The Space We Mature InGrowing up I had a lot of anger in me. In my combination of top-performing pupil and anti-establishmentarian surfie rebel I intuitively sensed that the world was independent of me and ran by invisible forces I would never be able to impact upon or control, no matter what. It made me mad in a way that only the young can get mad in and it led to an insouciant attitude that challenged all forms of authority that must have driven my teachers (and later my tutors) crazy.
At the back of my mind, back then, I felt that maybe by the time I was an adult I would have some things figured out. The anger that drove me would have resolved itself in a clear awareness of my place in the world, my capacity for self-destruction blunted by my clear sense of purpose. I’m not quite there yet and maybe, precious few of us are.
Arrested development
http://goo.gl/8Dc2cy presents itself in many different ways. From a tendency to act up (
http://goo.gl/lc7Woq) and simply escape anything that challenges us:
http://goo.gl/8SePBX to a sense of immaturity that puts “me first” at almost every critical junction:
http://goo.gl/ck9fwn.
Our obsession with youth culture (
http://goo.gl/sDjye7) may have as much to do with technology as the deeper underlying causes of deferred responsibility (
http://goo.gl/Z1cT2f). In a world where things happen way too fast to be certain of anything maybe adulthood in the sense of certitude and authority are the sacrifices we must make which is what Scott argued recently in
The New York Times:
http://goo.gl/5dYD5b.
It’s a complex subject. One perhaps that takes our journey in the world and tries, through the power of personal narrative, to give it some meaning that adds that all necessary requirement to it: purpose (
http://goo.gl/vHnHxk). We need to feel that everything we do is part of a grander design with ourselves in the starring role in order to feel comfortable with our choices.
The very fact that we need to use fiction to examine if we are becoming less or more responsible in our attitudes argues that perhaps, at a certain level, we are not. We are caught forever in the amber liquid of our stereotypical responses, thrown back at us (and reinforced) by every cultural artifact we care to examine:
http://goo.gl/uz4fns. So, as the world gets smaller, our tech gets faster and our knowledge expands, our willingness to be ‘adult’ in whatever sense we think that might be, wanes.
Scott’s piece prompted a media outrage:
http://goo.gl/5nJosv. A thousand keyboards were recruited to the task of adequately addressing its challenge which argues, I suppose, that the subject is well within our thought horizons. Our minds are thinking about the implications, questing for the answers that will at least show us how we stack up on the ‘adulthood scale’.
We need to figure some things out. The problem with ‘growing up’ is that the rules have changed. Even when I was a teen there were clearly defined demarcation lines between the way I thought and behaved and how the ‘grown ups’ did. There was a clearly defined order of concerns grouped by subject and prescriptive behavioral modalities. ‘Baby talk’, for example, was not a grown up pursuit. That it is now, giving rise to long-term sociolinguistic implications (
http://goo.gl/YwRlRg) is perhaps the clearest sign yet that the world of the past is well and truly behind us, its ability to guide us through the future woefully inadequate at best, totally confusing and contradictory at worst.
The challenges are massive. Whilst we are participating in a global free speech experiment (
http://goo.gl/gJAazz) we are also falling prey to the ability of social media to amplify the worst aspects of our nature and legitimize them under the herd mentality:
http://goo.gl/Xs277e. We can, in short, become the baying mob, the mindless crowd, behaving in ways that are not only immature but which display some of the worst characteristics of
The Lord of the Flies (
http://goo.gl/j2Rf) syndrome. Our ‘island’ a screen and an internet connection. The web a place where we are away from adult supervision.
There are worrying signals that we are not yet quite at the stage where we can think everything through as Microsoft CEO’s very public (and arguably inexcusable) faux pas will suggest:
http://goo.gl/TLDcnf. ‘Growing up’ is not the same as growing old. It has to do with the ability to understand what is happening, to see the trends (
http://goo.gl/gDo86E) and work to change them.
So now we’re back to that initial chestnut: changing the world. The questions here are simple: can we do it? Will it be for the better? Will our actions help us find a place in it? Connectivity is not going away. Neither is transparency. We will only see more and more connections being made and have increased accountability on the web. As digital becomes an integrated part of life its ability to amplify what we think, what we do and how we do it, invests each of us with a power that we have never ever had before. With power comes responsibility. We may never grow up to the point that we can pontificate like our fathers did, speaking what we now know was nonsense with a sense of utter confidence. And that may be a good thing. Because while we retain our sense of quest and our anger and desire to not accept things as they are, remain intact, our ability to actually so something about it all, grows.
‘Trapped’ on our own little island we will come to realise that the ‘adults’ are never coming to save us. That we have to work out new rules for a new order. That in that order all of us matter equally and that we have to make this construct work. The adults in our past may have had a sense of authority without maturity. The way for us may lie in developing maturity without the self-delusionary sense of authority. In the global playground, we may have to learn to forever adapt and evolve. Work, collectively, together in order to progress.
Kinda heavy reading this weekend so I hope you have done the adult thing and supplied yourself with fountains of coffee and mountains of donuts, cookies, croissants and even some cake. We’re living in a world that demands a lot from us, all the time. It’s important to be able to take small pleasures where we can find them. Have an awesome Sunday wherever you may be.
#davidamerlandsundayread
