Slashdot Mirror
Immaturity Level Rising in Adults
Ant writes to tell us that a Discovery News article is exploring the old adage, "like a kid at heart", which may be closer to the truth than we would like to admit. New research is showing that grown-ups are more immature than ever. From the article: "Specifically, it seems a growing number of people are retaining the behaviors and attitudes associated with youth. As a consequence, many older people simply never achieve mental adulthood, according to a leading expert on evolutionary psychiatry."
They are all just poopy-heads! Big, smelly, ugly, poopy-heads!
Space for rent, inquire within
The original poster has farty pants!
And on that note, my work as an adult is done
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
Case in point: How many "adults" have a myspace account? I'll admit it...
Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)
Adult Resignation
To Whom It May Concern:
I am hereby officially tendering my resignation as an adult.
I have decided I would like to accept the responsibilities of a 6 year old again.
I want to go to McDonald's and think that it's a four star restaurant.
I want to sail sticks across a fresh mud puddle and make ripples with rocks.
I want to think M&Ms are better than money, because you can eat them.
I want to play kickball during recess and paint with watercolors in art.
I want to lie under a big Oak tree and run a lemonade stand with my friends on a hot summers day.
I want to return to a time when life was simple.
When all you knew were colors, addition tables and simple nursery rhymes. But that didn't bother you, because you didn't know what you didn't know and you didn't care.
When all you knew was to be happy because you didn't know all the things that should make you worried and upset.
I want to think that the world is fair. That everyone in it is honest and good.
I want to believe that anything is possible.
Somewhere in my youth...I matured and I learned too much.
I learned of nuclear weapons, war, prejudice, starvation and abused children.
I learned of lies, unhappy marriages, suffering, illness, pain and death.
I learned of a world where men left their families to go and fight for our country, and returned only to end up living on the streets... begging for their next meal.
I learned of a world where children knew how to kill...and did.
What happened to the time when we thought that everyone would live because we didn't grasp the concept of death?
When we thought the worst thing in the world was if someone took the jump rope from you or picked you last for kickball?
I want to be oblivious to the complexity of life and be overly excited by little things once again. I want to return to the days when reading was fun and music was clean. When television was used to report the news or for family entertainment and not to promote sex, violence and deceit.
I remember being naive and thinking that everyone was happy because I was.
I would walk on the beach and only think of the sand between my toes and the prettiest seashell I could find.
I would spend my afternoon climbing trees and riding my bike.
I didn't worry about time, bills or where I was going to find the money to fix my car.
I used to wonder what I was going to do or be when I grew up, not worry about what I'll do if this doesn't work out.
I want to live simple again.
I don't want my day to consist of computer crashes, mountains of paperwork, depressing news, how to survive more days in the month than there is money in the bank, doctor bills, gossip, illness and loss of loved ones.
I want to believe in the power of smiles, hugs, a kind word, truth, justice, peace, dreams, the imagination, mankind and making angels in the snow.
I want to be 6 again.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Maybe it's because as the world turns increasingly to s h i t, people develop a imaturity complex derived from the "laugh" half of the proverbial "laugh or cry" syndrome.
With the focus in the past few decades on feelings, emotions, and our complete obsession with "our inner child." It's not surprising at all, it's been a while since we cared about some responsibility.
There's a reason people are suing everybody, there's a reason tobacco companies have been losing so much money in courts; we're like a cuontry of 8 year olds, always pointing at somebody else in the back of class that through the paper airplane.
That said, I think we're going to see a turn around with the generation in college right now, less divorces, less stupidity because it seems that more and more young people are sick and tied of the bullshit.
Error 407 - No creative sig found
Judging by the way American Electorate makes its decisions, I concur with the OP that the adults are getting dumber and electing duby... sorry dumb people.
-Palal
YUO R TEH FAGG0T! LOLOL!
Seriously, you see this more and more online. With people who arent 13.
I work at a movie theatre and I see grown men acting like children over the stupidest shit....
Though this study also explains companies like SCO and the MPAA and RIAA.
"WE'RE NOT GETTING WHAT WE WANT.. WAH WAH WAAAAAAAAAAH"
People use the kid at heart excuse too much. Basically they're justifying acting completely anti-social and not having to be decent to other people.
Of course maturity being a RELATIVE CONCEPT
I'm not sure if that's the world's best definition of immaturity, since its corollary would suggest that maturity is defind by predictability, having balance of priorities (what does that mean?), and not overreacting (does that mean reacting appropriately - how do you define appropriate?).
I hate to reduce things to an argument over definitions, but this stuff seems a little fruity to me. I think a simpler definition of maturity is a willingness to accept responsibility for oneself and for others. By that definition, then we definitely do see a lot of immature, i.e.: irresponsible, behavior among adults - probably because irresponsibility no longer gets you eaten by lions and tigers and bears the way it did for our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
But this guy is definitely right about the value of maintaining mental elasticity as an adult. My grandfather is a good example. He was a prof at a big university and has always had an amazingly agile and adaptive mind. And today I got an email from him of some pictures he took on his digital camera that he doctored in photoshop. Th guy is 86 years old. Email went mainstream when he was in his late 70s, for God's sake.
A-Bomb
A "child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviors and knowledge" is probably adaptive to the increased instability of the modern world, Charlton believes. Formal education now extends well past physical maturity, leaving students with minds that are, he said, "unfinished."
and
"By contrast, many modern adults fail to attain this maturity, and such failure is common and indeed characteristic of highly educated and, on the whole, effective and socially valuable people," he said.
So it looks like his definition of 'maturity' coresponds to my 'boring old fart', which, at the age of 53, I hope I'm not.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
http://ytmnd.com/
Slashdot posters especially tend to overstate the value of youthful flexibility and forget what evil little pricks children often are.
Part of maturing is learning to handle the fact that you are part of the world and that you don't always get what you want. Adult temper tantrums are increasingly viewed as the way to get things done, a vicious and childish response to being balked is hailed as being "forceful" and "practical".
Insert compulsory "slashdotters living with their moms" here ->
...having lived in the US I can say it's quite true. People there, more than anywhere else, love their toys. Except that the tiny remote controlled car has turned into a 4x4 with huge tires and raised suspension. Or a huge collections of guns that go 'bang!'. Or many other examples like the fact they react violently or in a completely immature way when someone tries to tell them they are wrong (freedom fries indeed). On the other hand I have no idea what 'adult maturity' would be like, myself...
I just pooted. ;)
But the real cause of bad jokes is that people are as desperate as ever to be well liked. I blame that on the growing culture of sexual presumptiveness in our society. You can't just go up to a stranger and start conversing with them usually without her/him thinking your up to something, no matter how natural you are (unless you have a reason to be talking). People in general are paranoid, presumptive, and take themselves too seriously. They have nightmare stories in the back of their minds from 'Unsolved Mysteries' that tell them never to talk to strangers because they will rape and kill you!
At least, that's the way people are in my town. I dunno about yours.
Could someone please define what is maturity ? I am lost here !
No duh!
-Peter
I can only speak for myself.
I reject the traditional concepts of maturity. I refuse to spend my life doing things I don't like because of some outmoded notion of 'have to.' The pressure to grow up, to think like an adult, is ridiculous and useless from an objective standpoint.
This doesn't mean shirking responsibility is part of the mindset. It simply means I try to retain a childlike viewpoint on the world. One of the most important things children have that most adults lack is a sense of wonder and discovery. The benefits are astonishing.
That said, I didn't actually read the article, as it were, so I may be wildly off-topic. In true immature fashion, whatever.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
...has always been: "I may be getting older, but I refuse to grow up!"
I think part of the problem might be that people are not forced to grow up and take responsibility at such a young age as they were before. I am now living in Africa but comparing my experiences to when I was living in the West I see this every day. Many children here have to take serious responsibilities in life from a young age. Perhaps they have to look after whole families or simply go out and find food every day for themselves. Regardless, when speaking to some of the young people you find that they are relatively mature.
Perhaps in the West people are too protected and hence don't need to grow up. Many people by the age of 18 have never gone to bed with hunger pains. They have probably never had a real job. They are probably given an allowance from their parents that they can go and waste on useless luxuries. The kids in the West are pampered and spoilt. No wonder there is a trend towards immaturity.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
I think that this is just a way for adults to deal with the stress of current day life. Or a side affect if you will.
Yes that's all very sentimental but why do you want to be six again, an age where from time to time you can sail a stick across a mud puddle but more often than not you are told you can't go near the mud muddle because you're wearing good clothes/at a wedding/supposed to stay dry? Who yearns for a time when everything is out of your control and sailing sticks across a pond is fun because you've still to undeveloped mentally to enjoy a good game of Risk?
I prefer a world where I have greater control over my freedom, where my education is in my own hands as is my destinty. A world where I can paint watercolors any damn time I feel like no matter what I'm wearing and while I am aware of nuclear weapons I can also dismiss such vapid fears casually to enjoy a warm summer day.
Being an adult is awesome if you just follow the golden words of Paul McCartney and let it be!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Many of the posts are very immature. The shear amount of trolls are incredable. I used to think that it was just kids, but over the ages, I have realized that a fair number are adults who wish to be something that they are not.
From the artice:
The theory's creator is Bruce Charlton, a professor in the School of Biology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England...
"People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence..."
I'm amused that he singles out academics, teachers and scientists - pretty much the exact description of people he has in his department. Not that I wish to suggest that the fine fellows at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne are in any way immature (I did my Bachelor's degree there), but I can't help thinking that his paper is by implication not exactly flattering to them.
When I'm lyin' in my bed at night
I don't wanna grow up
Nothin' ever seems to turn out right
I don't wanna grow up
How do you move in a world of fog
That's always changing things
Makes me wish that I could be a dog
When I see the price that you pay
I don't wanna grow up
I don't ever wanna be that way
I don't wanna grow up
Seems like folks turn into things
That they'd never want
The only thing to live for
Is today
I'm gonna put a hole in my TV set
I don't wanna grow up
Open up the medicine chest
And I don't wanna grow up
I don't wnna have to shout it out
I don't want my hair to fall out
I don't wanna be filled with doubt
I don't wanna be a good boy scout
I don't wanna have to learn to count
I don't wanna have the biggest amount
I don't wanna grow up
Well when I see my parents fight
I don't wanna grow up
They all go out and drinking all night
And I don't wanna grow up
I'd rather stay here in my room
Nothin' out there but sad and gloom
I don't wanna live in a big old Tomb
On Grand Street
When I see the 5 o'clock news
I don't wanna grow up
Comb their hair and shine their shoes
I don't wanna grow up
Stay around in my old hometown
I don't wanna put no money down
I don't wanna get me a big old loan
Work them fingers to the bone
I don't wanna float a broom
Fall in and get married then boom
How the hell did I get here so soon
I don't wanna grow up
TOM WAITS - "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" lyrics
Apologies for length - but feel the width...
I reserve the right to be wrong.
Having too many of the peasent moving up the Kohlberg scale is bad for_ moral_development
profits, war and control?
What if they start wanting and understanding ethical principles?
Best keep them all at stage 2?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg's_stages_of
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It's easy to move in a world of fog, you just need more sunshine in your outlook to burn the fog away.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Some people have commented that this is only happening in developed nations. But if it happens all over teh globe, would that make it a Peter Pan-demic?
What's the definition of mental adulthood?
Before we got married, my wife and I decided to not have kids. Over the years since and to this day, when people ask us why we don't have any kids, we simply say "We're not done being kids, ourselves."
And its true. We'd just rather spend all of that child-rearing money on ourselves and keep our options open (go out/take trips whenever), while not having to put up with the hassles of tending to kids.
I'm sure many traditionally-raised folks might see this as immature or selfish, but it all depends on the point of view.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
They are using a photo of a traffic cop dancing in the street to illustrate their point. I could have sworn I've seen that cop on TV. He does these crazy moves and motions as he directs traffic. Pretty entertaining to see and a lot better then a cop with a chip on his shoulder. I have doubts that he is really all that immature. Just a guy having fun at his job.
I don't understand why someone tagged this "obvious". I had no idea that adults, on average, are more immature now than they were in the past. It does sound reasonable, yes, but certainly not obvious.
I don't think the immaturity discussion at hand has really anything to do with becoming one of the Sheeple and conforming to expected norms. I think it has everything to do with accepting responsibilities. That I think is a growing problem that people seem to be less responsible than in the past...
I myself am happy to maintain a child like outlook on life but I also take responsibilities and commitments and relationships very seriously. Perhaps it is the erosion of serious relationships in society (and that could mean anything from partners to very close friends) that is tainting other aspects of life for some people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It seems adults in the USA have stolen the toys of their children.
Take comics for example, I was surprised to know that comic book companies in the USA now target adults much more than children. I was surperised more to find that adults dress up as comic characters in conventions. The same applies for Sci-Fi movies and TV shows. I don't know about video games, but with the increasing violence I'm guessing that again the main target is now a mostly adult audience.
The aim of this post isn't attacking adult comic readers (or whatever), but there's a difference between some people buying something they like, and the current situation where adults 'hijacked' whole categories of products initially marketed for their children.
Can anyone explain to a non-American how this happened?
I'm scared to post in this topic, I could be a poster child for immature behavior...
It all started when I had to answer to a 16 year old boss being 18 at that fast food joint.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
feel perfectly comfortable telling people my own age to get the hell off my lawn!
Ironically it's the ones that aren't intentional that we should be worrying about...
Summation 2
If what it takes to be "responsible" or "mature" is starvation, child labour, and so on then please, sign me up for immaturity. I would also point out that in that "mature" environment we have more crimes against humanity than, well, proably anywhere in the modern world. Ethnic clensing, tribal warfare, brutal torture, etc. Seems that perhaps having the weight of the world thrust on your shoulders as a kid and haivng to mature fast is perhaps not the best method for a stable and successful future.
I'm not trying to say America has the be-all, end-all answer for raising kids. Clearly we get screwed up adults here. But pointing to Africa as a good example of maturity is rather shocking. While perhaps people have to be mature on an individual level and accept responsibility for immediate concerns like food, socially it's very immature. Brutal fighting against someone who happens to be an arbitrary different tribe than you is not mature. It is indeed very much like little kids ostracising certian members because of trivial differences, it's just done in the grown up world and thus has more dire consequences. It is overall more mature to have a society where it's not just what's good for you and yours, but good over all. A warlike, tribal view is extremely immature in that context.
I think perhaps there's something to be said for being less "mature" in some ways. Being mature often seems to be tied to being cynical and depressed. People who are bright eyed and idealistic are looked down upon as immature and young. Ok, maybe so, but it is those bright eyed idealists that can bring about real change. If you are "mature" about life in that you accept it as it is then you don't stand much chance of changing it. It's only if you have the perhaps naive view that the world can and should be a better place that you'll have the will to go try and make it such.
Is there an agreed-upon defintion of mental or psychological maturity? If so, what is that? When I'm lyin in my bed at night I don't wanna grow up Nothin ever seems to turn out right I don't wanna grow up How do you move in a world of fog Thats always changing things Makes me wish that I could be a dog When I see the price that you pay I don't wanna grow up I don't ever wanna be that way I don't wanna grow up Seems like folks turn into things That theyd never want The only thing to live for Is today... Im gonna put a hole in my tv set I don't wanna grow up Open up the medicine chest And I don't wanna grow up I don't wanna have to shout it out I don't want my hair to fall out I don't wanna be filled with doubt I don't wanna be a good boy scout I don't wanna have to learn to count I don't wanna have the biggest amount I don't wanna grow up Well when I see my parents fight I don't wanna grow up They all go out and drinking all night And I don't wanna grow up Id rather stay here in my room Nothin out there but sad and gloom I don't wanna live in a big old tomb On grand street When I see the 5 oclock news I don't wanna grow up Comb their hair and shine their shoes I don't wanna grow up Stay around in my old hometown I don't wanna put no money down I don't wanna get me a big old loan Work them fingers to the bone I don't wanna float a broom Fall in love and get married then boom How the hell did I get here so soon I don't wanna grow up (tom waits/kathleen brennan)
What's the definition of mental adulthood?
Sigmund Freud wrote somewhere that psychological maturity was about the ability to love and to work.
You can take your pick, but that sounds like a start to me.
-wb-
Aside from short attention span, is any of this really indicative of immaturity? Sounds a bit more like a shift in social paradigm to me...I still see people working 8-5 to make ends meet so that a family can be raised. How are these people defining "mental adulthood?"
It sounds like this guy's main argument is that education requires mental immaturity, and education now continues into the 20s. If this is the case, then shouldn't the New Adult be more capable of learning than the older generations? I don't understand, but maybe it is just a consequence of my short attention span...
Adults are typically hard to sell to. Children on the other hand typically make easy marks. So how do you make sure that your target market remains in a blissful pre-lapsarian haze in the face of age and oncoming responsibility?
You produce them as such.
