“Grow up!”
It’s a common phrase people use all the time. It’s intended to shame someone into conformity by suggesting that behaviour or an idea is immature.
Implicit in the phrase is a judgement about what is adult, mature and respectable, and what is ill-thought-through. I think it’s a bad thing to say at any time; you should be able to explain why something is bad rather than using veiled insults. Being childish is not always such a terrible thing, and wise people often return to ideas they foolishly discarded. Let’s ponder some examples.
When I was a child, everything was about the long-term. I hid money in my piggy bank and rarely took it out. I spent almost nothing on immediate treats such as sweets, expecting far more return on my limited resources (I did run a thriving sweet trading business at school which paid sweets as drawings until I was cruelly shut down by foolish teachers).
As a student, I didn’t go running with the running club because I couldn’t afford to miss dinner in college and buy another replacement meal every week.
As an adult, I burned through an injury compensation payment to afford to rent close to work until I started earning more money, and eventually I got a mortgage to afford a house. I regret neither decision.
People conventionally say that short-term hedonism is childish, but I think that many children are far more thoughtful about the future than adults are. Adults are the ones still denying climate change in an attempt to fight actions that would curb it. Young people are looking to the future. Adults are caught up in the moment, with everyday cares. Children, partly because they are freer from immediate problems, can plan ahead.
We conventionally say that enjoying silly things is childish. Adults have more dignity and can’t lose themselves in the moment. This form of happiness implies a lack of awareness of other people; of how they might respond and how you appear to them. Fully-developed sentient beings have enough self-control not to be carried away.
I was pretty much an adult, under this definition, by 7 years old. And yet now that I am older and wiser I know that other people’s judgements should not control my behaviour; I am fully aware of how I might hinder or hurt other people’s lives, but scornful of their judgements about me enjoying my own. I have less need for social approval now I’m an independent adult free from the barbarity of the classroom, but I also have the wisdom to recognise that my own enjoyment in life is no-one else’s legitimate business.
I will coo over a lovely dog to the embarrassment of everyone except the dog and me, who both love it. I will smile happily at a tweeting bird, and I have even, gradually, learned to appreciate the beauty of flowers. It’s not that I don’t have self-control; I just choose to exercise it less and less every year.
It is childish to be amazed by nice things. It’s also a mark of great wisdom. Simple, nice things are the best we can hope for from life. Unselfconscious excitement should be replaced with deliberately unrestrained excitement, not with mild happiness. It’s a lesson I fully understand, but a life of self-control is a hard habit to break. I’m not there yet.
I do the same thing with those immediate joys I forswore as a child: chocolates, cake, nice drinks. I will gorge myself fully on what is available. Chocolate will mysteriously disappear in my presence. As will champagne. It’s not that I am mindless of the consequences. I know that after 500g of chocolate I will lose interest and feel a hunger for something savoury. I know that a few bottles of champagne will get me a little tipsy. It is worth it. Small pleasures add up: I love these things and see no need to hold back to conform to everyone else’s lifestyles or diets. I do enough exercise to burn off a champagne party every week, if only I could find one.
It's childish to make foolish decisions guided only by whims. It’s also not fully mature to let social pressure or expectations control you. Other people looking on disapprovingly as I demolish the chocolate cake they refused to taste fills me with glee, not guilt.
I’ve been told to grow up in relationships. My first ever girlfriend, in a horrically abusive relationship, loved to dismiss my expectations and desires as boyish and immature. What she wanted was adult; I should aspire to the same thing. If she wanted no privacy and invasive interdependence, this was mature, and independent interests and activities were a childish lack of commitment.
We see throughout modern media in teeny novels, children’s films and even adult productions that one approach to relationships is valued above all others. K, evil though she was, was merely a tiny bit more extreme than what is shown to be reasonable and normal in much of modern art.
“I can’t live without you” sounds romantic to most people. It ought to be a red flag of immaturity: a dangerous signal of unrealistic and unsustainable dependence, more like a drug addiction than a relationship of mutual respect. Should I grow up if I am unable to commit to such a degree? Or should you all grow up and develop a more sane notion of romance? Feel free to discuss that with me, but the implicit, unjustified assumption that anyone who doesn’t want or do as you do is immature is disgustingly arrogant – and, in its lack of awareness of other people, rather childish!
