"a society that has fewer and fewer children (of its own, not imported) requires fewer and fewer adults." Good point!!
I didn't mean to say that everyone should have children, by the way. I meant to say that if and when people do have children, it behooves them to become adults.
Case in point - when Republicans in states like Texas and Florida have power, they explicitly and unapologetically gerrymander districts to their advantage. When Democratic strongholds like California and Colorado had similar powers, they delegated them to independent commissions who did make them “fair” and thus diluted their power. Part of being an adult is knowing you don’t bring a knife to a gun fight
very nice. have you ever actually used tiktok or do prefer to just imagine things in a way to help make your points? tiktok like any platform is just a collection of different ideas. some good ,some bad. like this post.
Nahhhhhh even if two things both have some good and some bad, that doesn't make them equivalent. One might have a way higher percentage of bad. Substack has some bad things but I am confident in saying that Substack is better for humanity than TikTok
now weigh in on Twitter or Facebook? what % content do we need to get a post from Freddie. id imagine most people making money on a platform would be upset if it was being shut down. maybe they come from Substack next.
Oh I think Twitter has been a HUGE negative to humanity. And Facebook is a little bit better but I would not argue hard against someone trying to shut it down for the good of the country
All shortform content is horrible, I make no defense of the brainslop on Twitter.
But shortform video is much worse, because at least you have to read a tweet. Video is just absorbed, and compared to text/image there are a variety of ways to turn it into utter mind-pulping garbage.
I guess I would agree that "not all tiktok is like that" (though I don't use tiktok, I'm sure it has many redeeming qualities; it's created by humans, and we are good at creating beauty and meaning even if most of what we create is slop).
Perhaps I'm being kind to Freddie's point here, but he seems to be talking about a recognizable type of "content" where it just washes over you, rather than engaging your mind or soul meaningfully, and that consuming primarily that content, and making our culture up of primarily that content is a very poor choice.
As a teacher, it saddens me how many of the teachers want to have the same tastes and habits as the students. You don't need to make TikToks and say "skibidi" to earn the students' respect. They actually tend to find it kinda sad and pathetic.
Love it. And people who refuse to grow up will be more likely to fall prey to their neoliberal, corporate “parents” and whatever invisible political values they insert into dominant culture.
This strikes me as exactly backwards. Adults addicted to the internet and social media definitely tend to skew towards the extremes, politically. This seems very obvious to me. The most well-rounded and grounded adults I know tend to be pragmatic when it comes to politics.
I'm a very limited social media user, but it seems that the monetization of social media is clicks, or attention. Fear, anger and cute kittens drive attention, so extremes sell. The mundane stuff of life would be boring to watch.
My experience with video games (also playing Oblivion Remastered currently as a 47 year old - I commandeered my oldest kid's Xbox while he's out doing better stuff this summer) is that I sacrifice sleep to play them intensively for a few months. Then guilt hits me like a truck and I don't play for months before picking up another game and getting obsessed with it. I saw a clip once of Joe Rogan from years ago explaining that he doesn't play video games because they are too good and they would suck his life away. We are screwed if / when virtual reality tech gets really good.
Generally I don't see playing videogames as any more or less infantile than medieval monks playing backgammon... ultimately, it's just a medium.
That said, as with books and films, most videogames are either, if non-narrative driven, inelegant, repetitious and derivative or, if narrative driven, embarassingly badly written, reflecting a worldview as crude as that of the worst Marvel movie.
So, I'm inclined to agree taste/ discrimination in cultural products, is worthwhile! XD
Even the games regarded as the all time greats are usually YA tier in terms of the writing and content. (The Last Of Us is a great example of this, excellent in many ways but saddled by YA tropes.)
The industry is slowly getting better though - I’d regard Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and Death Stranding as genuinely adult oriented AAA games with solid writing. Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t bad either if you can tolerate the D&D campiness. (I get a chuckle out of it myself.)
Sorry but I couldn't disagree more. Medium is everything. Monks didn't stay up for 24 hours straight and forget to eat because they were so engrossed in backgammon. The level of stimulation is entirely different!
