why are there so many grown children?

Why are there so many grown children in this world? I think there comes a time in every adult's life when you look at another adult who has a job and pays taxes and maybe even has a mortgage, and you think to yourself, how does this person still act like such a child? They argue like they're 8, they date like they're getting into the prom, they post like they're trying to get expelled from college; they are an arrested development. You know, somebody hits a certain age and then they stay there. And if you think about people who have like a Peter Pan complex and they want to be kids for too long, if you think about people who have weaponized nostalgia, if you think about people who refuse to learn because they're not in school and there's not like an immediate negative consequence, you're on the right track for describing these kind of people.

So why does this happen and why are there so many grown children in the world? First of all, let's be clear, getting older isn't maturity. Anybody can get a birthday because they give them away for free. Growing up requires like real tension and friction in your life. It's not a passive process. Some people hit 40 and they are still throwing tantrums on Wi-Fi and ghosting their responsibilities. Some people hit 20 and they lose a parent or raise a sibling where they have like a catastrophic breakup, and now they are more focused in life. And sometimes when we see somebody and they have a lot of this quote-unquote maturity, we think of them as, at least in my neighborhood, we use the phrase old soul. And you know, somebody might have aged that soul in real life and in real time.

Where does it come from? What keeps people in this kind of arrested development? One, it's lack of consequences. You know, if nobody checks you, why evolve? If you can win an argument by throwing a temper tantrum or if you can get rid of somebody who tells you the truth and find somebody and replace them, you are living a different life. You just sort of have your own emotional Chuck E. Cheese. And some people look for that and pursue it in their life.

There's also over-functioning parents. You know, some parents do so much that the kids don't learn to grow up. And so when they become an adult, they are outsourcing a lot of that like output to their parents or their jobs or, you know, just any social factor. And obviously, like infantilism is a business model. Capitalism rewards nostalgia and there are whole industries built around arrested development. I mean, what are comic book movies? What are funko pops? This is a form of emotional regression.

Now, the thing is that like the growth tends to sneak in. You know, grief is a maturing force. You start asking different questions about your life and what you want from it when you watch somebody that's in that position. You realize that the world definitely does not wait for closure. Everybody who lives is going to have some unanswered email. They're going to die with unfinished business on their plate. It's very rare that a person can lie down at the end of their day and say, hey, I lived a life where I got to have everything that I wanted. It's not everybody.

Failure works the same way when it's public or it's private or it's humiliating or it's just to yourself. When you have to, can't avoid, when you can't rationalize a failure, that is a, you know, a growing ground for growth. Caretaking, when you have to be responsible for somebody else's well-being, and if it's somebody that you care about, you care less about the things that you're going through because you're not physically able, you know. I, with my own grandmother, you know, the process of caretaking took me really far away from all of my contacts that I had at that point in my life to a large degree, and that just was what it was. You couldn't get around it and also just the process of building consistency.

If something locks you into a consistent habit, you know, if you have to finish your shift, if you have to answer an email, boredom is a proven ground for maturity. If you're able to, the ability to handle boredom and routine is a thing that makes us think about maturity for sure. Now, every job doesn't require wisdom. Not every life path demands that you be mature. If you, and sometimes we look at a person that's young and we say young at heart when they're 60, there's no reason to scold a person that's like that, especially if they're not, you know, living a life that hurts other people.

And the problem here is not really immaturity as much as it is impact. If your delays are hurting people or you have like a gravity field that's dragging people into your unresolved issues. And of course, you know, there's the thing of maturity being a social issue when it causes collateral damage. And I mean, it's just as important to remember that even the idea of maturity is about societal expectations. You know, like if a person says, you know, I date so many people and none of them are mature, it's really like, is this about something that's going on in their own minds? Or is it really about like their ability to meet your expectations? Their ability or willingness to meet your expectations?

Growing up isn't so much a destination as it is a trait, as a muscle. You know, some people lift and some people don't. But the world stays the same regardless of your level of maturity. So if you want to work in that world and carry the real things like love and loss and responsibility, you need that strength and maturity. Because if you don't do that, the world will do it for you. So the ultimate thing that decides, you know, your rest of development, I think, is the rest of the world. So the world can give you this label, but only the world in a neutral sense can inflict that maturity on you.