Thomas Doherty once quipped that "movies reflect teenage, not mass - and definitely not adult - tastes". Hollywood, The TV industry, glossy magazines, etc, are all interested in doing one thing: producing you as an unquestioning consumer whose core concerns are childlike.
Take for example these new Nike Ronaldino ads whose catchphrase is "never grow up". I don't want to go all Barthes here but these ads are so shameless in their meaning production that you wonder how any adult with an IQ over 80 could fall for their message. It's pitiful really.
I'm 19. To politely state how I feel about my generation is that I strongly dislike them. What's worse though is having to deal with adults at my college, who attend to get a "second chance" at whatever it is they want. What's annoying about them is that they are immature. They act exactly like my generation. A group of people who are more focused on social aesthetics rather than concerning themselves with the overall good, they don't even focus on a goal besides graduating. It's annoying, and it probably won't stop. Education is being pushed on younger people to attend at an early age so they don't have to go back, or won't have to do a lot of work later in life while raising kids, and that might make it change because they'll be able to focus on adult responsibilties and socialize with people who are farther along in their life. As far as people in "the west" living in cushy little houses and having everything provided for them by their hardworking parents, that is untrue. My mom made me go get a job. My mom told me if I didn't save money that I would be the man who had to walk to work because he blew it on a game system instead of preparing for an accident from his car or saving for my retirement. Currently I'm renting my own house leased under my own name and sure I had her help finding it, but it's me and my roommates paying for it. She prepared me for it, but I am proof that "the west" doesn't have everything given to them and that some of my generation can appreciate deeper things than how many friends you have on myspace, or who got drunk at what party. Personally I find my generation offensive, but that's just me.
Wow! I remember thinking at the age of 10: "wow, being an adult sucks. I could go without the goodies if being an adult is as bad as my parents complain it is. I mean, I don't have to do anything. Having to spend most of my day at some crappy repetitive job would suck" I guess that sentiment has caught on.
An argument could be made that as we're neotenic by evolutionary design it's "only natural" that psychologically we exhibit overextended developmental immaturity.
Our sense of humour is based on broken symmetry. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience by Erving Goffman was an early effort to set out the myriad markers we use to establish a contextual frame and the wit we employ to break that frame for various reasons, humour not least among them.
Our relatively oversized brain is conjectured to be an outgrowth of our intricate social relationships. Our fetishes and rituals have come under scrutiny by dint of recorded history and cultural cross fertilization. In the vein of familiarity breeds contempt it may be that we've simply come to more easily poke fun at ourselves.
The Marx brothers said it best: Groucho:"I wouldn't want to join any club that would have me as a member"; and Karl: "Moi, je ne suis pas marxiste."
It may be that those who are now seen as relatively immature are those whose lives most correspond with the material wealth that permited playful immaturity. I suggest that Freud's concept of polymorphous perversity can be extended from sexuallity to all aspects of our lives as a description of our ability to transcend our basic nature.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
"sensation and novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion" etc.
I submit those are the symptom of exactly the opposite - mankind finally beginning to grow up.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
"a growing number of people are retaining the behaviors and attitudes associated with youth"
Oh my God!!!! Adults don't think about money any more! what are we going to do?! Don't tell me wars will soon be over!! Quick, you, "leading expert on evolutionary psychiatry", give me some aderol!!!
Growing old is mandatory but growing up is optional... and I opted out.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
I believe that being mature simply means to accept the consequences of our acts.
Being mature doesn't have anything to do with being predictable, boring, let-me-read-my-diary old fart or being playful, childish, fun and sometimes impredictable and impulsive.
As long as I accept the consequences of my acts let me play all I can and enjoy simple things and not worry more than I have to.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
prepare for economic activity.... am i the only one that thinks there's something wrong about that one?
i've been reading too much chomsky http://www.understandingpower.com/...
wat teh fucken u d00dz no abt waht is matrue and waht peeple wanna do now?!!? thins is change all teh time an were teh new way 2 go u fagz r stuk inna tim wrap!?! GO back to teh 70s u r 2 0ld!?!!!
When you are 6 you are unburdened by the full weight of reality
What weight? Is there a physical cinder block upon you? Put it to the side then. All other weight, especially mental weight, is chosen by you. You are the one who decides if weight of your imagining is dragging you down or something to stand upon.
The point I am making is that being much older I have had many more experiences and am able to enjoy them in ways a six-year old is not, as I can enjoy more esoteric pleasure just as much as splashing in a puddle (alluded to in the words of the musical Chess with "The Queens we use would not excite you"). My higher level of awareness also leads to greater ability to experience joy. While it is true that also means a greater ability to experience esoteric suffering, I would not give my far vaster scope of ability to simply feel more just because sometimes there is pain. There was pain when I was six as well so what would be the difference except that by opting to stay six forever I would wish myself to be enclosed in a box.
Have you ever read Flowers For Algernon? There is a reason why that story is a sad tale instead of a joyous return to a blissful state of ignorance.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...is he talking about us?
Human culture and religion has a huge effect on 'maturity'. Think memes, 'nature vs nurture', etc.
Here's a quote from the sf novel Emergence, by David R Palmer:
'Note that of the 1,284 incidents wherein wild animals of varying descriptions "adopted" human children, none (with the exception of the very youngest - those recovered from the wild below age three) developed significantly beyond the adoptive parents. They could not be taught to communicate; they evinced no abstract reasoning; they could not be educated. IQ testing, where applicable, produced results indistinguishable from similar tests performed on random members of the "parents" species...
'Finally, most authorities... are agreed that Man is born devoid of instincts, save (a point still in contention) suckling; therefore, unlike lesser animals, human development is entirely dependent upon learning and, therefore, environment.'
Plenty of evidence of human capability - childhood prodigies (Norbert Wiener, Stephen Wolfram), autistic 'idiot-savants' - perhaps provides a glimpse of truly 'mature' humans. As a former teacher, I've seen enormous potential damped or smothered by upbringing. A crying shame.
Bring up babies without culture, religion, prejudices, lowest-common-denominator TV, sexism (which, as demonstrated by Douglas Hofstadter, exists at a fundamental level in language) - and show them instead nature, science, music, art, rationality, super-rationality (again, Douglas Hofstadter). We may then meet real humans.
Other references? Unfortunately, the only other one I've come across is Howard Fast's rather comprehensive treatment in the novelette 'The First Men'. The title sums it up. Essential reading.
Old farts who judge me: "In my day, we didn't act like you, and we didn't blah blah blah."
Me: "STFU, you old fart."
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Were the two world wars, the Vietnam war, the thermonuclar arms race signs of this thing they call "maturity"? Is rape, murder and the systematic plunder of the world's dwindling resources also "maturity"?
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
what a worthless thing to say. i am a member of several high iq societies, where i debate with 140-160+iq, 20-80 year old gifted - high genius people (ceos, scientists, et cetera) and i have fathomed the reality that "maturity" whatever that means, is not even half important. it is even more worthwhile to speak with a child than a corrupted, trashcan-brained ""adult"".
payawal john
I totally agree with you, even though I must say it's only a subset of the phenomenom, other things like the rampant ignorance and erosion of the middle class (not just in the US, it's bloody everywhere!) are good indications of what all this globalisation steamroller has in store for us.
And I'm pretty surprised nobody else has mentioned this fact on Slashdot, as the majority of responses were like those of 6 year olds.
Violence is bad and deceit is bad, but what's your problem with sex?
You took the red pill didn't you.
Oh I took both the Red AND Blue pill. I skipped the one marked "bitter" though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And it wasn't the paradise you remember. Sure, someone stealing you jump rope was you biggest problem, but at the time you felt like it was the end of the world. You would often throw fits, yell, and generally colapse. Now we look back at that stuff and think how easy we had it, because we have grown up and can handle it.
Instead of "wishing to be six," I want to learn to be a adult that thinks like a six-year-old. I want to be able to deal with problems in a responcible manner, but still understand the fun of silly hats. I want to understand that there are bad things in the world, but still meet the world with smiles and a it-will-work-out deminer. We have the misconception that we must be cyical adults just because we have reached a certain age. I'm going to be a kid forever!
Oh, and remember, if you became 6 again, you would have your teenage years to look forward to *shudder*
I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint.
I ask why the poor have no bread, they call me a communist.
You hint it right on the noggen; the number of so-called adults who seem to have the maturity of a child seems to be an increasing phenomenon in our society; I just look down the road and on the news; the 'everyone elses fault except my own' syndrome. There are people on the benefit having children, knowing full well they don't have the funds to pay for the associated costs, we have couples having more children than they can afford, then demanding that the tax payer for the bill for their lifestyle choice.
All this is actually a biproduct of our modern day welfare state, and the nanny state complex which people have adopted, that we shouldn't take responsibility for our actions, because good old nanny state will always be there to whipe out bottoms, and stop us from doing moronic things.
Regarding smoking, the health issues have been known for over 60 years, if people CHOOSE to live under a rock, and REFUSE to take in the information that is readily out there, who is to blame? I don't blame the cigarette companies - they're like any other company, make their product look sexy, close over any possible health issues, and keep on pushing.
If you're going to blame cigarette for the associated health costs of smoking, why not allow people to sue fast food companies who fail to put warning labels and advertise that if their product is consumed in excess, it could cause health problems? why not extend it to the confectionary and snake food companies? heck, why not put a big sticker on cars that warn that due to the bad driving of others, you could possibly die!
Honestly, it is getting to the point where I ask, when are people going to take responsibility for their actions - that is the cornerstone of being an adult, making your choices and accepting the consequences of those choices....the governments want their citizens and megacorps want their customers... easy to influent... buying any lie they want to sell...
In the Soviet Union the same was achived by giving citizens cheap vodka.
It's real, and it's profound. The tendency is both a cause and a symptom of the "Information Age" -- cf. Industrial, Feudal and Agricultural -- making it a positive feedback loop, such that the rate of human evolutionary change is increasing, putting we geeks and goofballs in the avant guard, seeing as how we're less distracted by the common plights and predators of previous ages, unfortunately leading to the clash with Those Who Would Control Everything. I think. Without a trace of hubris, nosiree.
Well I don't know what to make of this. Has all this dumb marketing turned us into childish sheep? It's certainly someone's fault, that there are entire nations comprised of "TV cry-babies", adults failing to live up to their responsibility etc. There's nothing wrong with the occasional juvenile escapade, but when fully grown individuals start acting like babies, then the whole of society is expected to become even more dysfunctional. Soaring divorce rates, the erosion of the middle class, blatant consumerism... Really the top brass are short sighted, because all this will eventually come back and bite them in the arse, or at least their next of kin. The stupid responses here aren't assuring either.. "What is maturity?" is just as laughable as those cry-babies on Tyra, Oprah or Dr. Phil.
but men are better at it ;)
What's wrong with this sentence?:
'When television was used to report the news or for family entertainment and not to promote sex, violence and deceit.'
Hint for immatures: replace 'sex' whith 'chocolate' and read again.
Anyone who knows an old person or two could have told you they're freaking weird and like to act like they're young.
I have the doomed life of a PC gamer and a MS hater...
You find item: AOL install disk
I love having control over my life and my personal space.
I love being able to stay calm when things are stressful.
I love having the personal resources to really help my friends.
I love being able to buy ice-cream when I feel like it.
And there's nothing stopping me from playing Pooh sticks if I feel like it!
Xenu loves you!
I don't claim to know what maturity means, exactly, but it seems to be the ability to care, love, to provide for others, and to not be impressed by propaganda och values created by somebody else, perhaps with a political or religious agenda.
But what do I know? I'm not exactly a model person. I'm just happy I've made is this far. All I want is to do what I love and love what I do.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
Personally I think that this is a bus response to the growing number of adults playing video games because many of the non gaming public sees video games as for kids.
When video games are accepted by the main stream as for everyone we will stop seeing ridiculous laws targeting video games and reports like this.
Whilst the observation is indeed accurate I would wonder if there was any coralation to the autistic groups and that this my be a form of asbergurism.
:).
Now if you had somebody who was intelligent and had asbergurgers (mild autism) would it not be possible for them to adapt to there `alledged handicap` to the extent wer upon they general fitted in. Given they would adapt early on in youth thru obeservational mimicery then such traits would be explianable.
ANyhow
The observation to educational systems and the extension into work is whilst corrct also being addressed baturaly. We now give students loans and expect them to pay for everything to the extent that when they finish there course there so in dept they forget how to have fun very quikly or end up on the streets.
One observation not considered is that given how we have gone from evolving to the extent were upon our worries have moved on from hunting/gathering food and as a genral shift from essentials to were do we go for holiday and what stock options can I get if I.... That and increased leasuire time and financial ability to furfill more childhood dreams we natural find ourselfs staying in the learning inqusitive stages longer than the more practical stages of the brain/life.
This is how some could observe natural evolution and the stretching of the devolopment stages. We still measure in age were upon a 20 year old a 100 years ago was nothing like a 20 year old today who's lifespam would be more akin to twice as long so from a social basis's it would be very concievable that whilst they are more intelligent there sence of responsibility would be less due to the enviroment and extended lifespan they now enoy. So to equate them on a scale of responsibility to a 10 year old when comparitvly there IQ would be comparable to a 30 year old and you see another good fit to the observation.
Another thought, if we were all mature - somebody would have less fun in there work writting such papers
What you should be mad at is the startlying lack of accoutability, of everyone. Teaching people to be in touch with themselfs does not cause lack of responcibility, refusing to aknolage how you affect the people around you does. We are taught in America that you job is to take care of you, and people neglect the people around them. The reason I am responcible is not the affect it will have on me, but the affect on others. Lack of accountabilty is the reason the tobacco companies are being sued. Lack of accountabilty is the reason people are being sued. And lack of accountabilty is exactly the reason that people get called 5 year olds!
We are not islands. It's time we stopped acting like it.
I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint.
I ask why the poor have no bread, they call me a communist.
The fact that that was modded insightful is proof of this phenomena. And also a little ironic.
What is the formal definition of maturity ? I RTFA and didn't see one so its impossible to agree or disagree with it.
maturity = shouldering of responsibility
people hate responsibility
the information age allows people to shirk responsibility with ever greater efficiency.
this comes as no surprise, i've been harping on this failing of society for awhile now.
One definition is the idea that mature people "don't like silly things." I personally think these people need a pie in the face. Life is hard, life is stressful, and sometimes you just have to enjoy the silly and simple things.
The other definition (and I feel the more relevant one) is the responsibility factor. I would say "accountability" works better than "responsibility," even though responsibility is how everyone is refuring to it. As for this, I feel it is definately true that people aren't accountable enough. People (in America at least) seem to be told to watch themselves, and people stop looking out for the guy next to them. We all affect each other, and we all need to be accountable for that. NO PERSON IS AN ISLAND.
The trick is to take the best of both worlds. Enjoy a good pie fight, but have the courtecy to help clean up
I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint.
I ask why the poor have no bread, they call me a communist.
This guy doesn't want to be six to avoid responsibility as much as to be able to look at things like a 6-year-old again. He is talking about the part in all of us that wants the simple life again.
And you have to admit, sometimes the 6-year-old has it right. "Why don't people just talk instead of having wars?"
I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint.
I ask why the poor have no bread, they call me a communist.
Life never stays the same
no matter how much we wish it would
for time runs as a river does
and though the pattern may repeat
the drop cannot run the coarse again.
So we do remember
times that were good and fair
as we ever on prepare
for the day that now lies ahead.
The past is the past
and there is no point in living there.
The future is before us
more life to live and tales to tell.
Self author-ed
There is something to be said for the world of the 6-year-old, but there is something to be said for this world as well.
I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint.
I ask why the poor have no bread, they call me a communist.
What the hell *is* 'mental maturity'? No really? Having an IQ of 150? Or an EQ of 240?
I dare claim that whomever came up with the term 'mental maturity' was mentally immature enough to come up with a better term.
I mean, a man/woman is physically 'mature' when all the reproductive organs have fully developed and the person is capable of human reproduction.
Are you mentally mature when you start thinking about sex more then your gameboy? What?
I say the entire term 'mental maturity' is popular marketing speak for 'total nonsense'...
I am seeing way too many responses missing the point of adult maturity. I believe those responses that are telling you that it is about adults taking responsibility are correct. For those who seem to be missing the point, let me give several real-life examples:
My fiancee lives on the third floor of a 3-story 3-apartment house. About 8 months ago two girls who recently were done with college moved in. The apartment building rules are made very clear: each apartment has assigned parking and there is no smoking indoors. The first day the girls parked in my fiancee's spot. She thought nothing of it as they were moving in. The second day they were done moving in and they continued to park where they want and in a manner that reduced 4 parking spots to 3. My fiancee knocked on theie door and politely told them that they were in her spot and explained where their spots were. She was greeted with:
"Who the fuck do you think you are? The lanlord told us we could park anywhere we wanted."