To paraphrase Nick Mullen, "Nobody ever had to repeat a semester of college because they got addicted to looking at paintings"
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of interesting and worthwhile videogames out there. I just don't think comparisons to media of the past hold up at all.
What amazes me is that FdB can discern the world so clearly and acutely, and write it so, yet continue to subscribe (if I have read him correctly) to a more or less doctrinaire Marxism with its faith that other political and economic arrangements, other humans ruling, or rather that there is another type of human that can rule, would result in a more distributively and ethically just society. And FdB seems militant in that faith. Yet the juvenility he so vividly and accurately describes is precisely what continues to give us Bernie Sanders, Mamdani, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, the "Squad," Occupy Wall Street, MacArthur Park and all the rest. A shrinking pool of real adults is left to maintain actual reality -- the social and economic conditions (e.g., continuous electric power) in which the eternal children can continue to watch their cartoons, eat their cereal, play their videogames and rant on the Internet about "late stage capitalism" or whatever trendy phrase their favorite "influencer" on TikTok or Reddit peddles. A world in which a growing number of nominal adults refuse to participate in the work of reproducing the conditions of that world, and being constantly reassured that such refusal is "change" and "progress." This is the USA today.
I wouldn't say it's the juvenility that is giving us the Sanders and OWS's of the world. I would say it's the opposite of that. Adulthood =/= status quo. The people trying to change the system are not acting like kids, they are acting like adults. I would not put everyone you listed there in the same basket by the way, some are really trying to change things and some are more performing at change. I would argue that it's the ones who apathetically surrender to the way things are, or have been, who are more acting like kids. And more to your point, the ones who think merely talking about a thing, or chanting a thing, is going to change the world - are also acting like kids.
Case in point: for the last 4 years or so, every large meeting at my place of work is begun with a land acknowledgement statement. Honestly speaking, this is done for precisely two reasons: 1) young people at the meeting think it's actually doing something tangible to help Native Americans, and 2) most older people at the meeting (mostly the ones in charge) just don't want to piss off the young people so they go along with it and act sincere about it. It's immature, and quite frankly a waste of time, to think that reminding people over and over about who was here before Europeans came to this land is going to do anything for the lives and well-being of those remaining indigenous peoples. It's simply childish to think this moves the needle on any of it. But we do it anyway, mostly because young professionals have this strange yet strong faith that it is vital to do so.
In a normal world, say 20 years ago, the adults in the room would probably not let this go on; they would simply explain the uselessness of it all, and be done with it. This relentless hollow activism takes up a huge amount of bandwidth, and boxes out a whole lot of real work that could be done. All because a lot of people (mostly young) are too immature to know better, and too large an economic demographic for other people (mostly older) to reprimand.
I would suggest that most of the younger people don't really believe land acknowledgements and other performative self-flagellation are *actively* doing something, so much as they believe it's maintaining a sort of mental / moral hygiene. I suspect they do believe THAT can change the world -- if they just stay pure enough, and enough people stay pure enough, that the bad things will stop.
I think that's part of it, probably most of it for the most ideological. And part of it is certainly social pressure or simple unexamined assumptions that go along with being part of a group.
Do we really need to bring Freddie's economic beliefs into this? Kind of a stretch. I don't agree with them, but I think the link you're drawing here is tenuous. As if there weren't Marxists before the modern American worship of youth.
Fair point. I was just giving vent to my perplexity that someone who can be so right on so many things of importance can be so wrong on others. Just my opinion, of course.
"Yet the juvenility he so vividly and accurately describes is precisely what continues to give us Bernie Sanders, Mamdani, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, the "Squad," Occupy Wall Street, MacArthur Park and all the rest."
I'm not sure that the people arrested at Occupy were the same ones making mentally defective TikToks, but what do I know?
I don't think they are the same people either. I know a lot of people like the ones Freddie describes here, from my childhood neighborhood... many of them went to college but were never studious.
