relating others mental states to our own experiences. Shouldn't we as adults have a better ability to empathize with adults as adults whose mental lives are more like our own, than by imagining them as kids?
munificent 2y ago
I think the experience of getting older is becoming a superset of all of your past selves, not replacing them with newer versions. I'm in my 40s, and I have thoughts and feelings that my in my 30s wouldn't relate to or understand. I have a sensation of time and patience that would be alienating to my younger self. Time feels frighteningly finite in ways it never did before. But I also still fully remember what it was like to be in my 30s, that heady mixture of feeling like I'd blossomed into a certain level of competence and maturity while still feeling like I was in the full flush of health and with most of my life ahead of me. That 30-something me is still inside me, alive today. And I'm still the 20-something me, excited to get out of the house and experience new things, reckless enough to want to do things to excess because I hadn't experienced that many consequences yet, still romanticizing romance itself. And so on. We never stop being our previous selves, we just invite more new selves into that growing collection.
wjamesg 2y ago
Having kids certainly helps one to mature and grow into a new perspective
dfxm12 2y ago
In the words of Martin Gore, people are people. ...or maybe get the balance right.
nataliste 2y ago
I'd argue that adulthood was fundamentally altered by the time of the baby boomers. A sizable proportion of grownups became giant kids, not because adulthood has always been like that, but that a portion of baby boomers (and the generations that came afterwards) refused to implement what has historically been considered to be the hallmarks of what it meant to be an adult. David Hoffman's "Making Sense of the Sixties"^1 does a great job at elucidating the implicit rules that existed: >1. Respect authority figures: Children were taught to respect authority figures such as parents, teachers, and law enforcement officers. >2. Practice good manners: Kids were expected to say "please" and "thank you," hold doors open for others, and wait their turn to speak. >3. Dress appropriately: Children were expected to dress neatly and modestly, and to follow specific dress codes in certain situations such as church or school. >4. Behave appropriately: Kids were expected to behave appropriately in public and avoid drawing attention to themselves, especially in formal settings such as weddings or funerals. >5. Uphold traditional gender roles: Boys were expected to be tough, independent, and interested in sports, while girls were expected to be nurturing, feminine, and interested in domestic activities such as cooking and cleaning. >6. Be polite to elders: Children were taught to address adults as "sir" or "ma'am" and to show respect for their elders. >7. Value hard work: Children were taught the value of hard work and perseverance, and to take pride in a job well done. >8. Respect privacy: Kids were taught to respect others' privacy and personal space, and to keep their own belongings and personal information private. Regardless of how people think about the usefulness or malignity of this rule set, they're meant to create adults in the traditional sense. The falling away from them I don't think was so much of a personal or intentional choice, but an unconscious consequence from the destabilization that resulted from many factors but primarily the development of mass youth culture as distinct and orthogonal to traditional culture. "You can't trust anyone over 30" was really a canary in the coal mine for adulthood in retrospect. --- 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljihhFggHTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljihhFggHTI
karmakaze 2y ago
Yes.. and no? There's a few distinguishing characteristics. One is the dating-mating process, which will resolve one way or another. Besides (or because of) that we have responsibilities that we take on and spend less time doing what we may otherwise like. I know that I consciously plan periods of time for hobbies, side-projects, or just 'wasting time' on video games etc--but it's not even my available free time (as there's no free energy/mental capacity at times). There was (a TED talk or something) I watched that was basically said that if we treat adults as we do children, but at the same time treat them with respect, we'll all just learn to understand and work/play together better. (I think it had some sort of simple color stick-graphics depicting people and their motivations.)
thepuppet33r 2y ago
"This body is built on the ruins of all the people I have ever been." - The Simplest Words by The Narcissist Cookbook. Grownups aren't just big kids, but we're standing on the rubble of who we were back then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgUWdougUF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgUWdougUF8

31 points by thm 2y ago

No, young kids are sociopaths. they do not yet have well developed faculties of empathy. They will kick you in the head one second and ask for a sandwich the next.