Shocked, my fiancee went upstairs and called the landlord to tell him of the incident and that she had no idea how to proceed. He called the girls and explained to them where they were to park. The next day, things seemed better, as everyone parked where they were supposed to. But over the next few weeks, the parking degenerated and the girls went back to parking where they wanted, having friends park in spots that were'nt for parking, etc. The times they used my fiancee's spot, she would knock on their door and be greeted with rudeness and indignation. The girls got to the point that they would flip us off if they saw us. Yet all we wanted was the one parking spot we were paying for.
Then, they started smoking in the house and coming home late from the bars bringing in untold number of people. The smoking policy is there for two main reasons: the air system is such that smoke in the house moves throughout all of the apartments and it smells like you smoke in the apartment when you don't. Also, it is a fire hazard. So when the girls would smoke, my fiancee's apartment smelled like we were running a bar. I went and asked them once to please stop and they denied they were doing it. "We don't smoke." So we complained to the landlord. He came by and confronted them, to which we got a nasty letter written in bad english stuck to our door. It rudely introduced themselves to us, explained that the polite and neighborly way to handle things was not to go through the landlord and that if we had problems we should talk to them.
Smoking continued off and on, but the girls decided to be even worse. They would come home at 3am, deliberately bang doors, stomp up and down stairs, just to make the point that they could do what they wanted and we had no say. However, to our advantage, all the while the second floor apartment was keeping notes and also calling the landlord. Long story short, the girls decided they could do whatever they wanted since they were paying for the apartment. They had no respect for the other apartments, lied when convenient, broke good policies for their benefit, denied any responsibility, and wen tout of their way to exact revenge for their own out of control behavior.
Foruntantely, the landlord evicted them. Unfortunately, he was afraid of being sued and waited until just recently to do so, and did it in a manner which really wasn't an eviction but more of a denial to renew their lease. My fiancee is moving out and we only have one more month until we can get her out of there. The second floor apartment already vacated.
I see more and more of this kind of behavior within the people just coming out of college. (I am only 31 and in fact in grad school so I am still in college). They seem to do what they want and take no responsibility for themselves. I had my own "girls" story with a group of four living in my apartment complex that would play loud music and one night I watched as a very drunk one came home (in pants too tight to carry keys I guess) and
Simple question : why should we need to grow-up, when the gouverment is activily trying to become our parents ?
:-) ).
:-)
They tell is what to do, how to behave, and what to think (every four years something else, but that is not the point
If they are taking away our freedom as adults to decide for ourselves what is good us and our family (the sometimes hard, but allso positive points), why than try to keep the appearance of adulthood, with all the obligations that come with it (the negative points), alive ?
Nope. No adult rights, no adult obligations.
In short, the article describes a simple cause-and-effect.
The only thing you mature toward is death.
E Proelio Veritas.
There are people on welfare who fully know well that they are being deprived
of having children by an economic system designed to cause abject poverty.
They make use of what they've got and procreate anyway. Other people ekeing out
a living with five jobs per couple also have children, in spite of the supposedly sterilizing effects of low income. As far as "doing it on your tax dollar" is
concerned, there is no such thing as "your tax dollar". They reach into your pocket
and whatever they take is theirs. In fact you should be glad they're still spending
an ever decreasing small fraction of it on the people they have seen out into the
streets although not out of humanitarian considerations. They put welfare systems
into place to keep the raped, plundered and robbed from burning down their houses.
As far as the "Nanny State" is concerned, I agree with you wholeheartedly that people
have to take responsibility for their own action. However one thing that has been
bred out of them completely from early schooling to adult working life is to take
action itself. That we desperately need to work on.
So folk spend more time these days (officially) learning things and have to be more flexible in terms of what they need to know to do what ever they need to do.
And some guy years and years ago was more mature because past environments were more "stable" so there was nothing alternative or additional to learn, folk already knew exactly what they needed to know.
"the main role of education is to increase general, abstract intelligence and prepare for economic activity"
Isn't abstract intelligence something that is increased by the mere act of exploring your own life? I also suspect that a few in academia may be upset that the other main role of education is for its economic enablement.
If maturity means that I will only ever perform one single type of "economically motivated" activity all the time knowing everything that I'll ever need to know, or rather knowing my place in the true order of things, then I'm glad to be a child. At least it means I have some hope of something better.
Perhaps nuances of what the guy is trying to say have been lost in the conversion to a news article, or perhaps he's talking out of his arse.
But for some reason, it all sounds a little condescending to me, maybe I'm being childishly sensitive.
Just because you have a Ph.D. doesn't mean you're all there. (I'm in college I know. Did ya know the leader of the National Alliance has a doctorate?)
/enjoying life/ more than working ourselves into injury?
I don't get what this guy is trying to say. "Teachers, etc. are mostly rather immature except at work" to paraphrase. Right. So, basically, as a society, we now value
OK. I'm fine with that. I'm gonna go dance in the street now... ooh look a robin!
If it is the 'adult' understanding of the 50s, know that, it is out of fashion and practice already.
...
Dull people showing to be more serious and strong than they were
Read radical news here
Here's what the auther says himself: http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/ed-boygenius.html
You can make lots of money and not be a butt kisser or Stodgmeiser concerned with how you look in your Stodgemaster 4000 XL and know when to wear a tie or shoes. This sort of relates to that friendship/my space article where some folks in the comments talked about how everyone having lots of money means you see less troubles, rely on less people and therefore have less close relationships. This stuff is all tied together. The next major world war or global disaster may change that. Another way people forge deep relationships is through scientific or artistic achievement - though this is rare and I am not sure exactly what it is about the certain individuals that are able to achieve this.. or what would have to change about our society to make this more common place. Probably it would have to be less shallow.. and that's probably not happening any time soon.
I lived all my adult life -- hell, since my teens -- wanting the things you wrote.
Now I have a 6yo boy and a 2mo girl. And I have it all again.
Everytime he smiles because of his new YuGiOh card -- he made himself in a piece of A4 paper with his color pencils -- and everytime she smiles satified after feeding and everytime I hug both of them at night when it's cold and the three of us just cuddle watching the Simpsons or the Fairy Oddparents on TV, I forget about all the crap that is being an adult, and I am just there with the two people I love most in the world, completely happy.
A couple of years ago, the boy asked me "Dad, why do the adult make all the decisions", and I answered: "life is not fair -- adults got to make all the decisions, and children got to have all the fun."
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
As the life expectancy gets older we as a race are going to become more apt to be as we once were, children.As most of older folk look back there are things we regret and things we wish could live over.KMON people use a little common sense.Is this mean the older we live the dumber we get as a species or should we force our children to become more adult.UMMM NO.Always be a child at heart, no matter how old you are.Act your age fools.
Well, given the number of 20somethings I've seen playing World of Warcraft and still incapable of spelling simple words or avoiding ethnic slurs, I gotta say... YUP.
I guess this would explain why people act like they're still in high school. It makes me wonder if maturity is linked to intolerance. People that tend to be racist and homophobic also seem to be more immature. But that's just my opinion.
as i got older people said i should grow up but i haven't yet
We'll have to wait for publication of the good Doc's paper to make any judgement of this claim. Or even to see if he is in fact claiming it.
There is enough food in the world to feed every human on the planet, though hundreds of people starve to death every day.
There would be enough shelter in the world too, if we only looked after what we had and built things to last.
Practical clothes can be churned out by machines in a matter of seconds, if we set them up and tell them to do it, yet much of what is worn in the so-called first world is made by hand by people leaving in poverty conditions in less-developed countries.
One can say similar things about medicine, education, the natural environment, and a host of other important issues.
What's the common thread among all of these shortcomings? A lot of adults haven't grown up, and still suffer from greed, selfishness, and other negative emotions. With the resources and technology we have available to humanity today, we could provide for every human being on the planet, and we could all work only 20 hours a week.
If you're an adult who has grown up, please consider what you can do to help. Make a small donation to a charity that supports someone less fortunate than you. Change something in your life to be a little more environmentally friendly. Volunteer a couple of hours of your time to a good cause. Have the courage to vote for a someone who stands for these values, even if they have no chance of getting elected (this time), and tell everyone why you voted that way.
The more people grow up, take some personal responsibility for the state of the world, and do their small part in improving it, the better life will be, and there's really nothing indulgent about it.
Or we could just say "Yeah, whatever" and make it someone else's problem. Not that that would be childish, or anything.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I've been describing myself as 'adolescent going on mid-life crisis' since sophmore year in high school. Then it was more of the later, now it's more of the former.
cheers
Man, I could have shown them that any given day playing World of Warcraft!
Or ANY online game....
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
I have seen WAY too many people acting like they were 12 or below no matter what their age is. Darwinian law will sort most of them out but as always some will make it through.
"Adults are obsolete children, and the hell with them."
-Dr. Seuss
I HAVE CUBIC WISDOM THAT TRANSCENDS AND CONTRADICTS ONE DAY GODS
Mankind has domesticated many species and the most common characteristic among domesticated animals is that they are very close, physically and socially, to young elements of their respective original savage species. Domesticating is done by selecting at each generation, elements who are the most docile element, which in a litter is often referenced as the dominated one.
But how the "docility" factor is evaluated ?
1- is the element aggresive in any maneer ?
2- can it be teached something ?
3- are the drawbacks of its presence minimal ?
In short: those are the criteria of specialization and profitability.
What are domesticating currently used means ?
1- controling access to food: gratifications/sanction process.
2- simulating social hierachy and dominance.
3- controling access to knowledge, which is the root of authority: basically allowing or not one individual autonomy to choose its own food and way of survival.
In short: those are the means by which you lock someone in a consumer-only attitude.
Maybe one side effect of our specializing and consumering based societies is to produced domesticated people, in which case it is no suprised that someone found new generations more and more far from what the observer think "being adult" really is.
Maybe it is also how civilizations die: specializing people to be more efficient regarding profitability, locking them in a strict consumering attitude to ensure that profitability will last and one day waking-up as a big well grown fruit for the "barbarian hordes" from the outside. This may explain why anciant Greks, Romans and all other society that once dominated the world they knew have always found its youth as "immature". Specialization and consumering have simply domesticated them. And then they died.
Unfortunately these immature people can vote and sue. Their political attitudes basically boil down to an extended version of adolescent rebellion and "self-expression" that is all about self but neither contains substantive content that expresses an idea nor adds to the public discourse. They are usually against traditional social mores (especially religious mores) because they have a vague sense that tradition is somehow repressive of their "self-expression", but they can't really tell you why because they have to admit that any society must have rules to control bad behavior in order to make collective living bearable.
If you look closely, you'll see that those who protest the loudest about "self-expression" are usually the most conformist, but their conformity is within their own group. They will claim that weird hair, tattoos, and body piercing are about expressing themselves and they don't care what other people think, but here is what puts the test to their lie; All (or most) of their friends will also have weird hair, tattoos, and body piercing. They would never wear a plaid polyester leisure suit in front of their friends, precisely because they do care what their friends think and they have a need to conform within their own social group.
When these folks have an idea to express other than senseless reflexive nihilism, I'll be listening. But I'm not holding my breath.
Just spend 15 minutes on the average interstate during rush hour.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Maybe it's because as the world turns increasingly to s h i t, people develop a imaturity complex derived from the "laugh" half of the proverbial "laugh or cry" syndrome.
... the modern equivalent of the bad stuff that used to happen continually to people from a very young age, and built the mental toughness required for better perspective on what is, and is not, a hard life.
I think maybe you've got it backwards. By historical standards, life is better, for more people, than it ever has been. For most westerners, we live in the lap of luxury, doing relatively little back breaking work, cut down ever less often by capricious diseases, and with a standard of living that would make our ancestors blush. It's precisely because we have it so easy that we're still experiencing the world the way that a child does (with the hard stuff handled by your parents, you can just "be a child" and not sweat stuff). So, when a little bit of adversity comes along, it feels not unlike that first round or two of angst that clobbers so many teenagers ("It's, like, so not fair!").
Dealing with some adversity personally is one of the things that brings on a mature, rational, balanced outlook. Despite some obvious exceptions, I think that very trying participation in sports, or some truly rough-and-ready outdoorsy stuff, or even a short stint in something like military service tends to produce much better-rounded people than simply shifting from couch to couch in front of an increasingly sophisticated variety of game consoles. Yes, horrific trauma is an exception, and the results from that stress are not what I'm talking about. Although, a lot of young people today consider not having a new smart phone at least once a year to be true deprivation.
The "I don't know whether to laugh or cry" symptom is, I think, actually literally true. People without experience in certain trying circumstances literally don't know how to process the low-level stuff they're feeling in the context of their rather cushy lives. I've been pretty convinced for a while now that most of the professional people I know (like techies) don't really grow up (if at all) until they're in their late 30's - usually it takes things like death in the family, a couple of layoffs
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
At 36 I think I'm starting to be an adult. Ten years ago I made a choice between investing some windfall profits and a sports car. The sports car won. Six months ago I had a similar choice between investments and another sports car. This time the investments won, even with the growing shadow of MIDDLE AGE fast approaching and the fact that as a percentage of income, the sports car is a lot more affordable now than it was ten years ago.
I think it all comes down to realizing that people depend on me. I forego immediate gratification because I'm putting away for my daughter and making her life easier. I think about her before I think about me. Almost every decision, major and minor, is changed by how it affects her. Sports car? No back seats so I can't drive her with me. New laptop? I could put the money in a bond and she'll have five times that in a few years. Even my choice in food is affected since she likes to eat what I eat.
I see this typically in good-looking males and females, or otherwise adults that parents and society has continued to spoil well past their childhood. People who were and are not requiring much of themselves will not "grow up" mentally.
I find it ironic that people tagged this story with "obvious" and "duh." They essentially have the same meaning, but one is much more immature than the other.
"You are either with us or against us"
"Bring 'em on"
"Dead or alive"
we are a nation of immature adults, led by a frat boy
Geez, a workday drive on almost any SoCal freeway could have told you the same thing ten years ago. Every time I go to work I feel like I'm driving with a bunch of six-year-olds. Self-centered, arrogant, and rude to excess. Driving skills to match...
For starters, I am 22, and probably just about to finish up my post-secondary education (barring a higher degree).
That being said, people can have all the hope in the world, and it is worthless. So what if people are hopeful that the ills of life don't plague them? How does that make them any different than their ancestors? You're perfectly right, things DON'T change, unless there are enough people to change them. And let me explain something I've noticed, my generation (on average) is too used to things being handed to them. I am including myself in this. I think this generation will succeed on an industrial scale, but I have little hope for it on a personal one.
There are some benefits to being in this generation, but overall, we're no different. I predict the divorce rate is going to skyrocket under my selfish generation.
As for wanting no responsibility and being carefree... That is what alcohol is for. If only for a few hours.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
critiqued by somebody who can't use mature detractions.
Aren't they the little people who you see anoying everyone in public places because they won't stop crying their eyes out? I've always wondered what could be so awful about their lives that they feel the need to cry so much. You've done little to enlighten me.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I actually think that adults are letting the world note their immaturity more than before.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
But what am I?
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
I think his point was much energy is wasted on the fancy shit. Luxury cars, when all we really need is a model T, so to speak. Buying those 'nice' clothes to impress your preferred sex, or the neighbors, or to show people that you have 'grown up' and can be 'taken seriously'.
Most of society and culture is wasteful and useless if your goal is to live and be happy.
Blar.
Absolutely! You are only young once, but you can be immature forever!
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
There are other aspects of our culture that dilute personal responsibility. Corporations, by design, insulate managers and shareholders from actions they benefit from personally. We're okay with that, though. No problems there. But if an INDIVIDUAL avoids responsibility, suddenly western civiliazation is in dire trouble. If a corporation files bankruptcy so the shareholders don't have to ante up to pay the debt for the entity they own, we don't bat an eyelash, but if Joe Sixpack declares Chapter 11 then we get all concerned about the state of humanity.
Government habitually hides behind secrecy to avoid responsibility. Where is the hue and cry? Why is it only the morons on Jenny Jones who get our contumely?
Our so-called 'Mature' leaders, products of the old school, seem more stuck-in-their-ways rather than 'mature'. The 70-80 year-old fuckers who insist on driving and never thought that maybe they'd have to give up driving at some point and make lifestyle changes to accomodate that? The mature older people who insist on forming our society and law in the vein of their 2000+ year-old religion based on a savage proto-civilization?
This article smells of some old, crusty and un-adaptive person looking for funding. Maturity seems to be giving up and toeing the line.
Blar.
Adults: "Are not!"
Researchers: "Clearly if you look at the results of the study there is a clear correlation between adult and child behavior."
Adults: "Is not!"
Researchers: "You are proving our point now."
Adults: "Are not!"
Researchers: "Are too!"
Rinse. Wash. Repeat.
Dude, the nanny state isn't the cause of absolution of responsibility.