Maturity == the capacity to assume responsibility for things. Most people never really take responsibility for themselves until it becomes a requisite for taking care of someone else -- usually their children. When my first child was born, we called him "the little Zen master" because he was there to constantly remind us, "Your personal desires no longer matter." That may feel like slavery, for a while, but it is actually the path to liberating yourself from "childish things". You shed all the pretensions and useless obsessions of youth, and are actually lighter for it. You cut your hair and wear sensible clothes. You are finally free to care about things that really matter. You bond with other people who care about things that really matter. You can still enjoy childish things -- just by proxy, through your kids. You kneel on the carpet and build Legos with your six year old.
I understand the temptation to cosplay youth. But I agree -- TikTok is the teen form of a Teletubbies, a wash of incoherent stimuli. No wonder this generation isn't reproducing -- they haven't stopped being children themselves.
You can even still enjoy childish things directly. There's nothing wrong with parents who get together and act silly for a few hours over a game of <insert your game preference here>. But I largely agree that having children tends to focus on the things that matter most.
I have nothing against silliness, either. Play is an essential need for everyone, even adults. Even the stodgiest 1950s notion of adulthood still had room for bridge night, or a weekend round of golf, or bowling leagues, or even playing board games with your family. If anything, I think our society could use _more_ of games played IRL with family, friends and neighbors. That's how we used to make our own fun, before the internet. I think what Freddie was reacting to was how much people _identify_ with the nonsense while neglecting the substantial.
Reading your comment (and Freddie's post in general) gives me a sense of FOMO. As someone who is middle aged, not married, and not had kids, I have for the last five or so years started to want children if only for the reason that I've noticed that the large majority of my friends and family who have had kids have seemingly, mostly let go of childish things. At the same time, this desire to have kids to aid in my own maturation or gain insight through novel experience seem not good reasons to have kids.
I also wonder however if these debates and binaries (parents vs. the childless) have always been part of modern life or if they too are a product of algorithmically driven polarization.
The extended childhood grants people the rights and privileges of adulthood without the duties* and responsibilities that it used to entail. Maturity is one of those duties, IMHO.
But in the end, if post-modernism emphasizes the fulfillment of the individual, then it's always going to be a hard sell to endorse parenting, where you trade immediate and very tangible deprivation and frustration for nebulous payoffs of dubious value that can't be comprehended. It's easy to understand sleep deprivation and getting pooped and peed on as losses; it's impossible to understand the joy of a 3-year old looking at a real-life Space Shuttle, the same as all the toy ones he has at home but bigger as a win!
*I have found it utterly fascinating that the concept of "duty" has been all but extinguished in our society, Probably related to this problem.
All those "abandons" end with . . . abandoning one's own children. Something rigid old 1950s culture used to disapprove of, though it happened—people (like Stephen King's father, and mothers too) just disappeared one day. It was us baby boomers who made it hip to openly break up families in pursuit of "my authentic self." Today's kids are heirs to generations of routine divorce. I'm just reading Rob Henderson's "Troubled," a memoir of growing up in the foster system. He strongly asserts that family stability is THE most important thing for kids, well ahead of wealth or education. . . .
The Millennials in my niece-and-nephew generation let adolescence last till around 30, which seems reasonable in a world with so much to learn. The women's biological clocks seemed to set the limit. By 30, they had found someone to live with for several years and found it good. They had found a direction in life. They married and started having kids. They seem determined to reconstitute that part of adulthood, at least. They seem determined to try not to divorce in the face of difficulty or outside attraction. (Those ten extra years of adolescence somewhat slaked the latter appetite.) Notably, they restrict their kids' screen time or withhold it altogether during the most formative years.
It's a real balancing act between acting your age while simultaneously not falling into the other trap, acting as if nothing young people are producing now is worthy of consideration or has artistic merit. It's bad to send the message that all the important cultural work was done years ago. It sends the rather ugly message that it's not even worth trying to produce good art, because it's all been done before anyway...no need to waste one's time.
Aging gracefully is a lot harder than I ever thought it'd be. It's okay to like the same media and art that young people do, in my book anyways, so long as that appreciation is genuine and not forced in order to not appear old.