madcaptenor 2y ago
and then insist they never asked for the sandwich, and then say they're hungry.
tombert 2y ago
I've certainly experienced that, but I've also seen a fair bit of kindness from very young children as well. For example, a few years ago, one of my nieces, when she was four, got a bunch of candy for some reason, and desperately tried to give everyone a few pieces. She wasn't asked to share, she just decided that she'd give everyone a bit of candy, and as far as I can tell it was purely just to be nice. That said, kids are often sociopaths, I was definitely a little shit when I was a kid.
taeric 2y ago
Have you seen most adults? I thought it was generally held that empathy is a learned facility. Not just the ability to feel empathy, but who and what you feel empathy towards.
- HeuristicsCG 2y ago
  no, it's hardware. this is why sociopaths exist, they lack it
  - taeric 2y ago
    I thought that was psychopath? Regardless on terms, the thought for them was that they were unable to learn empathy. That does not mean that others get it automatically. You only need to look at how we treat animals to see examples of learning empathy.
perigrin 2y ago
I've been an engineering manager, I'm not sure that argument is as strong as you want it to be.
csa 2y ago
> They will kick you in the head one second and ask for a sandwich the next. As long as this example is taken figuratively, I think it makes a better case for “yes” for many/most people. I pretty regularly see people shit on others and then expect favors —especially in work contexts, but also in social contexts.
- HeuristicsCG 2y ago
  I mean it literally. 3 year olds literally do not have the brain development required for empathy and will literally kick you in the head one moment and ask you for a sandwich the next
channel_t 2y ago
Sounds like a lot of the adults in my world lol, although there is more subtlety in the ways that they will kick you in the head and ask for a sandwich.
- HeuristicsCG 2y ago
  move somewhere else
ramoz 2y ago
Adults do comparable things to each other all the time. I think many (probably most) adults miss the life experiences needed to really grow up, become self aware, open approach to learn, etc.
carabiner 2y ago
I do that as an adult.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  Have you thought about not doing that?
LinuxBender 2y ago
I am certainly not an expert in this area so this is just observational anecdotes but I suspect environment and parental input is a big factor. When I was in California in bigger cities I would agree with what you said for the vast majority of kids/teens I have interacted with. When I moved to Wyoming in a very rural area my opinion changed significantly. The kids for the most part that were born and raised here have empathy and are very polite especially to adults. Just as one example a large group of teens blocked each other from ordering from the deli and made me go in front of them. I had never seen anything like that before and that was just one example, there are many more.
- HeuristicsCG 2y ago
  3 year olds literally do not have the brain development for it
throaway2501 2y ago
[flagged]
IncreasePosts 2y ago
A sociopath might hurt some one and not care. A child(well, until a certain age) hasn't made the connection that flinging their leg around and hitting someone can hurt them and thats bad. So, it's different. It would probably be more correct to say children are more akin to mentally retarded adults than sociopaths.
skyechurch 2y ago
My experience is the opposite - kids have a natural sense of fairness, which is of course heavily bent by self interest. Assuming you yourself are not transparently full of sh_t, you can usually get them to appreciate your position if you can explain it to them on their level. Adults, having the advantage of decades to cultivate our twisted bonsai tree neuroses, can be literally impossible.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Some of this can last into adulthood—a common problem for small business owners and contractors is charging too little, because they know their costs and time and what a fair price seems like it should be. They have to have that innate child’s sense of fairness trained out of them. The notion that “what the market will bear” is fair rather than (often) screwing people over is something that has to be taught, more often than not, from what I’ve observed.
- HeuristicsCG 2y ago
  it's just biological fact, it takes time for the brain to build the areas of empathy
vkou 2y ago
Adults behave this way all the time.
- goatlover 2y ago
  Adults commit assault all the time? I've never had anyone kick me in the head.
  - vkou 2y ago
    No, they generally outsource inflicting suffering to a third party. One of my inlaws, for instance, sees no issue in themselves using a bathroom inappropriate for their gender, and also in having trans people imprisoned for doing the same. Many people feel that rules do not bind them, but are a great weapon for beating other people with. It's a core pillar of their political philosophy.
talldayo 2y ago
There's something richly ironic about calling your former self a sociopath. It's like a line you'd hear in a Mel Brooks movie.
- throaway2501 2y ago
  [flagged]

falcrist 2y ago

If you define being a kid as "the ability to express emotions and enjoy playing", then yes. I feel like that's a terrible definition, though.