If it was the nanny state, surely most social/democratic states - such as Canada or Switzerland - should now be 3rd world hellholes. (Since no one would learn to take care of themselves, right?) Yet, they somehow maintain a decent standard of living and moderately high education levels.
I remember how I got worried when 2 leaders with lots of nukes each argued about a spy-plane like two 8-year-old boys.
- It fell on my backyard, so it's mine
- No. It's mine. Give it back to me.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/asia_pacific/http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
It's studies like this that make the behavior of George Bush start to make sense. The big baby.
Accepting that one has responsabilities doesn't mean giving up on one's dreams.
Being friendly and joking with people is not the same as being immature.
Being serious all the time and totally giving up one's pleasure in life for the sake of family, community or just to be like everybody else is not maturity, it's being a drone (in my opinion, a sheep).
Real maturity is achieved when one achieves the level of self-confidence needed to outgrow the "fitting a mold just because thats what one is '(not) expected to do' behaviour" and one finds out it's possible to balance responsabilities and fun without beraking the first or giving up the second.
Unfortunately, our society is designed around the expectation that most people will "settle down", and become "hard-working family men/women". The push is constantly there to be a nice little drone, work hard to make money, buy loads of stuff that don't really make you happy (consume, consume, consume), become what your neighbours expect you to be and expect the same back from them, accept that you're just another average working stiff, accomodate and don't make waves.
BTW: Dressing up in a specific style (geek, retro, necro, whatever) to "make a statement", "be different" or "cause a reaction" can be just as much a form of "trying to belong", "accomodating to a sterotype" or in general "being relative to others" as wearing a suit for work - ask yourself "am i dressing this because of who i am or because of who i want to be?". Clothes are a tool - dressing a certain way can help you progress to certain aims, and it's what you are aiming at that matters, not what you wear.
Think back to your childhood. Remember when you were 6, and you thought you were a pretty big kid? And when you were 12, you remembered being 6 and immature, but you were quite sure that you were "pretty grown up now". As you look back and remember the memories of our youth, it doesn't seem that we were much different from now. We felt about as adult -- or more -- then as we do now, the only difference being that now some things that seemed to make perfect sense to us then don't quite now. ("I really thought that?")
:-/ Actually, she is truly mentally retarted (fetal alcohol effect) but not so much that many people would have noticed. My mother is raising her first child that she abandoned, but couldn't do much about the rest of them that she delivered and raised in terrible circumstances due to poor choices she continues to make. Then again, she probably doesn't view having more kids as stupid, because the state pays her more money for every one she gets, so neither her nor the latest bum she hooks up with has to work....
My experience is that MANY (but certainly not all) people who haven't yet married and chosen to have children (many are in school, but many more are busy chasing careers looking for fulfilment) show many signs of maturity -- but like the 6 year-old, they don't view themselves as immature (and neither do their friends in a similar state), but instead look down on everyone else around them as inferior. They see themselves as more mature than everyone else around them, even though to others they look like educated idiots. When that view is threatened, they often throw fits that reveal their underlying lack of confidence gained through maturity and varied responsibilities.
I think that having children (and actually participating actively in the raising of them) does a lot to mature young adults, particularly men. It's amazing to see the changes that can happen in a young man when he has a child under the proper circumstances (i.e. where he has married and with his wife chosen to have children, not just slept with her and gotten stuck with the child support).
Then again, I have to agree that there are a plenty of people with quite a few children that make me think "Will someone please STERILIZE them!??" -- my sister being one of them...
"It's hard to figure out if you're insane, because if you are, your best diagnostic tool is broken!" This holds true for self-evaluation of maturity, too. The best I can do is to try to objectively catalog my actions and see if I do things that might not be the best choice, then try to correct any tendancies to do things that don't further my goals and values, and just keep trying to "grow up"!
I think the old farts are pissed that they gave up their ideals at a younger age than the current generation. They probably hit 22-23 and resigned themselves to the culture and societal norms. This generation(s) refuses to give in and the previous gen is pissed. They thought that if they knuckled under to the demands of THEIR elders, the cycle would continue. Whoops, guess it didn't!
Besides, these wise oldster who flocked to the Suburbs where a car is needed to live...weren't wise enough to extrapolate old age = inability to control a motor vehicle.
Into the old-fart ghetto with you un-wise jerks.
Blar.
I reject the traditional concepts of maturity. I refuse to spend my life doing things I don't like because of some outmoded notion of 'have to.'
Man I would hate to see your toilet, though you neighbours can probably smell it... I, on the other hand, still watch cartoons, still throw paper airplanes, but when I 'have to' do something I don't like to do, I fucking do it.
You can't take the sky from me...
His post was not condescneding - I thought it was rather charming. I have found that spending time with kids, helps me keep things in perspective. Perhaps they find delight in silly things that are contrary to my adult sensibilities, but seeing them happy makes me happy.
FWIW, I think that making them laugh and smile is one of my jobs as an adult, even if it does make me look a bit foolish on occasion. We all take ourselves too seriously at times, and spending time with kids can be a useful reminder of that.*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
"Honestly, it is getting to the point where I ask, when are people going to take responsibility for their actions - that is the cornerstone of being an adult, making your choices and accepting the consequences of those choices."
Personally I think immaturity is a sign of stress and helplessness people feel under modern capitalism, it's becoming harder and harder to make a living. If you want to blame something for the state of society, the economy and how businesses use people is the first place to look.
Wow, your poor parents, they must have been really dumb to have you then.
I teach molecular biology at a University, and I'll have you know that the proportion of professors with multiple children to those with none that I work with, or know of is about 8 or 9 to 1. Very smart people have multiple children, it is not the dumb, but the selfish who have none. I've met a number of people who say they are never going to have kids, and do you know what the unifying personality trait is? They are selfish and conceited. It is cowardly to think "I'm not going to have kids because I don't know what kind of world I'll be bringing them up in."
My wife and I have 3 kids under 2, and are planning on 2 more. I know that I can't buy toys like I used to, I was the first of my friends to have a dvd player, digital camera, GPS, MP3 player, PDA and you know what? Those things only bring happiness at the shallowest of levels, while watching my twins crawl around chasing each other and laughing hysterically - that is a joy that goes right to your soul.
not having to put up with the hassles of tending to kids.
I'm sure many traditionally-raised folks might see this as immature or selfish, but it all depends on the point of view.
On the point of view of Darwin, you're gonna be out-bred by the traditionalists, and your lifestyle will go the way of the dodo.
You can't take the sky from me...
...because it damn well is. And it does make sense - today's environment does not allow you to learn one thing and just keep doing that for the rest of your life. You have to keep learning and learning while doing at the same time. It makes sense that this environment doesn't allow the mental wiring to solidify.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Better to conform within a sub-group than to conform to the entire group. For a self-acclaimed mature person, you sure do see things in black and white! Or is that the sign of maturity?
Besides, tradition is the must incredibly inane reason for doing ANYTHING. Sure, look at it, and then make your own decision...but to do it because it is traditional, and everyone else is doing it...that just makes you a tool.
I think religious mores are hated because of the inherant hypocracy in the rules and the practicioners both. We can pick and choose the good from religion and leave behind the socials rules of the savage originators that condems eating kinds of animals, or kinds of sex or behaviours within family groups.
Your post is a perfect troll if I didn't htink you were actually serious. We're all nihilists if we don't succumb completely to the demands of the aging populace?
Blar.
Hey, everybody knows men usually never grow up. Have you ever seen a grown-up man? They're scary.
-- Cheers!
All you have to do is watch some of those and it clearly shows why this is happening :p
Children demand time and money. The social system in this country is set up and even helped by government to encourage people breeding. My opinion is that they know they've 'got you' when you have a kid. You become more predictable and less risk-taking. You are the ideal citizen who will choose the status quo more often because the children and increased costs increase your stress level...why choose for more stress by encouraging a changing environment!? You realize that you can lean on society in ways that child-less people cannot...and therefore you want to maintain the ability to lean...which means not rocking the boat and changing things.
Just a though.
Blar.
The dancing cop in the picture? That's Providence, RI's own Tony Lepore, the Dancing Cop. They trot him out around holidays and he's usually directing traffic on Dorrance St. between Westminster and Weybosset.
I'm telling Congress on you.
My lawyer could beat up your lawyer.
Boy: I never said I knew where the WMDs were.
Father: We saw you do it, son.
Boy: No, no, no, no, no.
Boy 1: That idea is mine!
Boy 2: No, you gotta share!
Boy 1: It's mine! (punches boy 2)
Boy 1: Wanna play Kerberos?
Boy 2: Yeah! Only you gotta show me how.
[They play]
Boy 2: No, you can't use MD5.
Boy 1: Yes I can, we always used MD5.
Boy 2: It's my house, we play by my rules.
Yup, sounds about right.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Al of the above is great, but many of those things you can still do as an adult. Yes of course, as an adult you know a lot of things the world can really do without, as the parent explained. But life as a kid is also not always pleasant. You get bullied at school or by your brothers and sisters, there's homework, puberty and lots of other horrendous things. Not to mention kids who grow up in unstable families, for whatever reason. In every phase of our lives there are hardships. You have to find a way to deal with them, and make the best out of life.
I find that as an adult I have more power to do the things I like, without my parents or other people telling me what's good for me. I can make my own choices in life, and I am the one responsible for them. I like that a lot. Besides, the toys I had as a kid where loads of fun, but in my job I get to play with electron microscopes, dangerous chemicals and e-beam machines! What else could an immature man wish for?
-- Cheers!
The article did a rather piss-poor job of explaining what the research is suggesting, which is a pity because the topic is an interesting and complex one. Only one paragraph got the proper consequences:
:-), but to illustrate what almost everyone has experienced.
"People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence in the sense of being unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact."
So yes, childlike wonder and flexibility are good for learning new stuff, and tend to follow with a more dynamic society. The consequences of it are that people are going to be unbalanced, rash, irritable, and childish.
There is a guy I work with. He's in his mid-30s, and generally a nice guy. However at times (typically six or eight times a day) I want to scream at him, "GROW UP!!! Take some responsibility for what you're doing!!!" However, I don't. Now there are three 'maturity' issues at play here.
1) His lack of self-responsibility is immature (lack of responsibility)
2) My instinctive reaction is immature (ranting and raving like a kid)
3) My actions are mature (either nothing, talking to his manager, or talking to him professionally)
I bring this up not to prove my maturity (there are a lot of other cases that aren't so complimentary to me
In a modern workforce, I would expect that maturity equates fairly close to professionalism, and I can definitely say that I've seen a decline in professionalism in the last decade or so. Outside of the workplace, it's a bit trickier. People with kids who try to hard to be their kids' best friends and refuse to apply any discipline are a target, but it's a hard line to draw cleanly. Similarly, one poster mentioned that he and his wife have decided against having kids, because they're not done being kids themselves. This personally strikes me as a bit selfish (a fundamentally immature behaviour), but at the same time they seem remarkably mature in their immaturity.
At the base of it, I put a lot of the blame on pop culture and society. We venerate and idolise people who embody every negative aspect of immaturity (actors, rock stars, etc.) and naturally come to not only forgive but accept and rationalise their behaviour. At the same time, we know that getting stoned and trashing a hotel room is wrong, so we don't emulate them--however, the bar has already been set, and it's sitting in the mud. We have such a LOW standard of behaviour to exceed that an average eight-year-old is a more mature person than the stars who show up in the tabloids.
Society's final anti-maturity shot is the entire 'hide your age' industry. Makeup, surgery, and clothes are all designed to avoid aging, because aging reminds us of death. We're a culture so terrified of death that we'll spend billions to shove it under the rug. Unfortunately, that leads to consciously NOT acting like we think grown-ups should do, but rather as kids.
I could also mention a lawsuit-happy culture discouraging people from taking responsibilty for their own actions, but that would be another page of text, and this post is long enough already.
Maturity means responsibility. Taking responsibilty for your own life and your own actions, as well as acting responsibly and dealing responsibly with the actions of those around you. It is my personal belief that it doesn't necessarily preclude doing frivolous or foolish things when appropriate, but that historically it was never considered appropriate for adults to do such things. (Anyone remember Mary Poppins?) One exception has always been academics--the image of an absentminded or childlike genius professor is an old one indeed. In contemporary society, immature behaviour is allowed for all adults, and even encouraged. The new marque of maturity will be one who behaves in a mature and responsible fashion (a) when necessary, and (b) when desirable, but not necessarily (c) when not needed.
Maybe it's really a weakening of true maturity, but as long as (a) and (b) are achieved, I can happily deal with a society that has accepted (c).
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
If people mature slower than before, mentally, then that sounds like a reason to raise the age of consent further.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Becoming an adult used to take an explicit ceremony, with months or more of preparation, which every adult completed. Encoding cultural history as well as the expectations of adult behavior.
As more traditional culture is lost, more people go through life without the benefits of it, or a "new version" that can update it to work in modern society.
Girls have lost more of these procedures, filtered out along with lots of oppressive female institutions, and probably represent lots of the people not converted into adult personalities. If women's culture included explicit "rites of passage" from girlhood into womenhood, more girls would become women. At least some men have the bar mitzva, or the fraternity pledging.
I think that if every girl learned about the biology of becoming a woman in "midwife clubs" assisting a group of adult midwifes for a year, then celebrated their own "coming of age", they'd be a lot better integrated with their gender identity as well as their maturity identity. Boys would benefit from it as well, but not as much as girls, just as girls benefit from the masculine cultural bar mitzva, but not as much as boys.
--
make install -not war
Never heard of it. Are you sure you don't mean evolutionary psychology?
I guess noone considered that this supposed perception of 'adult maturity' is subject to change as culture changes.
I don't think the definition of maturity has nor ever will truly be valid enough to claim that adults are more or less mature. On a more realistic stance maturity is nothing but the state of being an adult. If the majority of adults decide they want to play video games, have sex with random people, do drugs, and listen to loud rock music then that is in fact the new state of maturity rather than claiming they are less mature simply because they don't act exactly the same as the predisessors. The notion that you can call a generation of adults more or less mature than the generation before them is laughable. What other purley subjective critisisms can we generalize entire populations with?
Next they will be telling us how studies 'prove' this generation of adults are uglier than the last. Articles like these just show how oblivious the common person is to the idea of perception. What is attractive or mature today has not always been considered so in the past and will not always be considered so in the future. If there is any real measurable prerequisite to maturity it's puberty and just about every study I've ever seen shows that age to be dropping. Social behaviour is simply not a reaonsable way to claim a person is mature or not and generalizing an entire generation of people with subjective claims just because they are not directly comparable in simplistic psychological models holds no real substance. Some day robotic automation will change the shape of the working class and social behevious will change with a new work ethic that doesn't mindlessly focus on the utilitarianism. The concept of maturity must change to fit peoples social behaviour, not define it.
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you mean they don't become sullen meat-robots doing nothing but going to and from their jobs and cultivating adult-approved recreations like golfing and needle-point? what a tragedy.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Maturity and Immaturity are not symmetric. Maturity is a convergence on certain behaviors and attitudes that have been observed or hoped to have a collectively positive effect on society.
There's nothing wrong with deciding to avoid war in a different way, but there is something questionable about saying that war will be avoided by unilateral disarmament because you've relinquished any capability of enforcing that. It works great when it happens to work, but it's unrealistic to think it's going to work in the real world. It's fantasy. It's immature.
Immaturity is not just The Other Set of Rules Not Tried. It is a lack of rules, and a lack of consistency, and it leads to a lack of Society At All. Maturity requires some form of internal consistency, while immaturity does not.
It is clearly true that Society has changed so fast lately (due to the Information Explosion, as accelerated by the Internet) and perhaps the world itself has changed quickly (due to, or exemplified by, Global Warming) that parents/adults/elders have less to offer in the way of information to children/youth about how to live life successfully. It's hard to make true predictions about how life will go if you live a certain way, as might have been done in the past. (Maybe the predictions were never true in the past, but society was still arguably in better balance.)
Maturity will come at that point where we as a society come to grips with what we have done with ourselves and start to feel that following the advice of anyone else we see around will routinely lead to improvement in our own lives. In some sense, I think rampant immaturity is a way of society saying "it just doesn't matter what I do--it will lead to the same outcome". And while none of us may aspire to live in a world where we can't affect things, I think to some extent there's more truth to such a statement than we might wish...
There's a danger here that Organized Religion will assert itself, not as a belief system but as a force for order, because part of what religion exists for is to fill that void--to offer answers to the unanswerable. And the more Society makes everday questions unanswerable, the more Religion will offer answers.
