Twenty-six

Older daughter turned that age yesterday. Today, the first day of the rest of her life, is full of promise. The rest, Susan Neiman quite rightly insists, is best.

"Having failed to create societies that our young want to grow into, we idealize the stages of youth. Watching the wide-eyed excitement with which babies face every piece of the world, we envy their openness and naivety, while forgetting the fear and frustration that accompany every bit of progress, from standing upright to drawing a stick-figure. The most pernicious bit of idealization is the very widespread view that the best time of one’s life is the decade between sixteen and twenty-six, when young men’s muscles and young women’s skin are at their most blooming. That’s due to hormones, and evolutionary biologists will explain that it happens for a reason. But your goal is not to maximize reproduction, whatever may be said of your genes. By describing what is usually the hardest time of one’s life as the best one, we make that time harder for those who are going through it. (If I’m torn and frightened now, what can I expect of the times of my life that, they all tell me, will only get worse?) And that is the point. By describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect – and demand – very little from it. Few things show this better than the progressive transformation of the Peter Pan story. In the original novel, grown-ups are simply dull: Mr Darling’s knowledge is confined to stocks and shares; his only passion is being exactly like his neighbours. By the mid-twentieth century the character is slightly menacing, an authoritarian who could become a tyrant so easily that the same actor could play father and pirate. By the end of the twentieth century, the grown-up had become ridiculous. In Hook, Steven Spielberg’s disturbing twist on the story, Peter Banning is an object of contempt. Grown-ups are still boring and rigid, but they are now so pitiful that teenagers are right to mock them. The variations on the story reflect the decline of the image of adulthood itself. At the beginning of the twentieth century, growing up looked merely dreary; by the end it looked positively pathetic. This book will discuss the ways in which our understanding of the way the world is, and the way it should be, are furthered – and hindered – by different kinds of experience. It will argue that being grown-up is itself an ideal: one that is rarely achieved in its entirety, but all the more worth striving for."

Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age" by Susan Neiman: https://a.co/iDa2pvg