OmarShehata 2y ago
I think the important point that isn't yet well accepted in our culture is that maturity doesn't happen automatically with age. There are extremely competent, mature, and smart 14 year olds, and there are 29 year olds who haven't emotionally matured yet. Education is slowly shifting towards "mastery learning" (instead of just taking a test and moving on, you keep practicing a thing until you get better). This is clearly the superior approach and how people learn things anyway (this is how people pick up skills on the job). We will hopefully see a similar shift in maturity, and accept that someone people get very far in life without necessary skills, remove the shame, and help people level up
- nradov 2y ago
  Mastery learning works great for some subjects but not as well for subjects best learned in groups. If you put 14 year olds and 29 year olds together in the same class then that's likely to be problematic. We can't really state that any one pedagogical is "superior"; the data doesn't support that.

ocschwar 2y ago

If you want to know the answer, read "The Disappearance of Childhood" by Neal Postman.

JPKab 2y ago

Anyone with kids knows the immediate answer to this is no. Depending on how jaded you are with the adults you interact with on a daily basis, you may think otherwise, but a fully developed pre-frontal cortex is a big differentiator.

InsideOutSanta 2y ago
Give a laser to a kid and to an adult and then measure the time between them receiving the laser, and them going blind. The delta between the two measurements is what a fully developed brain does for a person.
- tombert 2y ago
  I hear this all the time, but I actually am a walking counterexample. I had a laser pointer when I was eight years old, my parents made it pretty clear not to point it into my eyes or anyone else's, and I managed to not blind anyone.
  - leptons 2y ago
    I was gifted a powerful blue laser pointer from a laser enthusiast friend of mine, when I was in my 40s. It was powerful enough to light things on fire. It was far too dangerous. If that thing reflected off anything and hit my eye, I'd be at least partially blind. I also lived near an airport, so if it got pointed towards the sky, I'd be asking for trouble. I gave the laser pointer back to my friend. I kind of doubt the laser pointer you had was capable of blinding anyone, most laser pointers years ago were very low power. I just bought a couple hundred red diode lasers (around 5mw, or less) and they won't blind anyone. But today there are also extremely powerful laser pointers available to anyone that will blind someone in an instant.
    - tombert 2y ago
      Yeah, I have one of those things too, and they're terrifying. I wear special goggles when I use it to pop balloons or light matches. That's fair enough, this was a pretty typical "office" laser pointer you could buy in the late 90s, not terribly bright.

nextworddev 2y ago

Most adults die without achieving individuation

pkoird 2y ago

I should think so. I forget the source but I seem to have once heard (to my satisfaction) that all global diplomatic maneuvers can essentially be explained in terms of kids playing in a playground.

munificent 2y ago
Conversely, all kids playing in a playground can be seen as rehearsals for later global diplomatic maneuvers.

bell-cot 2y ago

There's the old saying that everyone is, at most, a toddler inside. But the older ones have fancier filters (between their impulses and actions) and usually better language skills.

prophesi 2y ago

I think there's enough evidence that psychologically our personality becomes tied to a certain age, for some it might be the peak of your time in highschool, others college, and we stick with it despite the cognitive dissonance from aging. It wouldn't necessarily be a stagnation of maturity, but simply how we perceive ourselves as lessons learned in adulthood merge and compound with your idealized younger self.

tombert 2y ago

I think part of it comes down to how you define "grown up". When I was 19, I felt like I was 19. I'm not entirely sure how to explain it, but that's just how I felt, I felt like I was the appropriate age. When I was 20, I still felt 19. When I was 21, 22, 23... etc, I still feel 19, and now I'm almost 34 and a small part of me is still kind of convinced that I'm 19 years old, despite my desk job, mortgage, and rapidly thinning hairline. I didn't really feel like I got a lot of my shit together until I was about 25-26 though. I think a lot of things changed, but the most obvious thing from my perspective is that I got a lot better about managing my personal finances, saving money, and making sure things were paid on time. I think drawing a firm dichotomy between "kid" and "adult" is a malformed premise.

adamc 2y ago
When my mother was in her early 70s, she told me that she still felt 17 inside. She said you always do, you just learn to behave in a way that doesn't elicit negative commentary. Aging is largely a role we learn to adopt. I'm not dismissing that we do gain some experience. But our emotions don't change that much.
- tombert 2y ago
  Yeah, I have no idea how much of this is hormonal vs genetics vs environmental vs anything else, but I know that 19 is when I became a lot more empathetic [1], a trait I still keep up now. I'm sure I've learned and developed my emotions since then but I think 19 year old me was the beginning of my "current" personality, if that makes sense.
Clubber 2y ago
I'm the same except my "feel" age is 23. That's the last year of college before I started working. Did you have a significant life change at 19, like starting work, join military, anything like that?
- tombert 2y ago
  I started college at 19, so that might be it. I dropped out at 21 and started working desk jobs after that, so you'd think that that would be it, but no, I "feel" 19.