In that regard, Religion is a looming threat to Freedom. And don't get me wrong--I'm not anti-Religion. I think Religion and Freedom could easily co-exist in our better times. But it's one thing for someone to seek Religion freely just because they want what it offers; it's another to seek Religion because they it is the only game in town and they are just tired of a needlessly dysfunctional society. Religion is ready to fill those gaps, but it will of necessity fill the gaps with rules, not freedoms. In recent times, civilized society has begun to offer answers to the questions "how do I live, what makes my life purposeful, etc." But if the power political grabs for money, the wanton depletion of natural resources, the inability of a legal system to protect individuals against obviously-unethical acts, etc. lead people to take refuge in Religion because it is the only game in town, that's not the same. It's more like the Republicans claiming they wont the election because the Democrats had no one credible to offer... it takes more to have a winning plan than the absence of an opponent.
Society needs to start re-asserting leadership and offering ways for people to succeed through honest, hard work. That will bring back maturity. Otherwise, the mature thing will, perversely, continue to be "grab what you can while you can because none of it matters anyway". Right now, that's what we're up against: Telling people that if they follow the rules, behave well, be honest, etc. they will succeed when it's obviously not true, is no recipe for having anyone respect you. The Youth of today will just laugh and say "You call what you're doing succeeding? You're just wasting your life." And they'll be right.
Just look at the people likely to run in the next US election. Unless the
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
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Is that what they mean by meta-moderation?
In 1979 "The Logical Song" by SuperTramp was my theme...and I was 14.
...
So what is so new about this? Some doctor needs to be published and put a name to this thing.
When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
a miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees well they'd be singing so happily,
joyfully, playfully watching me.
But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible,
logical, responsible, practical.
Then they showed me a world where I could be so dependible,
clinical, intellectual, cynical.
There are times when all the world's asleep,
the questions run so deep, for such a simple man.
Won't you please, please tell me what we've learned?
I know it sounds absurd, please tell me who I am?
This isn't about not maturing, but wishing that he wasn't forced to mature so young,
and wanting to go back to a simpler time.
Today kids are kept from learning a lot of things that would get them ready for adulthood.
I mean please...removing swings and other equipment from playgrounds because they're too dangerous?
http://kutv.com/health/local_story_086170456.html
In an effort to shield children from anything dangerous while they grow up, parents and other adults
fail to prepare children for the real world. And any public institution (read schools) that doesn't
conform to this complete "safety" policy for children get sued out of existence or can't afford insurance.
Growing up, I thought my generation would be smart enough to avoid the dumb things my parents' generation
did to shield us kids from life. Unfortunately my generation is screwing it up even worse.
It's no wonder so many people have "psychological neoteny" but I doubt the explanation is as simple as TFA says.
Let's take a scientific approach to this hypothesis: people have more children because they know the taxpayers will pick up the bill! Doesn't this predict that people will have more children in countries that have more welfare?
So, testing what do we find? The exact opposite relationship exists. People in countries with less welfare have far more children. Europeans have fewer children that Americans, Israelis have fewer children than Palestinians. The average German couple has one child -- it has to rely on immigration to maintain its population, which it imports from countries with booming populations that have no welfare.
Do people sue each other more because of the nanny state? That is, the "nanny state" induces a kind of psychological condition that makes people sue each other more? An alternative hypothesis might be that there are more lawsuits in the United States because the legal system left much more to civil enforcement than to what would be prosecuted by the government in other countries. Ignoring that alternative for the moment, what testable prediction does the nanny state hypothesis make? Doesn't it predict that countries with more nannyish systems have more lawsuits? Doesn't it pretty clearly predict that?
But of course, we all know that the United States has far more lawsuits than more nannyish states in Europe.
This is why, I think, it makes a lot of sense to apply scientific priciples to political theories like this.
1 Corinthians 13:11 (KJV)
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
I guess we're all ignoring the last half of the scripture.
I am suprised there has been no reference to Rome just prior to it's fall. The reason the maturity level is lowering is directly related to the amount of maturity needed to survive. Rome was the mightiest civilization throughout history and it fell not from an outside intruder but from apathy from it's citizens. Rome had become so strong that the majority of it's people did not need to protect themselves for they were protected by Roman Centurions. As they became increasingly restless, and immature, Rome enacted the Bread & Circuses policy to provide food and entertainment to keep it's people engaged. Ultimately it could not stem the growing unrest and the people revolted. The current popularity of BLOGS is a perfect place to see the unrest in todays society.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence...
Again, I ask, what is the "research" described in the article using as a control or baseline? This is never discussed -- and it sounds like this "research" is nothing more than an elaborate opinion-piece. TFA even use David Brooks as a kind of "reference." I enjoy David Brooks, even if I don't always agree with him. He is a respectable social commentator and pundit, but he is ultimately a professional opinionist, not a respected psychological researcher.
Also, can someone help me out with this quote from the article:
Charlton added that since modern cultures now favor cognitive flexibility, "immature" people tend to thrive and succeed, and have set the tone not only for contemporary life, but also for the future, when it is possible our genes may even change as a result of the psychological shift. [bold emphasis mine]
Genes shifting as the result of a psychological shift? WTF? It was my understanding that genes needed a bit more than "psychology" to change. Are these guys implying a Lamarckian evolution based not even on physical characteristics but somehow "attitudes affecting evolutionary physiology"? With little snips like this, it makes this work seem very fishy to me, bordering on crackpotism.
Anyway, while the basic hypothesis has merit, the research the article describes doesn't seem to demonstrate or prove (or even have the ability to demonstrate or prove) the proposed effect.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
With the resources and technology we have available to humanity today, we could provide for every human being on the planet, and we could all work only 20 hours a week.
You are an idiot! How do you think the available technology and resources came to be? They came from long hours of hard work! How long do you think the technology and resources would continue to last if everyone started doing half the work or less? Not long at all.
Your post clearly demonstrates the immaturity, naivete, inexperience and ignorance of youth that older individuals are not growing out of, as the article discusses.
Now, some people will say that I too am immature because I called you an idiot. But, the fact is that I am not immature, I have simply chosen to be rude and dismissive because I am weary from dealing with, well... Idiots!
You know, I believe you have got something here. Given the level of immaturity of the characters on "Friends", "Seinfield" and many other television programs combined with the behavior of the actors in various beer commercials, we may have lowered the bar for maturity. If the major media formats in our culture show examples of adult behavior that is, essentiallly, childish then who can blame the viewers for adopting those standards?
:)
I'm reminded of an ex-girlfriend who seemed to me to over-react to situations. I was puzzled until I realized that she was acting as if she were a character on a television program; where drama is important. We may have a couple of generations now doing the same thing.
Nice work.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
As an adult, I am subject to a wider variety of feelings and emotions than a 6 year old. Being an adult is more subtle - we gain access to joys that a child couldn't even understand. When you're six, you know happy, sad, fear, hungry, tired. As an adult you also can experience bemusement, irony, sarcasm, terror, bliss, longing, melancholy, and a host of other things that make the experience of just living through your day more deep and meaningful. Your mental palette is larger. Yes, it means you can be hurt or suffer in larger ways than a child. But you can also rise above them in ways a child could not. The game is bigger, so the rewards are bigger.
And speaking of the palette, food is an excellent way of describing the difference. As a 6 year old, all you crave is candy. Big ugly blocks of sugar. As an adult, you're complex enough to tell the difference between good sushi and bad. Really expertly done fresh sushi with fresh ground wasabi and some nice sake on the side is sublime, and that's the joy of it, and a child could never understand it. Think of how many things there are like that.
Another good reason - look at what you would have to go through today. At the risk of sounding like an Auld Farte, think about how bad teenagers have it today. All the good music is gone. Pepsi decides what is cool these days. You have three choices basically. Stupid thumping gangsta rap whose only function is to shake your car's quarter panels, bubblegum crap pop, or Nu Metal where guys with long hair get up in front of the mike, blast the distortion and whine about their relationships.
And you can't do anything fun or dangerous in this bubble-wrap world we've made. As soon as one kid gets hurt doing something it gets outlawed or regulated past the point of any fun whatsoever. How many childhood memories do you have where you were experiencing both big fun and mild danger at the same time? Are their any stories you have about your childhood that you haven't told your parents yet because you don't want to give them a heart attack? Kids today will never have those kinds of vivid childhood memories. We've outlawed them.
If God All-Mighty came down from the clouds and told me he would be willing to make me a six year old again, I would politely decline. I've got it better now than I've ever had it, and I feel genuinely sorry for children born in this time.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Funny you should bring up clothing; It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately.
Particularly: "How can I explain Second Life dress habits? How can I explain my own personal desire to dress how I feel?"
Note that I dress geek conservative, which is to say: "Backpack." It consists of cheap shoes, t-shirt, blue jeans, and a backpack. The t-shirt is upgradable to a shirt known as "nicer," or "nice." I do not dress goth, or otherwise stylized. This is to say: I'm hardly fashionable.
The traditional reasons given for dressing up include: narcissism, to fit peer stereotype, manipulation.
But I've been questioning that lately; I don't think it truely fits what I see, in these goth communities, and so on. I think it can be those things, but I don't think that's truely it. In fact, where I do see those things, it's more in the "traditional" or "conservative" spheres; not the youth scenes. (Or, I suppose I should say, youthful scenes.)
I'm thinking about putting together an essay: "The Moral Virtue of Narcissism."
The basic idea, I'm developing in my head, is this: Dress-up has roots in communication. It's a way of communicating: "This is what I'm thinking, this is how I feel, this is what I aspire to, this is what I value, this is what I aim for, this is what's going on for me." It can be connected with the virtues of sincerity, and appreciation, and beauty.
If communication is valuable, then why not dress-up?
"There are people on the benefit having children ... then demanding that the tax payer for the bill for their lifestyle choice."
OK, I agree that there are some people, and yeah, I pay for my kid, but let's look at a few facts:
- In the US, the child care tax credit is for 80% of child care expenses - the tax credit for viagra is 100%. Why are old guy boners worth more than children's care?
- Similarly, the tax credit for child care is around $3000. Please. My provider charges over $40 per day, or over $160 per week. If your provider is charging you $120 per week, it's about market minimum, and that's $6,000 for a 50 week year.
- The normal child tax deduction is only good for 15 1/2 years, it's limited if you're making decent money, or if you don't make any money, you don't get it.
- Public assistance comes with many strings, one of which is that the unmarried father (normally) must be signed into a program (TANF-D) where if he doesn't make child support payments, he can be imprisoned - no excuses - get sick and go to jail - normally for 6 months at a stretch. I know children whose mothers who cohabitate with the father, and they are afraid to sign the kids up for help, so those kids just don't have access to Medicare, etc. Also, "child support" in this context can mean the majority of the money is going to fees, late fees, court imposed lawyer fees, court imposed counseling, and court imposed this and that, and not actually helping the child. I've heard reports that 40% or more of a parent's income can be taken out with as little as $50 per month actually going to the child. Bankruptcy will not save you, and the fees and fines will dog you until you die.
- Also, if you're a parent under 35 or so, which is probably most parents, you're paying about 14% of your income, with no exemptions, to social security and Medicare, and if you look at your yearly statement, it says that by the time you retire, they will have no more than about 74% of the money available - if that. So you're being screwed there. How about getting that 26% back so that those people can feed and house their children? Nope. Grandpa needs his state subsidized Viagra.
So, whose being selfish here? A government that's out for it's own good first? An older generation willing to screw the young rather than give up extras? Or some poor, miseducated, smucks who think they can get away with having kids that they can't aford and not get seriously screwed?
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
Back in the early 70s and 80s, we woke up to a real problem.
We were wasting half our population, by not encouraging young girls to be everything they could be. A huge amount of societal energy went into teaching girls to have leadership qualities, a vision of themselves as agents in the world capable of doing anything their desire and talents qualified them for. As a result, in recent years we have had a bumper crop of dynamic young women, with a plan for their future, the education, the experience of competition fields (athletic, academic and artistic) to make those plans work.
This is a good thing.
But we've lost our way with boys. It's not that there aren't young men who have these qualities, it's just that it seemed for some time less urgent to foster them in boys; it was expected they would just be that way, or that somehow they'd be able to make their way because the playing field was tilted their way. Therefore we see relatively more young men with somewhat passive attitudes towards the future and their community than we did in the past.
Being a "guy" used to be a role that you took as the occasion demanded. At the weekend softball game, you were a guy. When duty called, you acted like a man. Now "Guy" and "Man" are more like mutually exclusive vocations.
I believe that gender makes a difference, but people are more complex than just their sex. I coach a little martial arts; when you coach somebody in, say sparring, you have to assess their strengths and weaknesses, and help them exploit their strengths, and build up or work around their weaknesses. Some people are very aggressive by nature, which wins fights with inexperienced opponents. Some people are very careful, which usually loses. But a well coached cautious player can exploit his greater affinity for tactics and technique to beat a poorly coached agressive one. Eventually you take somebody and you make him more than he used to be; not just a strong, reckless agressive attacker, and not just a cautious "runner". Coaching is about understanding the big picture of what usually works, but at the same time coming to grips with each athlete's individuality.
I can say from experience that education today is far superior to education 40 years ago, even though it was the post-Sputnik era. But it's a long way from making the most of every individual. If we spent twice as much effort on each student, in twenty years we'd get it back a hundredfold.
In any case, the way most young male persons learn what it is to be man is finding out they're about to become a father. It's not the exclusive way, but there's nothing like it to kick in the role appropriate behaviors of responsibility, sobriety, and duty. Since pepole are starting families later, I think that late adolescence is more often prolonged.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I think that this story is old news for anyone here who works in any aspect of the service industry. Whether it be answering phones, working as a retail clerk, or even waiting tables at a restaurant, the levels to which "adult" customers will stoop to get what they want is at once amazing and alarming. There are many so-called "adults" who are impossible to even reason with, let alone come to an amicable solution to whatever the problem is.
One great chronicle of such behavior is the blog Waiter Rant, where a server in an upscale New York bistro works constantly with the patrons from hell. I've done a decent amount of customer service, and people get all bent out of shape over the smallest things, many of which we have no control over. We're in a culture of entitlement, and everyone is supposed to receive exactly what they want, when they want it. And if they don't, then they'll scream, yell, threaten to sue, etc.
Look, it doesn't take a clinical psychologist to recognize immaturity in adulthood. I could have pointed to my ex-finace' as a prime example of someone who was a good 10 years behind the curve. It's amazing how some people don't learn how to deal with real life situations and revert to child like reactions. Nobody is perfect but I certainly see a lot of simple minded reaction to complex issues.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Indeed, I can tell you are immature because who wants kittes with all these OMG PINK PONIES!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In the book there are nto two personalities but a continuum of one.
In order to understand Pooh totally you must also read the Tao of Pooh.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Oh, I've no problem with screaming kids. Note how I don't criticize either the kids or the parents. I just find it hard to imagine being a 6 year old again and remembering just what could have been so awful so often.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
> I don't blame the cigarette companies - they're like any other company
Yep, because I'm sure every company sells addictive drugs that eventually kill the customer - and then construct a massive advertising campaign to get more customers (i.e. children) - definitely a winner for society.
Charlton explained to Discovery News that humans have an inherent attraction to physical youth, since it can be a sign of fertility, health and vitality. In the mid-20th century, however, another force kicked in, due to increasing need for individuals to change jobs, learn new skills, move to new places and make new friends. A "child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviors and knowledge" is probably adaptive to the increased instability of the modern world,
I tend to agree. When learning new stuff or encountering new situations, I find it easier to try to go with the flow rather than worry about the future. For example, if I start thinking, "Do I need to learn this? What will happen if I don't learn it fast? How long will I need it?" etc., then I tend to feel overwelmed. However, if I take it minute-by-minute and stop thinking and planning and find humor in it, I can get into the groove better.
Table-ized A.I.
The ability to change one's mind about things is something that tends to be exclusive to childhood. As people age, changing your mind about something becomes more difficult as the burden of existing evidence increases our psychological momentum. This is a process that I refer to as calcification. Eventually, a person decides that learning new things and changing their minds is no longer worth the effort. The person becomes less flexible and less adaptable to their environment. It isn't a given, but it's very difficult to avoid as one ages.
Although the article doesn't describe this, I'm wondering if calcification is happening earlier due to a lack of urgency to change one's mind, or if it's happening later because people are presented with more tempting options.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
That explains it! This story sheds considerable light on the behavior of posters on DailyKos, Democrat Underground, and yes, even Slashdot. They're not all children, they're just immature adults. :-)
Seriously, I think this phenomena (and the behaviors of the sights above) occurs because 1) people don't have to "grow up" to be survive/thrive in the world anymore, and 2) we are coddling our children too much, refusing to discipline them, and providing them with too many surrogate parents.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Where was the science in this experiment? How was "psychological maturity" defined and tested for? Is there some sort of indisputable characteristic associated with this, or did he just get a large sample size and ask them if they still liked scooby-doo? Without that, this just seems like pseudo-science supporting a world view in which todays' generation is less responsible that the last.
The best lack all convictions, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. -Yeats, The Second Coming
He says that we are obnoxious to the rest of the world. We constantly say we are the best and believe it. Just like the jock in school though we will eventually
find somebody who can kick our ass and then we'll grow up, at least we better grow up or we'll find the ass whoopin' only gets worse.