I liked this essay, because it was something others in a similar vein aren't. A lot of essays and the like complaining about Millennial arrested development or whatever betray only the author's own insecurities; anything that seems childish much be peevishly rejected. An "adulthood" must be precisely assembled from cultural cues. Half-understood classics, photographs of old libraries and old art, modern culture and its alleged infantilism railed against with all the heat and emotion of Holden Caulfield fighting the phonies or Ignatius J. Reilly battling the degeneracy of the modern world.
But no, Freddie doesn't fall into this trap. It's really not about the particulars. It's about taste, discernment, and self-awareness in all things. If one loves (for example) children's movies, that is an opportunity to educate oneself and taking a critical eye to them. Learn the medium, what works, what doesn't, delve into its history. Perhaps there is a beautiful movie that a philistine like myself has never heard of, half-forgotten yet timeless, waiting to be shared with a new generation; I would admire one who had the ability to find and identify such a gem.
I dunno, this is true enough as it goes, but the notion of maturity undergirding the whole thing is rather superficial.
Like, lots of people have a few dumb childish hobbies and still hold down jobs, raise families, build businesses, pay taxes, think critically about morality, participate in their community, etc. Do _some_ people tilt too far to the childish? Sure. Is the childish tilt valorized by social media? Sure.
At the same time, you know, look at the cohort of extremely adult adults presently adultly adulting the nation. Good thing Stephen Miller doesn't collect Funko Pops, we'd surely be fucked then.
I agree with the narrow point you're making, but that
> many of the big social/environmental problems [don't] have much to do with people's refusal to grow up
is exactly wrong.
Perhaps the most critical element of maturity is an ability to think through actions ahead of time, *acknowledge tradeoffs*, and make choices based on long-term considerations. "If I spend all afternoon playing video games, I won't get my homework done" just doesn't occur to your average unprompted fourteen year old. Nor does, "this person is only telling me this because they want something from me that's probably not in my best interest".
Democracy depends on a critical mass of voters (and politicians) being able to override their short-term material interests, and make future-oriented decisions. To be fair, that's probably always been a plurality, rather than an absolute majority, but for the system to work that cohort's gotta set the "vibes" for the rest to follow. Now, though, I have a hard time identifying any adults in the room.
Again, this is all true enough. The problematic part is the assumption that enjoyment of middle-brow cultural products is the best indicator of immaturity.
I do have children. I agree with Matt tattoo that assuming that enjoyment of middle-brow culture indicates immaturity does not make any sense. I have noticed noticed such a correlation among myself, or any other parents I know. On the contrary, I've noticed plenty of responsible dads who enjoy dumb action movies and responsible moms who read dumb bodice-ripper romances.
Light entertainment has always been with us. The only difference is the medium that delivers it. Before people could waste their time on the internet, they could waste it watching TV programmes of dubious quality and reading the likes of the National Enquirer.
"The aging process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over, and runs off laughing." - John Mortimer.
Boy does it. I vividly remember getting old at age 45. Physically, socially, mentally...everything seemed to change overnight. It was quite jarring. One can try to put it off forever, but there will be a day it knocks you over like a mac truck.
I would agree the distinction between the last century and this one feels palpable: that more and more people seem to not want to bother with adulthood very much. And yeah, there's not nearly as much public or private stigma for "not wanting to grow up" as there was only a few decades ago. For instance my own place of work regularly uses all sorts of silly emojis in work emails, and the average age is probably around 45 or so. If I tried that crap in the 2000's my boss would have reprimanded me for being a child.
I can't help but think social media and technology have a lot to do with it, but that can't be all of it can it? Was it bad parenting? Or perhaps doom and gloom over the future of the world? And I'm asking as someone who didn't want to grow up for a long time, I don't even know why that was the case for me.
Also, if you don't even know who Addison Rae is, does that automatically make you old?
Came here to say that too. I don't want kids either.
"furbabies!"
"a society that has fewer and fewer children (of its own, not imported) requires fewer and fewer adults." Good point!!
I didn't mean to say that everyone should have children, by the way. I meant to say that if and when people do have children, it behooves them to become adults.
"Adults who refuse to be adults leave no adults to run the world. And somebody has to."
Somebody will. That power is to sociopaths what catnip is to cats.
