Grow up or be wise

 

“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.

Perceiving emotion clearly: does it happen to us or is it us happening?

 

My team at work has been told that the age of working from home is over and that we must now work our full working weeks in the office. The company’s owners believe that anyone working from home is not working, despite the evidence of the last two years. They do take most of their work meetings from home themselves, despite living less than five minutes from the central London office.

Our managers tried to reconcile us to this announcement by telling us that we would soon become accustomed to the daily grind of commuting. This folksy wisdom struck a bum note with us, as I discussed afterwards with one of my colleagues.

One way in which it was such a poor argument was that it didn’t address the problem: it simply promised us happiness (or rather, that the unhappiness would fade). Like opium, religion or wild-eyed, overenthusiastic, reality-denying self-help mantras this ‘advice’ tried to address our emotions directly.

In our conversation afterwards we ended up discussing this, and I confided to my colleague that I don’t drink, eat or game to make myself feel better. I do these things because they feel good, but not because there is some sort of immediate deficit to make good. I don’t do things to correct a mood. I think that that way of approaching life is fundamentally flawed.

 

A few days later I ended up in a(nother) argument with my sister, who was angry when I mentioned that the prospect of commuting to the office was looming over me. She thought that I was focussing on the negative, making a mountain out of a molehill and wallowing in misery. I mentioned my boss’ ‘advice’, and she thought it reasonable. We are creatures of emotion, she seemed to think, and we shouldn’t ignore or distance ourselves from that. If the direct emotional impact will be small, because we adapt to situations we find ourselves in, why would I ignore that fact and 'choose' to be upset about something that will not end up displeasing me that much?

Amongst the multitude of answers I wanted to give but couldn’t because I didn’t want to anger her even more is to refer this real-life situation back to the concept of higher values. Is mere hedonism all there is in life, or are there other, more important things? Because the truth is that working from home is far more convenient for all of my team, barely hinders productivity at all (and if only for the part of the week, not at all) and that coming to the office is merely the owners’ unjustifiable whim. If humans adapt, why can he not adapt to the truth and find that actually having us work from home is not so bad? Truth matters to me. Things are right or wrong, and things that are wrong rankle. This doesn’t stop: I don’t just forget that things are not true. I do have other things to do in life apart from ponder all the untruths out there, but every so often I’m forced to face one, or it pops into my mind. And the more there are, the more this happens.

Should I abandon the core part of my being and chase the latest pleasure, never caring about truth or justice? Should I give up on fulfilment, the peak of Maslow’s pyramid of needs, and accept that drugs, or their equivalent, are fine? Is it nobler to ignore the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and suffer them? Am I homo sapiens, or homo sentiens?

Apparently there is a therapist who persuaded my sister to abandon the idea that emotions are outside influences and to embrace her emotions as a core part of her being. I’m at a bit of a loss to understand what this really means, but it seems to be in opposition to what I think is true:

Emotions come with experiences. When I see the road outside, I see grey tarmac and paving stones. When I look at a pretty face it feels good. When I stop looking at the road I no longer see grey, although I can remember the experience and the view. When I stop looking at a pretty face the good feeling stops, although I can remember the experience and the view. When I remember my mother, I can remember great times, but it is always tainted by the immeasurable sorrow that she is dead. When I’m not remembering my mother, that sorrow fades away again.

If someone were to tell me not to see grey when I look outside, we would all laugh. The grey is there, even though lush green valleys are a better view. The same applies to the emotional impact of being commanded not to work from home. It is a bad thing, even though perceiving good things is more fun. I am devoted to seeing the truth in such things; it matters to me. It makes me fulfilled beyond the everyday hedonism of spirits, chocolate and computer games.

Where other people adapt to good and bad fortune, I remember whether things are good or bad. It is something I am proud of, and aspire to maintain. I like seeing the truth of things. I work at it. Tell me about cognitive biases and every time you will find that I have been overcoming such errors all my life. I am sadly familiar with them; my commitment to truth is not a bias to be abandoned in favour of wallowing in hedonism and accepting my animal nature. I avoid immediately-pleasing emotional bias in favour of fulfilment.

Other people in my situation might have other priorities: they might care about the fact that my company’s owners work from home themselves, and own far more than the brightest poor person could hope to earn in a lifetime. They might care about the liberty of choosing for themselves how to live parts of their life irrelevant to the work they have promised to perform. They might care about the extreme lack of goodwill that demands things from workers despite their obvious objections. All these points carry weight with me.

This is how we should think. The world would be better if people didn’t adapt to unpleasantness; if we carried the knowledge of wrongness inside us. Instead evil or thoughtless people continue to commit unpleasantness and outright crime unchallenged, and the rest of us muddle along, adapting to a world that other people shape. And we therefore indirectly shape it too, implicitly supporting anything that is wrong in life.

 

Death is horrific, but we just accept it until we, too, die. Climate change will destroy the world as we know it, but we just muddle along. Inequality is a disgrace, but we survive and ignore it. People who speak up are shouted down for disturbing our frail peace of mind: something that campaigners about sexism, racism and similar injustices have railed against for decades. Keep quiet and accept a problem, or speak up and be called a problem for being so negative and nasty.

My personal issues are hardly on the same scale (although they are mini-examples of wider issues in the world), but the principle is the same. If you hate someone in your life talking openly about their problems and you’d rather life were just a happy sequence of fun times, then you might be a hedonist. That’s your choice, although many people seduced by hedonism later find that they’re not as happy as they hoped. But other people don’t have to be hedonists too. Fulfilment comes from confronting what is wrong in life, no matter how powerful it is.

It's better to fight tyranny. Stand up and be counted.

The mind is its own place and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. It doesn’t matter if the outside world is awful, as long as you are content with yourself. And the way to be content with yourself is not to pretend that bad things are not bad: it is to acknowledge them, to see them for what they really are. There is no virtue in delusion. You will fail: you will get things wrong and make mistakes. We are all only human, and mistakes are inevitable. We must forgive our mistakes, but only if we’re actively trying our best not to make them.

Commuting is awful and will always be so. This does not mean that life is not worth living. It is because I have not given up on life that I confront and acknowledge unpleasantness. Some day, when I’m old and tired, I’ll forget the problems of the world. When I chase emotion instead of reality you know I've ceased to care. My spirit will be gone, and soon after, my body. But that day isn’t here yet.