How much damage is this really doing? And to what extent do these people have other options? It's far too easy for people with plenty of resources who will never be stuck in these kinds of situations to judge those who are desperate and have little choice -- for the conservatives, it's "How could these people even think of an abortion?!", ignoring the actual situation these people are in, and for you it's "How could these people even think of having a child?!", again ignoring their situation and culture.
I think this is especially strange since the US, which has some of the highest birth rates in the western world, is still just barely edging out the death rate. People say ominous things about overpopulation, while much of Europe is slowly killing itself by not having children, and if you got rid of the poor US families who have children despite economic hardship, we'd probably be doing the same.
why not allow people to sue fast food companies who fail to put warning labels
And if fast food companies deliberately put dangerous chemicals in their food to make it more addictive (I mean, more than they already do), then maybe such lawsuits would be justified. The lawsuits against tobacco companies are (at least some of the time) a lot more complicated than just people claiming they didn't know smoking was bad for you.
I am the man with no sig!
I both agree and disagree with this. I'm of the mind that so long as I take care of everything I have to take care of, everything else is fair game. I play video games, I watch cartoons, I like to have stupid, mary-jane fun with my friends, but I am responsible about everything I do. I think adult maturity is accountability, respect for others, proper use of empathy, comprehensive communication and being responsible for yourself. You can still be a complete ass and be an adult so long as you follow these precepts. The lines blur in the middle these days.
"It's here, but no one wants it." - The Sugar Speaker
In old dictionaries, "adult" is defined as;
a lazy, slothful person. disgusting, stupid, immoral.
It is figured that because those days were emphasized to grow as a child under God, that is is recognized that a child is of the same substance of the Creator; being quick to love, slow to anger, defend the innocent, honest, work to ability, study and meditate constantly, pray without ceasing, love neighbor in same likeness, not provoke fellow children to anger, don't lie, no double-law to same qualified people, et al. (you all get the idea: a child is a *blessing* to everyone.
An adult, however, appears to be more qualified to be governed and held to ward of the SOCIAL SERVICES agency of the day because of the lack of intelligence to prove competancy in those matters.
without prejudice
I look at my parent's generation, and yes, in general, they were probably a bit more mature at my age than I and the family members and friends of my generation. On the other hand, our parents got married and had kids on average, a decade or more earlier than people of my generation. As people in my generation have begun getting married and, more importantly, having children, they seem to mature quite quickly to handle it (though this is far from being an absolute. Obviously some don't).
But the definition of maturity is really hard to objectify properly. I am 37, unmarried, and have no children. In some ways, I'll admit, I'm less mature than some of my married with kids family and friends my age. I'm freer. I've been able to travel more, change jobs more, live outside of the country, etc. Not that I'm unstable. I've worked almost without pause since I was 15. I have good jobs that entail responsibilities, but I'm pretty free to leave a job when I've had enough. Does that make me less mature? Maybe by some standards, but it also means I'm not as tied down. Maturity, in some ways, results from losing freedom. You have kids and you can't do some of the things you did before. You're not always as free to quit jobs and relocate, at least not without negatively impacting your family.
So we get to have our childhood a little longer than our parents. We're also going to live a good bit longer, on average, than our parents. So it stands to reason, to some degree, that we'll take advantage of that by stretching out some of the stages of aging. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. Personally, I've enjoyed the freedom not being tied down has brought me. Not that I don't want to have kids, but honestly, I'm not entirely sure I personally want to make the sacrifice, despite the obvious rewards. So go ahead and call me immature. At least I'm happy.
Right, but making a poison more addictive is just plain wrong, IMHO.
Then again, I would purposefully cause the extinction of the tobacco plant if I could. And give tobacco execs a knee in the groin* for all the suffering their product has caused, including to members of my family.
You do realize that they've caused many, many times as many deaths as you could even blame Bush for, right? And yet we act like people can choose not to be chemically addicted once they make the mistake of getting hooked and as if it is okay to make it hard for them to quit.
* I guess I'd have to give female execs a bitchslap or a throat punch.
Adult maturity is a myth. (Think about this during your next series of meetings at work.) Adult responsibilty is a reality.
Personally I think immaturity is a sign of stress and helplessness people feel under modern capitalism, it's becoming harder and harder to make a living. If you want to blame something for the state of society, the economy and how businesses use people is the first place to look.
Outstanding!
You have identified the root cause in America: rampant unchecked capitalism/commercialism. Because of this, we have ad-clogged mass media telling people they live in a 'microwave society' where you can 'buy today and pay tommorow.' As a result, people are on the 'rat race treadmill' fueling all this and lining the coffers of fatcat businessmen who view their workforce as 'a necessary evil' and a 'constant drain on the bottom line'. Why is there a relentless drive to computerize as much of business workflow as possible? So they can downsize and save on labor as much as possible. Case in point: I heard/read that WAL-MART
has such a sophisticated IT infrastructure that only the one in place for the Department Of Defense (the Pentagon) surpasses it!
Charlie Chaplin was preniscient when he made MODERN TIMES. If you've seen his misadventures in the factory scenes, you realize employees are little more than 'small replaceable parts' in a much larger machine--use them up as long as they are useful then replace them/discard them when worn out or no longer needed.
It looks like to escape the rat race, you have to 'fire your boss' and become 100% self-employed somehow (without breaking the law if you so desire). Good luck!
Your explanation makes sense ( along with cliath's observation that new generations of kids get their entertainment from elsewhere).
But why is this prominent in the USA? Perhaps because American production companies spend much more than others on promoting their works thus have lots of 'franchises' that more people cling to?
I don't know what chemical they use, but it sure is icky. I don't know if it's the green coloring or the fake "lime", but I sure can recognize it. It's kind of soapy tasting.
Green Jello is NOT lime. It's green flavor.
The worst is probably Surge. Eeeeew.
I scanned over the article and could not find a definition of what the author of this study considered "maturity" to be.
the word is "phenomenon" and the plural is "phenomena".
the McDonald's toy
the Furby
the Chia Pet
any "beauty" product
chrome trim
Oh, what was I thinking. People would go hungry to get the stupid shit.
Mental Adulthood? Been there and tried it. Its overrated and very boring. Decided to regress and enjoy life again.
Sure, one ought to avoid getting into a situation where the child will be tired and cranky, but...
Once it happens, you have to live with it. The parents who allow themselves to be controlled by a screaming fit are the ones who will get screaming fits. The kids wants control. The kid isn't stupid. If screaming makes you cave, then screaming is what you will get. It's training a kid to scream whenever he gets annoyed.
YTMND
if you look a post subjects other than computationnals and or course porn ones , it seems to corfirm the lack of adultehood of slahdotter.
yes it may be indeed a trollbait somehow, but its not a reason not to post..:)
I just look down the road and on the news; the 'everyone elses fault except my own' syndrome.
Because there might be a high chance that we have no free will to begin with... Or rather we must believe in free will because we have no other choice, yet if you look at the big picture of our existence then we were simply destined to do these things such as me writing this for example and anyone who finds the had to reply to this and say "Free will exists!". Well you were just destined to do that but sure luck, fate, chance, or some other awkward destiny in the chaos fabric of time... But I digress.
There are people on the benefit having children, knowing full well they don't have the funds to pay for the associated costs, we have couples having more children than they can afford, then demanding that the tax payer for the bill for their lifestyle choice.
I think having children to begin with should be limited to one child per couple and perhaps the government should pay mean $1,000 if they volunteer to have a vasectomy. However, wanting to have children is another one of those ingrained natural insticts that people refuse to believe in. After all... After several hundred million years of having evolution, we are simply programmed to desire to have as much sex as possible and have as many children as we can. We actually get measurable joy in this and our natural reaction to someone saying "Don't have kids!" is rejection and disgust.
That is because most humans have no understanding of their programming and natural desires.
In truth, the only way to be free of these things is to become an Ascetic or Buddhist.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
If everyone worked 20 hours a week, they wouldn't need to rely on handouts. Working 80 hours a week to make a select few people grossly wealthy is why so many people need handouts. Stop competing with each other for the right to be a slave.
This is a bizarre list. In my fifties now, I can recall as a teenager having a much longer attention span. For instance, if I began reading a book in the evening I'd often stay up through most of the night to finish it. I don't do that any more. Sometimes I'll get that focused on a programming problem - but the young have all the advantage in attention span there too.
Cultural shallowness? Most cultural depth comes from youth. Many of the greatest works of the greatest classical composers were achieved while they were young. And all of the great musical advances and inventions of the 60s - aside from those of Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis - were accomplished by people in their twenties - many of whom had encyclopedic knowledge of the musics they were extending from.
Short cycles? Sure, invention can move quickly. But arbitrary fashion? Are long-cycle fashions less arbitrary? Should we more respect the whale-bone corsette than bell bottoms on boys? Were the centuries of wearing powdered wigs more "mature" than the several years of goatees and mullets?
And are we better off in life with no sensation? Would this psychiatrist prefer we were all comfortably numb? Figures. But I'd hardly call his the "mature" approach.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
By far, the biggest thing affecting human evolution right now is birth control. The second biggest thing is probably the welfare and child support, eliminating the need for long-term pair bonding.
There are two ways that is will affect us. The desire to have kids will be stronger, and the ability to use birth control correctly (being smart, etc.) will decline.
The desire to have kids is the big win for selection, but it can't be selected fast enough. Birth control is an extremely powerful selective force. We're going to get stupid before we all decide that we like to maximize the number of kids we have. Once we have evolved to defeat birth control by not wanting it, our intelligence might recover.
The Slashdot summary makes reference to research. The article's title is "Serious Study: Immaturity Levels Rising." Unfortunately, the article did not mention anything about any actual study that was being done. It presented a theory called "psychological neoteny." The article didn't tell us about any sort of data that had been collected or any research that had been done in this area. I'm rather curious to know how you could confirm this theory. How can you measure how mature people are? And how could you possibly measure how mature people were in the past?
-- dR.fuZZo
Not all immaturity is harmless - much stems from lack of responsibility, and a growing inequality gap. This is particularly true for the sub-peasant classes that have evolved. Here in the UK, some people's only economic contribution is to have children that they don't have the means to care for (hence they get benefits and a free house, then they have more children to get more benefits). There are too many inept young parents, many of whom are just children themselves. If you have ever worked in education, and tried to reason with the parents of the ones that have behavioural problems, you will know that it is a lost cause. Such people should be sterilised. The right to reproduce should be means tested to prevent these social parisites from sucking up our tax money. Firstly, their income should be assessed to see if they can provide for children, then their home background and lifestyle should be assessed (ie. not getting drunk every week). If we permit animal like behaviour as the acceptable norm in our society, our society will rapidly decay even further. The sub-peasant morons must accept responsibility, and must be made to feel that there are social consequences to their moronic behaviour. I would like to see every noisy drunk arrested for being 'Drunk and Disorderly'. This would soon put a rapid halt to sub-peasant behaviour. The difference between these people and a peasant, is that a peasant works for a living, and can be respected, whereas, these people exhibit a form of civilisation less advanced than the inhabitants of the primates enclosure at the local zoo (which always seems to remind me of a certain US president)
Blockquoth the AC:
A good workman knows his tools, and a good workman with good tools can produce higher-quality work at a faster rate than the same workman without the tools. Why spend long hours doing hard work by hand, when you can develop a tool that does the same job just as well with less effort, and then devote the freed resources to more useful tasks?
As others have pointed out, this is exactly what humans have done throughout their history, yet in recent years our technology is improving at probably the fastest rate in human history. We have developed effective, world-wide communications and transport infrastructure. We have manufacturing processes, and design and engineering tools that surpass anything we had 50 years ago, never mind 500 or 5,000.
Moreover, a lot of people in this thread make an unfounded assumption that putting in longer hours of harder work actually results in doing a better job. This is known to be untrue among research circles -- there isn't really any doubt left about that one -- yet incompetent managers persist in believing it. This is simply another example of my original point: our current ways of organising society, in particular at the senior management/politico level, is not acting in the best interests of our society, but the system functions as a vicious circle that acts to prevent change for the better.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Seems like this could be the problem with all of the stupid lawsuits over stupid stuff.
The author of this article lacks any understanding of the difference between the negative effects of aging and maturing. Being flexible and adaptable are good things, which if kept while you are getting older are a sign of wisdom. Acting irresponsibly is totally unrelated to being flexible. People tend to become inflexible and set in their ways if they don't make an attempt to keep growing. However, personal growth takes effort and while necessary to achieve a minimal state of competence as you grow up, it becomes less important once you reach minimal competence. As a result many people would rather coast and become set in their ways than to put forth the effort and take the risks of growing further.
Once you have become familiar which one area of life, you take a risk branching off into a less familiar areas of life/learning and expose yourself to the possible ridicule of (small minded) others for making the beginners mistakes in this new area of growth or learning. The payback is well worth it, but you have to be willing to put forth the effort and accept the growing pains.
People tend to coast if they are not goal driven in some way to continue to improve. Sometimes, a wiser person gives us a nudge or sparks our curiosity so we continue to grow. Most people become more inclined to settle for less as they grow older, especially if you achieve a certain level of financial success intitially.
The problem is, once people become set in their ways, they want everyone else to act the way they do, so that they feel less insecure. I'm over 50 now, and my worst nightmare is becoming set in my ways, and fearful of change. In the meantime, I will continue to downhill ski down expert ski slopes, go backpacking in the mountains, learn new computer languages, tools and techniques and meet new people.
I'm growing older but not up,
My metabolic rate is pleasantly stuck,
Let those winds of change blow over my head,
I'd rather die while I'm living than live while I'm dead
This sig is false.
...is being able to enjoy the small things in life, as a child would, while also being able to take the difficult things in stride, as an adult should.
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
New research is showing that grown-ups are more immature than ever.
/.ers, here the bar for what we can call ligitimate research: it is research ONLY if it is done using there or more of the following: particle accellerator, electron microscope, supercomputer, advanced mathmatics, radio telescope, remote sensors, data acquisition, orbital observatory, vintage HP calculator (can sub a slide rule here), uses the scientific method.
Once again, I question who would be doing research, spending money and wasting time on this candy-assed bullshit! This isn't even close to research and to call it that is an insult to the people who are doing real research like physicists, chemist, mathimaticians, biologist, bio-chemists, microbiologists, etc.
This is is a bunch of little old blue-haired ladies gossiping while they are having their hair done.
OK
Furthermore, legitimate research MUST demonstrate a hypothesis using non-antecedotal evidence.
Is that a SCSI connector or are you just glad to see me?
Ill bite....
The "Vae Victis" saying is just part of the myth's of early republic times unless you honestly believe that a conquered people would argue over the amount of tribute in order to save their city. Secondly, latin does not pronounce "v's" like we do. All V's are pronounced as w's and that is that. How hard is it to believe that something sounds "odd" to your ears but sounds normal to those living in that society (ie: japanese substituting r's for l's). Therefore it is very foolish to assume that because something sounds odd it is wrong.
-Brooks believes such individuals have lost the wisdom and maturity of their bourgeois predecessors due to more emphasis placed on expertise, flexibility and vitality.
I haven't gone to college and sure I gained some insight of the lost wisdom & maturity and I've seen the other side of the fence and it is a drunken sex-fest of sweet sweet immaturity(runnn onnn sentences see kids stay in scool:)..! but a new type of maturity has risen from the ashes of this -short attention span, sensation and novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion and a sense of cultural shallowness- youth. This new bred of persons are the real heroes they didn't cut-n-run while they watched everyone around them act like drunken animals. No they stayed, they made a difference, they gave good advice, support, hell I'm sure someone out there probably even turned down some easy drunk sex with a stranger just to adhere to some moral sense of decency(look nothing wrong with being drunk and haveing sex u know when it's right or when your just taking advantage of some poor sap) or put their body on the line to protect those in need even if it makes them a social outcast, and they do these deeds for no rewards those people are truly wise & mature. I hope we can all take a page outta their book! :) fuck even if you haven't done any of that shit you'll be ok just sit back and enjoy the abuse your partner for 30seconds, crack open another beer on me, and piss caution to the wind after all you just miight be president someday....
sense of security, like pockets jingling...
There is a way you can re-experience the joys of childhood (and they are many) while maintaining the rich experience of adulthood.
Become a parent. Then spend lots of time with your children.
-- QED
As members of my Gen (Baby Boomers) and the Gen that immediately followed (GenX) start to kick the bucket the overall maturity level will I'm sure, begin to increase. Either that or the boomes will have destroyed enough to make it a moot point.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Ah, but I was so much older then.
I'm younger than that now.
- Bob Dylan
I expect to live longer. And if not, at least the quality is better.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If communication is valuable, then why not dress-up?
Reading your comment made me realize that a big portion of what people call "maturity" is the ability to refrain from communicating, and keep the communication we can't get by without confined to narrow acceptable set of topics and manners.