Case in point - when Republicans in states like Texas and Florida have power, they explicitly and unapologetically gerrymander districts to their advantage. When Democratic strongholds like California and Colorado had similar powers, they delegated them to independent commissions who did make them “fair” and thus diluted their power. Part of being an adult is knowing you don’t bring a knife to a gun fight
We're going back to the era of Big People. Presidential races and pro wrestling will be indistinguishable.
They already are.
very nice. have you ever actually used tiktok or do prefer to just imagine things in a way to help make your points? tiktok like any platform is just a collection of different ideas. some good ,some bad. like this post.
Nahhhhhh even if two things both have some good and some bad, that doesn't make them equivalent. One might have a way higher percentage of bad. Substack has some bad things but I am confident in saying that Substack is better for humanity than TikTok
now weigh in on Twitter or Facebook? what % content do we need to get a post from Freddie. id imagine most people making money on a platform would be upset if it was being shut down. maybe they come from Substack next.
Oh I think Twitter has been a HUGE negative to humanity. And Facebook is a little bit better but I would not argue hard against someone trying to shut it down for the good of the country
All shortform content is horrible, I make no defense of the brainslop on Twitter.
But shortform video is much worse, because at least you have to read a tweet. Video is just absorbed, and compared to text/image there are a variety of ways to turn it into utter mind-pulping garbage.
I guess I would agree that "not all tiktok is like that" (though I don't use tiktok, I'm sure it has many redeeming qualities; it's created by humans, and we are good at creating beauty and meaning even if most of what we create is slop).
Perhaps I'm being kind to Freddie's point here, but he seems to be talking about a recognizable type of "content" where it just washes over you, rather than engaging your mind or soul meaningfully, and that consuming primarily that content, and making our culture up of primarily that content is a very poor choice.
So, Longfellow (you can look him up) was right:
Life is real! Life is earnest!
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Finds us farther than today.
As a teacher, it saddens me how many of the teachers want to have the same tastes and habits as the students. You don't need to make TikToks and say "skibidi" to earn the students' respect. They actually tend to find it kinda sad and pathetic.
Be an adult and model that to the students
Love it. And people who refuse to grow up will be more likely to fall prey to their neoliberal, corporate “parents” and whatever invisible political values they insert into dominant culture.
This strikes me as exactly backwards. Adults addicted to the internet and social media definitely tend to skew towards the extremes, politically. This seems very obvious to me. The most well-rounded and grounded adults I know tend to be pragmatic when it comes to politics.
I'm a very limited social media user, but it seems that the monetization of social media is clicks, or attention. Fear, anger and cute kittens drive attention, so extremes sell. The mundane stuff of life would be boring to watch.
My experience with video games (also playing Oblivion Remastered currently as a 47 year old - I commandeered my oldest kid's Xbox while he's out doing better stuff this summer) is that I sacrifice sleep to play them intensively for a few months. Then guilt hits me like a truck and I don't play for months before picking up another game and getting obsessed with it. I saw a clip once of Joe Rogan from years ago explaining that he doesn't play video games because they are too good and they would suck his life away. We are screwed if / when virtual reality tech gets really good.
Generally I don't see playing videogames as any more or less infantile than medieval monks playing backgammon... ultimately, it's just a medium.
That said, as with books and films, most videogames are either, if non-narrative driven, inelegant, repetitious and derivative or, if narrative driven, embarassingly badly written, reflecting a worldview as crude as that of the worst Marvel movie.
So, I'm inclined to agree taste/ discrimination in cultural products, is worthwhile! XD
Even the games regarded as the all time greats are usually YA tier in terms of the writing and content. (The Last Of Us is a great example of this, excellent in many ways but saddled by YA tropes.)
The industry is slowly getting better though - I’d regard Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and Death Stranding as genuinely adult oriented AAA games with solid writing. Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t bad either if you can tolerate the D&D campiness. (I get a chuckle out of it myself.)
Sorry but I couldn't disagree more. Medium is everything. Monks didn't stay up for 24 hours straight and forget to eat because they were so engrossed in backgammon. The level of stimulation is entirely different!