Another popular ‘grow up’ is in politics. It’s a popular line for Conservatives, who like to imagine themselves as the level-headed people who understand the realities of life and that the left-wingers are childish do-gooders who think that everything will be great if we’re just nice to people.
That delusion is so foolish that it would struggle to be as respectable as something childish. From the magic money tree of rational Labour policies that turned into Conservatives throwing money away, through to Conservative ideologies that think that unenforced rules on powerful entities and wealthy individuals will yield good results because of course people are naturally good and will fall over themselves to do as we intend, all the way to salami-slicing 40% off government department budgets and claiming that such drastic budget cuts will result only in greater efficiency and that even more comprehensive services can be delivered, it’s clear that the realities of life do not penetrate into Conservative messaging.
A mature approach to regulation is to acknowledge that rules are necessary. Take the rules away from chess and you have a fist fight. Take the rules away from the market and you have no market. The bonfire of regulations should appeal only to children whose only thought of regulation is being forced to tidy their toys away. Adults know that regulations keep the gas and electricity flowing, keep the house safe, would ideally keep the night quiet, keep the dinner safe and healthy… etc. ad infinitum.
Regulations are the social contract: every law imposes a duty on someone and protects or serves everyone else. If you hate regulation, it’s because you resent someone else being protected from you. Adults don’t want Lego in their feet; therefore children must be tidy.
I started life as a Conservative, influenced by my father who sold me this childish lie about Conservative rationality. But the more I read about the world, the more I realised that the right-wing, and especially the UK’s version of it, is entirely immature. Who voted for Brexit on the basis of a lie on a bus and three-word slogans about sovereignty? What a whimsical, childish way to make a momentous national decision! Trust us, have some faith, take the leap, stop being a moaning ninny… It was the Liberal Democrats who looked at the detail, tried to discuss evidence and forecasts, and who have been proven completely right.
Perhaps, just perhaps, whimsical indulgence is a reasonable thing for a stable adult’s personal life, but not when doing anything that might affect other people. And yet ‘grow up’ seems to be flung at me to imply the opposite: that I must make a leap of faith and follow the herd in public or shared concerns, but be uptight in private.
I would like children, in an abstract way. I can look at the costs and downsides and know that I will be sleep-deprived with no social life for the all-too-few remaining years of my healthy life and decide that I do not want children. It’s not a childish shirking of responsibility. I have no responsibility to have children, and anyone who thinks I do should probably stop worshipping a fictional sky fairy and grow up. It’s a mature approach to life-changing decision-making – that will also affect other lives.
I want a reasonable salary for a reasonable day’s work. It would take me longer than humans have existed to earn, on my above-average salary, as much as my company’s owners own. Should I ‘grow up’ and ignore such gross inequality? Should I buckle down, as many wealthy people including these same owners tell the population, and work my way up? Is that more adult than taking a moment to ponder the instinctive revulsion and envy I feel at such inequality, and realising that inequality is entirely unjust, and that’s why it makes me feel so bad? Millions of people ‘buckling down’ in exchange for the hope of becoming one of the mega-rich is exactly what keeps them so rich, as they get to pay people in dreams rather than cash.
I was a socially awkward child, made far worse by the bullying I experienced all through childhood. It’s hard to reach out to people when life has taught you that your hand will get bitten – and that people will celebrate the bite for months afterwards.
We were late adopters of technology and I didn’t do much texting. I grew up talking to people and arranging to meet in person again or relying on chance meetings to catch up.
Should I just ‘grow up’ when someone wants incessant digital contact to prove a friendship or relationship exists? Or should the rest of the world grow out of unreasonable demands on other people, and learn to accept each person as they are?
It’s likely that even if you disagree with many of my approaches to life you can still think of ways in which you’d prefer not to be told to ‘grow up’. It’s a dismissive phrase that only ever implies the speaker’s superiority without ever demonstrating why. It demands conformity with a worldview without even elaborating that worldview; it just applies social pressure and no rational argument. That’s just like school bullies. People who use it should grow up.