Pre-school kids talk all the time. Some kids change their shirts 4 or 5 times a day, to suit their mood of the hour.
They've got questions about everything. They're not afraid to tell the old guy in the next row at church that his clothes look wierd and he smells funny. They know when they're being lied or talked down to, and they'll call you on it every time.
Teenagers may not respond to their parents, but they still communicate extensively with their friends. They'll dress goth or punk or preppie to show who they are and how they feel. They hash over every personal, social and academic problem with their peers.
Then you have adults, mature people who say little and communicate less: a non-commital politically-correct greeting here, a meaningless "have a nice day" there, a few low-content emails and a meeting full of corporate newspeak in between. They don't tell the boss his ideas are unworkable and he has spaghetti sauce on his tie. They know all the candidates are lying, but they vote anyway and never call them on it. Instead of burdening friends with personal problems, they keep it to themselves lest they appear immature (or pay big bucks for a therapist to hold the same conversation high-school friends used to have every day for free). They dress the same way every day because it's expected of them, and because expressing your opinions about music, sports, politics, etc on a T-shirt is for teenagers.
Maybe "maturity" is just the word for doing exactly what everyone around you expects, and doing it very quietly...
0 1 - just my two bits
Is not!
There's nothing you have that they can't take away: Absolute zero, Gentle Jack, bottom line.
In his exceptional book "The Underground history of American Education" John Taylor Gatto details that the stated intent of our education system is to produce permanent childhood.
He explains that, due to an unusual set of circumstances at the time the USA was formed, young people where given adult responsibility and adult work. The concept of the teen years as a part of childhood did not exist. It was only with the introduction of mass forced schooling that young people lost the ability to deal with adult responsibilities. In fact Gatto contends that compulsion schooling has produced a measurable drop in literacy, inventive thought and maturity.
Some quotes:
This is from the book:
As a senior citizen, I feel it's my duty to point this out: LOL! PWNT! W00t
screw all that, let's go play in the sandbox!!
it was like that when I got here.. I wasen't here when that happened... second shift musta done that....
Whoever done that research is a stinky poo poo face, I'm telling my mummy..
God Be Gone
n/t
my password really is 'stinkypants'
I couldn't find any studies that claimed my parents' generation was acting more child-like. If anything, the studies seemed to imply 'over maturity' in that my parents' generation were over-worked and under-family-timed as compared to THEIR parents' generation.
I agree with your statement in most cases, but not this one.
Blar.
Actually I greatly prefer Axis myself (well I don't know about greatly but I did really liked Axis), but I wanted to frame it in terms most people might understand rather than throw off an obscure reference that would enhance my mad gaming street cred. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The burden caused by a mortgage and bills are not an illusion. They are quite real. And they are not something you can 'stand upon'.
A mortgage is determined by what you choose to buy, where you choose to live. Some choose to live without a mortgage by saving enough to pay for housing outright or wandering the earth with a backback.
Mortgages and bills all represent payments for things you have chosen, and in at least one way they are indeed something you can stand upon for they are all tools for establishing good credit in order to acquire larger loans in the future - if indeed that is your choice.
Nothing is inherently wrong with choosing the life of a large mortgage and some debt over the life the monastic wanderer. Just don't think fate handed you that mortgage any more than it put the backpack on the pack of the wanderer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Let me tell you a joke about nostalgia. Two veterans meet at some war-ending aniversary and have a little chat:
"Ah, do you remember when they captured us and took us to a concentration camp?"
"Oh yeah."
"And how they wanted to take us to the gas chamber?"
"Aw man, how can I forget that?"
"And then there was this bombing raid, explosions everywhere and we ran through a hole in the fence? And they chased us with dogs and we hid in the swamp for a week?"
"Oh yeah. Man, those were the good times."
Well, admittedly, childhood usually isn't _that_ bad, but still, everyone remembers the good parts, but never remembers the annoyances and frustrations. Or remembers some sanitized rose-tinted version of them. I suppose it must be some mechanism of the brain to stay sane.
But if I'm to really remember childhood, and without even going into the parts that were due to my parents being... well, completely unfit to be parents, it wasn't _that_ idyllic anyway.
E.g., take school alone. I could read since the age of 3. In fact, I could read and write in two foreign languages by the time I got into school. I could calculate a transformer or solve other physics problems up to that level. (I guess I must have asked something like "why is the sky blue?" and my parents, god bless their totally nerdy souls, gave me a physics book.) And yet there I was in school required to write a page of oblique lines or loops. Or to write a page worth of the letter "a". How boring is that?
And that's just one of many issues.
On the whole, I'll go and say I'm actually a _lot_ happier as an immature adult than I ever was as a child.
_Now_ I can actually do what I want. If I want a chocolate, I can go buy a chocolate. If I want to buy a doll, I can go buy a doll. (Or The Sims, which is one hell of a doll house simulator.;) If I want to stay up late playing with it, I can jolly well stay up and play with it. Back then I had a ton of people who knew better what I should be doing, what I should be thinking, what I should be saying, etc.
As for Calvin and Hobbes, or Winnie the Pooh, they're not written by a kid. They're written by an adult, and through rose-coloured nostalgia glasses _and_ from second-guessing the "enemy" at that. They see "man, this kid never listens to a word I say", or "man, he's throwing a tantrum again when I'm trying to teach him proper manners", and from there they go and paint some image of the kid being completely care-free and living in some imaginary wonderland. They don't however, see the frustrations like being treated like a brainless idiot. Or the frustration of that "teaching manners" meaning "Moraelin, say 'hello' to the nice lady?"... again... in front of 10 strangers and 2 of my friends. Or about a hundred other little issues.
In fact, I'll go and say that all that seeing the kid as a care-free brainless _idiot_ is just... selective confirmation. People start with the preconceived idea that the kid is inherently retarded and unable to ever comprehend adult logic, and from there remember every detail that confirms that, but conveniently forget the details that don't. Or acts like they're some one-in-a-million occurance that's surely just a freak accident.
And let me also say that a lot of the time, "adult logic" _isn't_. Adults are just as good as kids at rationalizing backwards from what they'd like, to some half-arsed unconvincing "facts" to justify it with. E.g., they start from some pre-conceived wish, like that they want to go camping or fishing (bonus points when it's just to fit in some group, not because they actually like it), and from there work their way backwards to some half-arsed justification, like that shivering in a tent in the rain builds character or that fishing is some kind of valuable RL skill. (How? What for? Exactly in which situation can one possibly catch enough fish with a fishing rod to support a family that way?) Even when they actually do have a point there, they're so convinced that you're an idiot and can't possibly
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Calvin: Dad, what's a control freak?
Dad: That's what lazy slip-shod workers call anyone who cares enough to get things done right.
Calvin: Am I in the presence of their King? Should I kneel?
Dad: If anything works in this world, it's because someone took charge.
"Orangutang scientists report on the phenomenon of psychological neoteny. Certain apes (the Homo genus) are retaining childlike behaviours (curiosity, etc.) into adult life. In a real sense, these apes are failing to grow up."
Seriously, neoteny (physical and psychological) is one of the mechanisms by which evolution made us human. If the modern world is making us move further along that path, why should it bother us? Unless you think coming down from the trees was a mistake.
TFA used the biologists' term "neoteny", but didn't define it or give examples. It turns out that humans have a lot of examples of this evolutionary phenomenon.
;-) their entire lives.
...". I was disappointed that the author didn't mention that this is effectively a job requirement in any field that explores new ideas. Mature primates don't explore new things; only immature primates do that. So of course people in those professions are "immature". More properly, they are exhibiting a neotenic characteristic.
Its basic meaning, of course, is the extension of "juvenile" characteristics into adulthood (or whatever the mature, reproducing stage of a species is called).
One of the curious examples in humans is the ability (mostly in Europeans) to digest milk as an adult. Most mammals, and most humans, lose the lactase enzyme as part of maturing.; But in "Caucasian" people, lactase production usually continues into adulthood. This is interesting because it's probably an adaptation to the domestication of cattle and goats. Usually when domestication is discussed, people are talking about modifications of the domesticated animals. In this case, it was a population of the dominant species that changed, so as better to exploit the domesticated species.
But my favorite example is that a number of scientists have proposed science itself as an example of neoteny in humans. The explanation is that science is fundamentally based on curiosity about the world, plus a willingness to explore and test rather than just accepting what society tells you. In most animals, including our primate relatives, curiosity and exploration are characteristics of juveniles. Adults have learned all they want to know about the world, and new things outside their experience are mostly causes of concern and fear. This is still true of most humans in most societies. But in many societies, there is an active scientific community that institutionalizes curiosity and learning new things, and many people remain working scientists (some of whom also drink milk
Of course, there have been precursors of this throughout history. Many societies have produced explorers, sometimes in great numbers. The ancient Greeks, Phoenicians and Chinese did this, as did the later Norse and Arabs. Polynesia was settled by a whole society of them, as was North America a thousand or so years later. These were people willing to abandon the home they knew and face the challenge of learning to live in a strange new place. Normal, mature people stayed behind no matter how bad the situation was at home; only neotenic "adult children" would engage in such adventures. (Of course, not all went voluntarily, so this doesn't apply to all such emigrants.)
In any case, TFA does mention that academics, teachers and scientists are often "strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence
Also disappointing was the comment "... such individuals have lost the wisdom and maturity of their bourgeois predecessors due to more emphasis placed on expertise, flexibility and vitality." There is no conflict between these characteristics. The immense success of the scientific enterprise over the past few centuries, especially its success in improving our lot in life, is a good illustration that "wisdom" should imply recognizing the importance of both expertise and flexibility. Those two words succinctly describe what it takes to produce a good scientific result. You need the expertise to understand and judge the value of the data, and you need the flexibility to consider new ideas (no matter how wild) and systematically work out tests of their validity.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I reject your reality and substitute my own!
I loved that stuff when I was a freshman in high school, used to drink it and eat those spicy Doritos. Went perfectly with whatever else they had, be it pizza or a hamburger.
I'd be happy to be sixteen again, let alone six. At 26, you know what you've got to look forward to, and that's pretty goddamn bleak.
"There's no point in being grown-up if you can't be childish sometimes."
-- The Doctor, in "Robot"
So, how do you go about personal growth? I have my theories, but really don't know.
At 25 it's a bit horrifying to read your diary and notice you've had all the problems you're now complaining about already 2 years ago.
-- up-modding policy: make a good point, write self-contained.
The joys of childhood typically don't include frequent sex with a really hot woman. A colleague reading over my shoulder has just asserted that this is true for most adults, to which I can only say, nyah nyah.
As does Anne Coulter. (And probably me, and anyone else who replies to this story, or even read it.)
But isn't imaturity the cornerstone of American society? Isn't that main reason for the french feud? :) So as the cultural exporter of our capitalist niche, how can anyone claim to be amazed? It is this desperation that fuels the economy, it is a self realizing totality. Take Italy as an example, old society, good erudition, good life standards, good climate, even good genes, get the point?
Where is the tag, insightful but wrong.
If a corporation files bankruptcy so the shareholders don't have to ante up to pay the debt for the entity they own
Um, If I own a corp at $50 a share and it goes bankrupt and its share value drops to $.01, I've just lost $49.99 per share! Seems like I took a loss. Here is what you ment to ask...
If a corporation goes bankrupt because the heads of the corp run it in to the ground spending all there money on mansions and personal jets, why do they not go to jail. We put these people in charge, and they build golden parachutes incase things get bad.
At least a few people I know are FAR more concerned about corporate irresponcibility then any one individual. And yes western civilization because we 'individually' allow our respective goverments to give incorporated entities far more power then any one individual would receive.
__My spelling sucks far worse then yours.
Girls grow into women. Boys just get old.
Yes, you'd lose your investment. But when people go into business, they are advised to incorporate, for the very reason that it limits liability while retaining the money-making potential. Sole proprietorship is discouraged, explicitly because it doesn't shield an owner (the one making the decisions and the money) from responsibility as well as a corporation. This legal entity exists explicitly for this reason. My only point is that there are other aspects of our culture that undermine the idea of personal responsibility, and the evil "welfare state" isn't the culprit. People want to make decisions and reap rewards while excusing themselves as much as possible for any ill consequences of their own decisions, and we not only allow them to do so, but respect them for their business acumen. Where exactly is one supposed to learn the value of personal responsibility when so few people actually believe in it? For themselves, I mean, not for other people.
I learnt a new word from your post, 'contumely'. Thanks! ;-)
That this finding is offset by the fact that children seem to be getting mature (Not sure if "mature" is the correct word, see next sentence for context) younger?
I was reading yesterday about the increase of teenage pregnancy, especially younger teens 14-15.
The article doesn't specify what age people where wanting to be again, I thought "child" was before "preteen" (10-12 onwards). A lot of kids seem to be going through puberty earlier these days.
Then again, the article was more about the mental state of mind rather then the physical body.
This space for rent
Now if they put a little rat poison in it (Warfarin, Coumadin), well rat poison of this kind is actually used in the treatment of people with clogged arteries to prevent stroke, heart attack, and other clot damage. Maybe if they put the right amount of rat poison in the fried chicken, it would counteract the bad effect of the fat and make for an even slightly healthful product.
Of course, this is all fine and dandy until these permanently immature people have kids themselves. Then it's a big interesting competition to see who can be the child. For that matter, to see whether one or other parent can manage to stick around long enough to raise the actual children, or whether someone is going to go rocketing out the door once the next 'teenage crush' (oops, I mean, 'true love with a life partner who really understands me') turns up.
I was fortunate enough to be raised by actual adults, and am married to one. But I saw too many of my friends growing up with the consequences of being raised by the first generation of PermaChildren, and there doesn't seem to be a huge difference with many of my generation.
A lot of that stuff about "innocent 6-year-olds" is very disingenuous. 6-year-olds can be innocent largely because there are adults out there shouldering the burdens of adulthood. A side point: unlike the mawkish chain letter thing posted on this thread implies, you need to do this (shoulder adult burdens) without doing too much whining about it. Moaning about how tough it is to wake up in the morning and go to work and deal with irritating stuff in your e-mail is usually a fine warning sign of someone who's about to flip right back into PermaChild status again. Suck it up.
This entire article is just a sad addition to the various sayings about how eventually liberals face the real world and become conservative. As far as I can tell, locked in my ivory tower forced to work with people from all around the world, the "real world" consists of taking a job where someone that makes a whole lot more money than you tells you and a bunch of other people exactly like you what to do each day. They pay you enough money to live in the suburbs with a bunch of other people that make the exact same amount of money and have the exact same color skin as you.
Funny thing about the "real worlders" is that they are *always* asking for help with there "real world" stuff: broken cars, electrical wiring, computers.
My handle breaks slashcode, what does your handle do?
These are the people I point & laugh at. Kidding aside, I dont laugh, I just point.
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. Those who fail to learn history CORRECTLY, they are just doomed.
Poor familys have ALWAYS produced more offspring than wealthy ones. History has shown that the more comfortable people are in their life, the less likely they are to reproduce.
I know you are, but what am I?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
D'oh. Do psychs think this predominately a Neocon job or the libbys just as guilty. Tune into the next election where we hear the Bushits say, "I want my Mapo." and we hear the Plame prosecutor say, "We have no comment on any pendimg or ongoing investigation," for the three thousand and first time. And then all of a sudden state they're not going to indict Carl Rove and then return to "We have no comment," to the bitter end of the Grand jury proceeding. And don't forget the congress who will immaturely vote themselve four or five $3200 dollar raises so that they can feel jusitified in raising the minimum to probably a whopping 6.15 an hour in 2008. Hopefully the American public will pay back those who so kindly paid them. I don't know. Those gutless wonders are probably too cowardly to confront their government in its obvious lie.
It looks like you need to read up on the concept of "limited liability". Shareholders are limited in their liability to the amount of shares they own. They will never ever have to pay any debt of the company (that's exactly _why_ incorporation happens). The worst that can happen (and probably will happen when a corporation files bankruptcy) is that they lose their ownership of the company (read: their shares go *poof*) and the company ends up being owned by the former creditors. If that is not sufficient to pay the debt of the company, then the creditors end up losing money.
Actually, from what I can tell, "growing up" is just a matter of enculturation. Or to put it otherwise, of pretending to be X, so you can fashionably fit in a crowd of X. Where X can be something like "rebellious teenager" (huzzah for immitating someone in the name of being an independent individual) or "responsible adult and member of the community" or whatever.
To put it even less diplomatically: SFV. Stupid Fashion Victim.
You're just told that once you've reached age Y, you suddenly aren't supposed to play any more, because that's not what an adult does. You're suddenly supposed to become over night uninterested in exploration and imagination -- which is what playing is -- and just become a slave. You're supposed to go to work from 9 to 5 and produce value for your slave driver, like a good slave should, then go pretend to like your neighbours for community standing, and then flop on the sofa and watch football. Again, not necessarily because you actually like football, but you wouldn't want to be different from your neighbours, would you? It would be sooo unfashionable to have different interests than the neighbours. God forbid that you show that by not knowing exactly who passed the ball to whom in yesterday's game.