To paraphrase Nick Mullen, "Nobody ever had to repeat a semester of college because they got addicted to looking at paintings"
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of interesting and worthwhile videogames out there. I just don't think comparisons to media of the past hold up at all.
What amazes me is that FdB can discern the world so clearly and acutely, and write it so, yet continue to subscribe (if I have read him correctly) to a more or less doctrinaire Marxism with its faith that other political and economic arrangements, other humans ruling, or rather that there is another type of human that can rule, would result in a more distributively and ethically just society. And FdB seems militant in that faith. Yet the juvenility he so vividly and accurately describes is precisely what continues to give us Bernie Sanders, Mamdani, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, the "Squad," Occupy Wall Street, MacArthur Park and all the rest. A shrinking pool of real adults is left to maintain actual reality -- the social and economic conditions (e.g., continuous electric power) in which the eternal children can continue to watch their cartoons, eat their cereal, play their videogames and rant on the Internet about "late stage capitalism" or whatever trendy phrase their favorite "influencer" on TikTok or Reddit peddles. A world in which a growing number of nominal adults refuse to participate in the work of reproducing the conditions of that world, and being constantly reassured that such refusal is "change" and "progress." This is the USA today.
I wouldn't say it's the juvenility that is giving us the Sanders and OWS's of the world. I would say it's the opposite of that. Adulthood =/= status quo. The people trying to change the system are not acting like kids, they are acting like adults. I would not put everyone you listed there in the same basket by the way, some are really trying to change things and some are more performing at change. I would argue that it's the ones who apathetically surrender to the way things are, or have been, who are more acting like kids. And more to your point, the ones who think merely talking about a thing, or chanting a thing, is going to change the world - are also acting like kids.
Case in point: for the last 4 years or so, every large meeting at my place of work is begun with a land acknowledgement statement. Honestly speaking, this is done for precisely two reasons: 1) young people at the meeting think it's actually doing something tangible to help Native Americans, and 2) most older people at the meeting (mostly the ones in charge) just don't want to piss off the young people so they go along with it and act sincere about it. It's immature, and quite frankly a waste of time, to think that reminding people over and over about who was here before Europeans came to this land is going to do anything for the lives and well-being of those remaining indigenous peoples. It's simply childish to think this moves the needle on any of it. But we do it anyway, mostly because young professionals have this strange yet strong faith that it is vital to do so.
In a normal world, say 20 years ago, the adults in the room would probably not let this go on; they would simply explain the uselessness of it all, and be done with it. This relentless hollow activism takes up a huge amount of bandwidth, and boxes out a whole lot of real work that could be done. All because a lot of people (mostly young) are too immature to know better, and too large an economic demographic for other people (mostly older) to reprimand.
I would suggest that most of the younger people don't really believe land acknowledgements and other performative self-flagellation are *actively* doing something, so much as they believe it's maintaining a sort of mental / moral hygiene. I suspect they do believe THAT can change the world -- if they just stay pure enough, and enough people stay pure enough, that the bad things will stop.
Yikes. So McWhorter may be right, it's some kind of religious purification ritual?
I think that's part of it, probably most of it for the most ideological. And part of it is certainly social pressure or simple unexamined assumptions that go along with being part of a group.
Yeah, it's Calvinism without God (or Grace).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQyFfC7_U-E
Lol. Exactly.
Do we really need to bring Freddie's economic beliefs into this? Kind of a stretch. I don't agree with them, but I think the link you're drawing here is tenuous. As if there weren't Marxists before the modern American worship of youth.
Fair point. I was just giving vent to my perplexity that someone who can be so right on so many things of importance can be so wrong on others. Just my opinion, of course.
"Yet the juvenility he so vividly and accurately describes is precisely what continues to give us Bernie Sanders, Mamdani, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, the "Squad," Occupy Wall Street, MacArthur Park and all the rest."
I'm not sure that the people arrested at Occupy were the same ones making mentally defective TikToks, but what do I know?
I don't think they are the same people either. I know a lot of people like the ones Freddie describes here, from my childhood neighborhood... many of them went to college but were never studious.
Maybe not the authority pleasing Organization Kid types?