vundercind 2y ago

Yes, except that they’ve mostly learned to not act drunk except when they are in fact drunk. Otherwise, yes. I just figured realizing that (and, not unrelatedly, that at least 95% of people in prestigious and powerful positions, in society, business, or politics, are a lot less remarkably-capable than one might expect… or hope… and are surprisingly often outright idiots) was a common experience for those who’ve been “adults” for a while. The whole thing, top to bottom, is mostly large kids doing dumb shit with things they present as understanding but super don’t. It’s a big fuckin’ game of play-pretend that actually kills people pretty often.

wat10000 2y ago
A lot of things make much more sense (with some accompanying loss of hope) when you realize that humanity is about as dumb as it’s possible for a species to be and still develop a sophisticated technological civilization. We’re right on the ragged edge of what our species’ biology allows. This follows from the simple fact that evolution happens on much longer timelines than human history. We’re pretty much the same animals as we were before the invention of agriculture. Once we had enough brain, we almost instantly went from flint arrowheads to inventing computers and hydrogen bombs and mortgage-backed securities. Of course we’re just barely mentally hanging on trying to handle all of it.
- vundercind 2y ago
  I think this is where you get a lot of stuff about how actually some dumb shit a rich or powerful person keeps doing must be part of some master plan, or working toward some purpose we don't know about. [EDIT] Where you get people coming up with this is their resistance to accepting that the folks with all the power mostly aren't terribly exceptional in the ways one might expect or hope, I mean. "Surely that's not how the world works... right? There has to be another explanation." Maybe, but most of the time they're just a hell of a lot dumber than one might suppose. And maybe a bit mentally ill. And, even odds, have a drug problem ("Winners don't do drugs" and "cheaters never prosper"—grand lies of our childhoods, both are hilariously false)

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throw4847285 2y ago

> Seeing people this way can be condescending, but also gentle: it nods to the basic psychological needs that often drive our behavior. I think the author is on to something. We are far less willing to ascribe psychological motivations to other adults than we are to children. People are happy to say that a child is "shy" or "jealous" or "grumpy because they are hungry." It's possible that the construction of adult identity means hiding one's psychological motivations from others, and we learn this from the shame of having adults reduce our needs and desires to something other than our own self-narrative. This is understandable, but maybe we should be learning the opposite lesson. Every human is a psychological being, and it's actually easier to be empathetic when you're aware of your own motivators and look from them in others.

nfgrep 2y ago
This. I’ve learned that being brutally honest with myself and others regarding what I’m feeling and why has been super helpful. It _does_ run the risk of sounding childish, but thus far I’ve found the open vulnerability more rewarding than punishing. Identifying when I’m irritable, I’ll say “I’m grumpy, I’m gonna suck to be around, sorry”. Or when the real reason why I don’t want to do something is just because “I’m feeling shy”, etc. Its hard to break the whole “men should be stoic” expectation but I’ve found people are remarkably understanding when you’re honest about why you’re feeling what you’re feeling.
- throw4847285 2y ago
  It is very telling that the only vocabulary that many people (especially men) have to talk about their feelings is childish. As children, parents or other caregivers demand that we express ourselves but they also set the constraints for what valid expression is. Those constraints might be something as simple yet ultimately toxic as, "I care about how you feel, unless it makes my life more complicated, in which case shut up." Or my favorite (for personal reasons), "Tell me how you feel but if you say anything other than that you're content I'll panic and start flailing." Kids learn soon enough what the real boundaries of their emotional life are. As a little boy, I was told that it was weak to cry if I lost a Karate match but as long as I lied and said it was because I got punched really hard, it was OK. I'm not sure what the ultimate goal is of this kind of socially engineered lack of self-awareness, but it doesn't seem to be working. At least not for me.