And let me state that again: children's "playing" is running scenarios in a safe environment, exercising your natural curiosity and imagination. E.g., if you watch a small girl enacting a tea party with her dolls, it's actually running a simulation of a social situation. It's exploration and imagination at their finest hour. That's what playing is, and not only in humans. Watch kittens or rabbits play, and you'll see that they too "play" by exercising their respective survival skills. In humans it's exercising your brains, which is _the_ survival advantage that nature gave you. Yet somehow people are supposed to "grow up" and basically give all that up. Give me a break.
Want to know what makes the western world increasingly reject that idiocy? The simple fact that society is increasingly unable to enforce that uniformity.
A quote comes to mind: "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." That's all there is to it. It's finally become safe to risk being the unpopular one, and the effect is cascading. When person X decides to drop the SFV pretense, and persons Y and Z around him see that nothing bad happened, they too might drop that sad masquerade. People are gradually discovering that they're not surrounded by drones who'd drive them out of town if they didn't fit the "responsible pillar of the community" stereotype to the letter, but by people like them who didn't particularly like that retarded stereotype either.
In the middle ages if you were the unpopular serf that thought too much, you'd find yourself a good candidate for the next inquisition trial. Don't think for a moment that witch hunts were only for the heretics. At least half those burned at the stake were just the unpopular guys and girls that told some community leader or village gossip to fuck off. (Having some wealth that the inquisition could confiscate also helped.)
Later society had to do with just ostracizing and occasionally bullying you if you refused to fit the stereotype reserved for you.
Nowadays what we're finally at the point where you can say "fuck them, I'll continue to be an intelligent and imaginative person if that's what _I_ want to be." Even if they ostracize you, you can find a thousand people on the Internet sharing _your_ interests, instead of having to fit in some SFV community. If you'd rather talk about your cat instead of the prescribed "manly", "adult" things like cars and football, you can just drop by in some cat-lovers chat room and there you go. If you want to still maintain a healthy "child-like" imagination and curiosity, there you go, you can find a ton of places to satisfy that curiosity or to exercise your imagination and creativity. You no longer _have_ to become an unimaginative drone, whose sole interests are football and earning enough money to keep up with the Joneses, just to fit the community.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I picked up a copy of Mr. Gatto's A Different Kind of Teacher the summer after finishing my 4-year college degree (from an expensive science/engineering school), and realized that I didn't really know how to read.
:)
Gatto had discovered that most of his 7th graders couldn't read beyond the level required for a multiple choice test, and offered his readers a question on the classic All Quiet on the Western Front. I went to the library, borrowed the book, read the first 20 pages as best I could... And had no idea whatsoever what was going on.
I'd tried to read many books before - The Hobbit, Moby Dick, texts for college course, etc. I couldn't even read Harry Potter.
Someone posted a link to some Gatto videos when I posted a comment linking to Underground History some months back. So if you're like me, and can't really read, then at least you can watch the movies.
http://www.edflix.org/gatto.htm
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
The poster you're responding to understood all this perfectly well; it is exactly the point of the line you quoted.
.........to know how true this is.
How can "be like a child" be a bad thing? You are agile, flexible, good-looks, healthy, active, humourus, spontaneous, creative, friendly, open, receptive, giving, nurturing (ever see a child nurture a smaller?), smiling, laughing, loving, caring, happy, giggling, joking, dancing, singing, playing, ..., I can go on and on...
Being "like a child" when above 20-30 years old means you now have the freedom and means to do what you wanted to do when you were a child. While being what someone else tells you, can be totally unnatural. Something inside you will speak to you what is needed.
The only catch is "responsibility". If you don't take it, you will regret it, because the finest moments of life, comes from when you have taken responsibility. Doing the right thing all the time, includes taking care of yourself, your family and friends by having a good time.
So I see this as a good trend, as long as people become more conscious of the roots of their new-won freedom: responsibility. Responsibility when taken will ensure a deep happiness, not a shallow and superficial one where you can't even manage to be alone, just to avoid feeling empty. Sometimes, there will be a storm, a war, a hail or thunder, but when you are with the responsibility, you are unshakable and know exactly what to do, and grow on the circumstances.
Innocent like a baby, wise like a (wise) king. =)
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
If people are less mature then we must obviously protect them by raising age of consent. What should we decide on this time? 25? 30?
Think of the children!
One thing afflicting my US boomer generation is an extreme denial of the level of savings it takes to retire. I've read that the average portfolio value of people in their 40s and 50s is $50,000. If one excludes the poor and near poor, the average portfolio value is maybe $100,000. Living off of that plus Social Security requires a large intake of dog food and other similarly delicious delicacies. Complaining about our relatively measly Social Security benefits or the disappearance of defined benefit pensions is a diversion. These benefits are what they are and, in fact, Social Security and Medicare are endangered as the boomers begin to retire. My generation's pathologically high preference for current vs. future consumption sounds pretty "immature" to me. Does this ring true to anyone else?
Thing is, being "adult" used to be something very cool and people learned to fake it. Many adult adults will still be very childish if you annoy or challenge them.
Now it's cool to be dumb, ignorant and naive.
Oh the humanity!
Reacting in an immature way is a response to stress...and stress is increased due to information overload: most people in western societies feel they are no longer important members of society, due to information overload: they are always receiving messages about other important members either directly (through the news) or indirectly (through ads, music etc), and that makes them feel small and insignificant.
Also, a little scary!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Each generation has a right to define what the terms "Grown-up" and "Mature" mean. Just because we do not fit the definition of "grown-up" in a 17th century sense of the term, doesn't mean I don't make my contribution to the world and take care of my peeps.
I play video games, I read comics, I still shop the toy isle at target.
I also have a house, 4 cars, 2 children, a decent investment portfolio, and an early retirement plan.
Every generation has the right to define how they should act... It just seems like my generation is the first one to actually exercise that right in a long time (maybe since the first Renaissance). Comic book target audience was 8-12 years old from the early 1900s untill 1990 when it steadily grew up with my generation. Video games were for kids when they went mainstream... their target audience is now my age group.
I just think the definition of "Mature" or "Grown-up" which says that you are no longer allowed to have fun is an antiquated one, and one that will eventually die out.
Also Coffee tastes like shit. Viva La Mountain Dew.
Been there! I worked as the bookkeeper for AT&T. Funny how back then, what I really wanted to do is work the fry machine at MacDonalds. Now all grown up I won't go to McDonalds at all.
good times, good times..
"Some choose to live without a mortgage by saving enough to pay for housing outright..."
Unless I choose to have a 2 hr drive to work every day I'd be 60 before I could buy a house outright just by saving. I guess I could get a crappy shack and feel like a bum but my wife would object.
"...or wandering the earth with a backback."
A nice idea but see #1 about my wife. I also need to eat decent food and have clean clothes and body. People who do nothing can only do it because other people have struggled to do all the work.
And don't say the wife is a choice, companionship is a need for most people.
Life has always been like that.
I suppose all generations harp back to an idealized golden era when things were uneniably better.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Heh... I think I understand what you're saying. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. And it's just normal human biology, not anything even remotely blamable on "immaturity" or on the western culture or anything.
See, the brain doesn't see absolute levels, when it comes to being happy or unhappy. It sees a differential. It sees the difference to the previous state, not absolute values. You can't just say "at standard of living X you're perpetually unhappy, at standard Y you're perpetually happy." If both X and Y are were constant at all time, both would have zero difference to the previous state at all time, so both would be stuck somewhere in the middle: neither happy, nor unhappy.
Well, it's not even that simple. The more detailed explanation is that the brain gives you "I'm happy" or "I'm unhappy" chemical signals for stuff that is respectively judged as being an improvement or a worsening of your current situation. E.g., if I'm getting hungry, I'm getting less happy, and if then I'm eating, I'm temporarily happier for fulfilling that need.
But here's that catch: those chemical signals also immediately trigger the release of the "antidote" that will gradually bring you back to the baseline. Otherwise eating once would keep you happy for the rest of your days. And you're not supposed to stay perpetually happy like that. You're supposed to almost immediately need to work on your next "I'm happy" signal, e.g., fulfill your next need.
What I'm saying is that old farts ranting and raving stuff like "back in my day we didn't have TV or microwave ovens and we were happy like that" are missing the whole bloody point. It just doesn't work that way. Humans back in the 50's, or humans in Ghana, were adjusted to one given "point" in the space of desires and available means. Happiness or unhappiness are judged with that point as a reference point. They were the deviations from _that_ point. Humans in the USA or EU in 2006 are adjusted to another point. So, yes, they judge their happiness or unhappiness, their achievements or losses, compared to that other point. Now they're the deviations from _this_ point.
Or to put it otherwise, imagine that you took a caveman and let him live 5 year intervals in various times in history. Let's say you moved him from his cave to a hut in ancient Greece. For a while he's happy, then this improved standard becomes his new baseline. From there happiness and sadness, achievement and loss, are compared to this new state, not to his old days in the cave. If from there you moved him to a modern day third world, he'd be happy again for a while... then get adjusted to this new standard. Then you'd move him to being a rich homeowner in the suburbs, and he'd now be happy for a while, then... adjust to this new state as his new reference point.
There is no maturity or immaturity involved there, since it's the same human that grew up with the same hardships. It's just adjusting to a different reference point. What's a signifficant positive delta for one situation ("yay, I have some meat today") is just the baseline for another ("yeh, so I have meat, just like every day. What's the big improvement or reason for celebration?") to being a _negative_ delta compared to a very high reference point ("oh, dear, the meat today isn't baked in fine french wine and the spices are rather bland").
In fact, you don't even have to believe that hypothetical scenario. There are plenty of RL scenarios showing just that. E.g., just look at how consumerism is a never-ending race because of that very phenomenon. It may seem like "man, if I had a plasma TV I'd be soo happy"... and you actually would... for a couple of days, until it becomes the baseline. Then it's back to needing the next delta, if you want to be happy again. E.g., see how winning the lottery jackpot is way more likely to make one depressed for life, instead of locking them into perpetual bliss.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Maybe we could feed, house and clothe everyone in the world. But why would we want to do that? Is the goal to teach these people that we'll take care of them, so they don't have to? I just don't see the point. I doubt they'd do the same thing for me. In fact, I know they wouldn't. They're only in a position to take, not to give.
I'm sure I could support 10 families in some third world hell hole if I were willing to live in poverty. Granted, poverty in the US is much more comfortable than in the third world. However, my family would have a much lower standard of living in order to do that. I don't think there's anything altruistic about denying some people opportunities to give them to others.
It's not selfish or greedy to put yourself and your family's needs above those of others. You may want to only work 20 hours a week. Saying "we" doesn't change that it's your own selfish desire. I don't want to only work 20 hours a week. I don't mind working more to give my family an advantage over those who aren't willing to do more.
The world isn't going to become a better place if you can convince more rich people to donate to "charities" that skim heavily off the top before any of that money helps the poor. If you want to make the world a better place, DO something positive. If you want to help someone, help that person as an individual. Most "charities" work just like any other profit motivated corporation. If people really were interested in helping others, they'd do it free of charge. There aren't a lot of "charities" built on my idea of charity.
My wife has two kids from a previous marriage that I've taken in and treated as my own. We have two dogs we got from a rescue group and another that would have been put to sleep if we didn't give him a home. We drive Corollas, which have low emissions and get good gas mileage. I believe that if you want to make the world a better place, you actually have to take an active role in making it happen. Talking about it or donating to charities is only a baby step. For every dollar that goes into trying to help people in a third world country, there are probably 100 that go into exploiting the same people.
People are motivated by their own interests. It really is that simple. Maturity or "negative emotions" have nothing to do with it.
And, for the record, no I do not live with my parents. Nor do I live with a wife who tells me what I can or can't do.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I have long known that maturity has nothing to do with age.
I started working when I was 14 and I've never had a summer break since. I don't feel that made me mature, but it certainly made me a responsible person.
I've often associated with people older than me. My psychologist from years past stated this had to do with my intellect level and seeking like-minded company. Still not a sign of maturity, but a sign of thinking beyond my years.
I always dated (and married) girls/women older than I am. One time I tried dating someone younger than me. She talked constantly but never really said anything. She also couldn't understand my humor. Once more not really a maturity signal, but a sign that any age can accept or refuse maturity.
So what is maturity to me? Taking responsibility for your actions (as another poster stated) regardless of whether they are responsible actions or not. Consideration for those around you and your environment (teens [or adults] cursing in public locations is a good counter-example). Knowing your age, acting it when appropriate and knowing how to play young at heart without interfering with anyone else's fun or seriousness.
I repeat, it's not so much that we have adults being immature (though I know a few), it's simply the immature crowd of the past 20 years finally becoming adults and entering the workforce, the social structure and more importantly to this study, surveys.
The last few decades have done nothing but speed things up: restaurants, ovens, service, traffic, communication, gratification, etc. et al. What do we expect when a 20-something feels they should steadily move up the corporate ladder by throwing tantrums? Our society created these brats. Now it's time to accept them into the workplace or spank them back down where they belong so they can wait in line like everyone else.
. . . I would like to ask two questions:
1) Who pissed in your Froot Loops?
2) Do you actually still eat Froot Loops?
Do you also think that listening to "heavy metal" inspires violence?
It's as though they never get past the stage where you're supposed to realise that you are not Ptolmey, sitting at the center of the universe while everything revolves around you, and that if you yell and scream enough, eventually you'll get your way.
A few actual excerpts from some of the stuff that comes across my desk, with only identifying information removed; nothing else whatsoever is altered.
For the record, he's pissed because his net connection sucked, which means his VoIP sucks, but that's not our problem. Which he was told, numerous times, yet for some reason, he thinks it's acceptable to write this.
Third time he's told us this in a fifteen-minute timespan, after we'd already spoken to him and told him we're working on it. I have not added any exclamation marks; this is exactly how he wrote it. And this is ALL he wrote; nothing before or after. Real mature.
One of my favorites. "The lady" referred to here is, of course, the recording that says things like "You have.. one.. new.. voice message. To play new messages, press one..." That a grown adult is referring to this announcement as "the lady" strikes me as utterly, utterly infantile. This sort of broken, stilted ramble is precisely what I would expect from a six or seven year old, not from an allegedly professional adult.
Sent on a Sunday morning. We're closed on weekends except for emergencies, which he knows, but more to the point, what kind of adult says stuff like this?
People, this is just off the top of my ticket list here. If I really felt like digging around I could find dozens of examples even better than these, and oh, if only I had recordings of phone conversations I could post.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Old, perhaps ... old enough to recognize when someone's feeding Eliza into their slashdot postings. ;)
"Life is for my own
To live my own way"- Metallica
With kids and a wife:
Life is for work and chores
my other /. emacs Macro does towers of hanoi.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's rare, but I suppose most of my kids try that a couple times.
:-)
Punishment for grabbing the candy bar: mom buys it, goes outside, and eats it herself! The kid has to watch.
To accept muslim immigrants then. To get the birthrate up with 12 kids. I would like to see th British race die off anyway.
Unless I choose to have a 2 hr drive to work every day I'd be 60 before I could buy a house outright just by saving. I guess I could get a crappy shack and feel like a bum but my wife would object.
Oh really? What city do you live in? That you live in a city at all is a choice. That you think you have to live in one with a 2 hour drive to work just to make mortgage payments says much about your priorities. You profess to desire one thing but act in a different manner.
A nice idea but see #1 about my wife. I also need to eat decent food and have clean clothes and body. People who do nothing can only do it because other people have struggled to do all the work.
I have read endless stories about couples that travel together on the budget of school teachers. If you have kids, well - that was another choice, As is choosing a wife not willing to life like that. How can you be blind to the repercussions of choice? No choice is nessecarily bad but it does alter the possible future choices you may make. That you do not understand this means you will simply continue to make seemingly random choices without any long term goal. If that frustrates you then make a goal! Or do something that moves you to a place of less frustration. That is, in the end, your Choice.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And this has been going on since the 1950's? What else has been going on since the 50's? Hmmm.
Television.
What he's talking about is an observation of what happens to a society that watches television. His associations of maturity or immaturity are immaterial. All of those traits are caused by television exposure and are encouraged by advertisers to get us to buy stuff.
How thick can you get? :^P
"Man I would hate to see your toilet"
Meaning that the poster never flushs it?
No, after a while, a toilet bowl grows a nice, strong bacterial colony in its well oxyenated waters regularly, supplied with organic matter and fresh new unicellular recruits.
You can't take the sky from me...
He's just basing it on literature that has traditionally been based upon "normal" stereotypes. There is no real evidence for this occuring. Also, being immature as an adult is different than being immature as a child.