“Everything I disagree with is childish” is a child’s understanding of the world
Maturity == the capacity to assume responsibility for things. Most people never really take responsibility for themselves until it becomes a requisite for taking care of someone else -- usually their children. When my first child was born, we called him "the little Zen master" because he was there to constantly remind us, "Your personal desires no longer matter." That may feel like slavery, for a while, but it is actually the path to liberating yourself from "childish things". You shed all the pretensions and useless obsessions of youth, and are actually lighter for it. You cut your hair and wear sensible clothes. You are finally free to care about things that really matter. You bond with other people who care about things that really matter. You can still enjoy childish things -- just by proxy, through your kids. You kneel on the carpet and build Legos with your six year old.
I understand the temptation to cosplay youth. But I agree -- TikTok is the teen form of a Teletubbies, a wash of incoherent stimuli. No wonder this generation isn't reproducing -- they haven't stopped being children themselves.
You can even still enjoy childish things directly. There's nothing wrong with parents who get together and act silly for a few hours over a game of <insert your game preference here>. But I largely agree that having children tends to focus on the things that matter most.
I have nothing against silliness, either. Play is an essential need for everyone, even adults. Even the stodgiest 1950s notion of adulthood still had room for bridge night, or a weekend round of golf, or bowling leagues, or even playing board games with your family. If anything, I think our society could use _more_ of games played IRL with family, friends and neighbors. That's how we used to make our own fun, before the internet. I think what Freddie was reacting to was how much people _identify_ with the nonsense while neglecting the substantial.
Reading your comment (and Freddie's post in general) gives me a sense of FOMO. As someone who is middle aged, not married, and not had kids, I have for the last five or so years started to want children if only for the reason that I've noticed that the large majority of my friends and family who have had kids have seemingly, mostly let go of childish things. At the same time, this desire to have kids to aid in my own maturation or gain insight through novel experience seem not good reasons to have kids.
I also wonder however if these debates and binaries (parents vs. the childless) have always been part of modern life or if they too are a product of algorithmically driven polarization.
The extended childhood grants people the rights and privileges of adulthood without the duties* and responsibilities that it used to entail. Maturity is one of those duties, IMHO.
But in the end, if post-modernism emphasizes the fulfillment of the individual, then it's always going to be a hard sell to endorse parenting, where you trade immediate and very tangible deprivation and frustration for nebulous payoffs of dubious value that can't be comprehended. It's easy to understand sleep deprivation and getting pooped and peed on as losses; it's impossible to understand the joy of a 3-year old looking at a real-life Space Shuttle, the same as all the toy ones he has at home but bigger as a win!
*I have found it utterly fascinating that the concept of "duty" has been all but extinguished in our society, Probably related to this problem.
All those "abandons" end with . . . abandoning one's own children. Something rigid old 1950s culture used to disapprove of, though it happened—people (like Stephen King's father, and mothers too) just disappeared one day. It was us baby boomers who made it hip to openly break up families in pursuit of "my authentic self." Today's kids are heirs to generations of routine divorce. I'm just reading Rob Henderson's "Troubled," a memoir of growing up in the foster system. He strongly asserts that family stability is THE most important thing for kids, well ahead of wealth or education. . . .
The Millennials in my niece-and-nephew generation let adolescence last till around 30, which seems reasonable in a world with so much to learn. The women's biological clocks seemed to set the limit. By 30, they had found someone to live with for several years and found it good. They had found a direction in life. They married and started having kids. They seem determined to reconstitute that part of adulthood, at least. They seem determined to try not to divorce in the face of difficulty or outside attraction. (Those ten extra years of adolescence somewhat slaked the latter appetite.) Notably, they restrict their kids' screen time or withhold it altogether during the most formative years.
It's a real balancing act between acting your age while simultaneously not falling into the other trap, acting as if nothing young people are producing now is worthy of consideration or has artistic merit. It's bad to send the message that all the important cultural work was done years ago. It sends the rather ugly message that it's not even worth trying to produce good art, because it's all been done before anyway...no need to waste one's time.
Aging gracefully is a lot harder than I ever thought it'd be. It's okay to like the same media and art that young people do, in my book anyways, so long as that appreciation is genuine and not forced in order to not appear old.
I liked this essay, because it was something others in a similar vein aren't. A lot of essays and the like complaining about Millennial arrested development or whatever betray only the author's own insecurities; anything that seems childish much be peevishly rejected. An "adulthood" must be precisely assembled from cultural cues. Half-understood classics, photographs of old libraries and old art, modern culture and its alleged infantilism railed against with all the heat and emotion of Holden Caulfield fighting the phonies or Ignatius J. Reilly battling the degeneracy of the modern world.
But no, Freddie doesn't fall into this trap. It's really not about the particulars. It's about taste, discernment, and self-awareness in all things. If one loves (for example) children's movies, that is an opportunity to educate oneself and taking a critical eye to them. Learn the medium, what works, what doesn't, delve into its history. Perhaps there is a beautiful movie that a philistine like myself has never heard of, half-forgotten yet timeless, waiting to be shared with a new generation; I would admire one who had the ability to find and identify such a gem.
Oh my God, thank you for this article! I have been harping on this in my little corner of the music industry for years.
I dunno, this is true enough as it goes, but the notion of maturity undergirding the whole thing is rather superficial.
Like, lots of people have a few dumb childish hobbies and still hold down jobs, raise families, build businesses, pay taxes, think critically about morality, participate in their community, etc. Do _some_ people tilt too far to the childish? Sure. Is the childish tilt valorized by social media? Sure.
At the same time, you know, look at the cohort of extremely adult adults presently adultly adulting the nation. Good thing Stephen Miller doesn't collect Funko Pops, we'd surely be fucked then.
I agree with the narrow point you're making, but that
> many of the big social/environmental problems [don't] have much to do with people's refusal to grow up
is exactly wrong.
Perhaps the most critical element of maturity is an ability to think through actions ahead of time, *acknowledge tradeoffs*, and make choices based on long-term considerations. "If I spend all afternoon playing video games, I won't get my homework done" just doesn't occur to your average unprompted fourteen year old. Nor does, "this person is only telling me this because they want something from me that's probably not in my best interest".
Democracy depends on a critical mass of voters (and politicians) being able to override their short-term material interests, and make future-oriented decisions. To be fair, that's probably always been a plurality, rather than an absolute majority, but for the system to work that cohort's gotta set the "vibes" for the rest to follow. Now, though, I have a hard time identifying any adults in the room.
Again, this is all true enough. The problematic part is the assumption that enjoyment of middle-brow cultural products is the best indicator of immaturity.
Out of curiosity, do you have children?
Nope.
That checks out.
I do have children. I agree with Matt tattoo that assuming that enjoyment of middle-brow culture indicates immaturity does not make any sense. I have noticed noticed such a correlation among myself, or any other parents I know. On the contrary, I've noticed plenty of responsible dads who enjoy dumb action movies and responsible moms who read dumb bodice-ripper romances.
Light entertainment has always been with us. The only difference is the medium that delivers it. Before people could waste their time on the internet, they could waste it watching TV programmes of dubious quality and reading the likes of the National Enquirer.
"The aging process is not gradual or gentle. It rushes up, pushes you over, and runs off laughing." - John Mortimer.
Boy does it. I vividly remember getting old at age 45. Physically, socially, mentally...everything seemed to change overnight. It was quite jarring. One can try to put it off forever, but there will be a day it knocks you over like a mac truck.
I would agree the distinction between the last century and this one feels palpable: that more and more people seem to not want to bother with adulthood very much. And yeah, there's not nearly as much public or private stigma for "not wanting to grow up" as there was only a few decades ago. For instance my own place of work regularly uses all sorts of silly emojis in work emails, and the average age is probably around 45 or so. If I tried that crap in the 2000's my boss would have reprimanded me for being a child.
I can't help but think social media and technology have a lot to do with it, but that can't be all of it can it? Was it bad parenting? Or perhaps doom and gloom over the future of the world? And I'm asking as someone who didn't want to grow up for a long time, I don't even know why that was the case for me.
Also, if you don't even know who Addison Rae is, does that automatically make you old?