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abeppu 2y ago

> It's possible to adopt “adults are just giant kids” as a lens through which to see other people. A work colleague is unreasonably angry at being left off an e-mail chain—but don’t playmates always hate being left out? An elderly relative refuses assistance—but doesn’t every child insist, “I can do it myself”? Seeing people this way can be condescending, but also gentle: it nods to the basic psychological needs that often drive our behavior. It's interesting that we're more willing to be understanding of adult misbehavior if we start by infantilizing them. Yes, we're predisposed to expect behavior issues with kids without blame, and perhaps to attribute behavior to circumstantial causes (he's cranky because he's tired) rather than stable traits (he's a jerk). But ordinarily we also think of empathy as stemming from relating others mental states to our own experiences. Shouldn't we as adults have a better ability to empathize with adults as adults whose mental lives are more like our own, than by imagining them as kids?

munificent 2y ago

I think the experience of getting older is becoming a superset of all of your past selves, not replacing them with newer versions. I'm in my 40s, and I have thoughts and feelings that my in my 30s wouldn't relate to or understand. I have a sensation of time and patience that would be alienating to my younger self. Time feels frighteningly finite in ways it never did before. But I also still fully remember what it was like to be in my 30s, that heady mixture of feeling like I'd blossomed into a certain level of competence and maturity while still feeling like I was in the full flush of health and with most of my life ahead of me. That 30-something me is still inside me, alive today. And I'm still the 20-something me, excited to get out of the house and experience new things, reckless enough to want to do things to excess because I hadn't experienced that many consequences yet, still romanticizing romance itself. And so on. We never stop being our previous selves, we just invite more new selves into that growing collection.

wjamesg 2y ago

Having kids certainly helps one to mature and grow into a new perspective

dfxm12 2y ago

In the words of Martin Gore, people are people. ...or maybe get the balance right.

nataliste 2y ago

I'd argue that adulthood was fundamentally altered by the time of the baby boomers. A sizable proportion of grownups became giant kids, not because adulthood has always been like that, but that a portion of baby boomers (and the generations that came afterwards) refused to implement what has historically been considered to be the hallmarks of what it meant to be an adult. David Hoffman's "Making Sense of the Sixties"^1 does a great job at elucidating the implicit rules that existed: >1. Respect authority figures: Children were taught to respect authority figures such as parents, teachers, and law enforcement officers. >2. Practice good manners: Kids were expected to say "please" and "thank you," hold doors open for others, and wait their turn to speak. >3. Dress appropriately: Children were expected to dress neatly and modestly, and to follow specific dress codes in certain situations such as church or school. >4. Behave appropriately: Kids were expected to behave appropriately in public and avoid drawing attention to themselves, especially in formal settings such as weddings or funerals. >5. Uphold traditional gender roles: Boys were expected to be tough, independent, and interested in sports, while girls were expected to be nurturing, feminine, and interested in domestic activities such as cooking and cleaning. >6. Be polite to elders: Children were taught to address adults as "sir" or "ma'am" and to show respect for their elders. >7. Value hard work: Children were taught the value of hard work and perseverance, and to take pride in a job well done. >8. Respect privacy: Kids were taught to respect others' privacy and personal space, and to keep their own belongings and personal information private. Regardless of how people think about the usefulness or malignity of this rule set, they're meant to create adults in the traditional sense. The falling away from them I don't think was so much of a personal or intentional choice, but an unconscious consequence from the destabilization that resulted from many factors but primarily the development of mass youth culture as distinct and orthogonal to traditional culture. "You can't trust anyone over 30" was really a canary in the coal mine for adulthood in retrospect. --- 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljihhFggHTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljihhFggHTI

karmakaze 2y ago

Yes.. and no? There's a few distinguishing characteristics. One is the dating-mating process, which will resolve one way or another. Besides (or because of) that we have responsibilities that we take on and spend less time doing what we may otherwise like. I know that I consciously plan periods of time for hobbies, side-projects, or just 'wasting time' on video games etc--but it's not even my available free time (as there's no free energy/mental capacity at times). There was (a TED talk or something) I watched that was basically said that if we treat adults as we do children, but at the same time treat them with respect, we'll all just learn to understand and work/play together better. (I think it had some sort of simple color stick-graphics depicting people and their motivations.)

thepuppet33r 2y ago

"This body is built on the ruins of all the people I have ever been." - The Simplest Words by The Narcissist Cookbook. Grownups aren't just big kids, but we're standing on the rubble of who we were back then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgUWdougUF8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgUWdougUF8