The Cult of the Kid

Recently I lamented the immature portrayal Chris Pine gave of Captain James T. Kirk. I suppose I should at least give him credit for acting like a 20-something instead of someone younger. And I'm probably an ebony pot making kettle-like references in some cases. Do I drink soda instead of coffee? Do I have comic books ("graphic novels") on my bookshelves as well as serious literature for grownups? Is my primary vacation destination Orlando and Disney World rather than some serious city with museums and culture? Guilty.

And yet I still want and prefer the life of the adult: responsibility, career, cleanliness, orderliness, sanity, serious conversations, aspiration, depth, personal growth, dependability, philosophy, taxpaying. Mind you, I stop short of some of the other things to which adults are supposed to aspire--marriage and children, for example--but I keep myself quietly domesticated and have made some efforts to restrain my urges toward the tacky, the immature, and the obnoxious. And yet...and yet...I find myself falling into the mindset crystallized so neatly by this XKCD comic:

Somewhere along the line, Americans gave up the notion that we were going to become like our parents, only better or smarter. The notion of building a life or improving on civilization seems hilarious if spoken of in the same breath as a GenXer. Maybe that's why actors in movies from before I was born seem so much older. They act more maturely, more restrained even in comedy. Consider the sly wit of Cary Grant to the oafish blathering of...what's his name again? Oh yeah: Adam Sandler. Comedy is now profanity, pushing the limits of acceptable taste. And what's acceptable has slid downhill quite a bit since my parents were young. Hollywood was actually funnier when they had censors because they pushed the limits without any word that would raise an eyebrow.

And, again, the goals of melodramas today circulate around hooking up or just getting a boyfriend/girlfriend. I purposely use the term "lady friend" because girlfriend seems a tad too young--for me and whoever I'm dating. I'm very quickly crowding up on my mid 40s. Shouldn't I be dating women, not girls?

But yet I work in an office where we all have Nerf guns at our desks. I have a Darth Vader cookie jar on my counter top. Do we really want a cult of perpetual childhood--or adolescence? I've worked in companies where a game must be played in a classroom full of adults in order to get people motivated to participate. If my bar conversation strays into some heavy topic--politics, metaphysics, cultural decay--I'm told that I need to "relax" or that I have too much time on my hands. Apparently some folks don't understand that this IS how I relax. The future is going to look pretty awful if no one wants to be the grownup in the room.

This isn't something I've picked up because I'm approaching 44 this year. I've always been this way. I never wanted to be a kid. Kids are young and stupid. Adults never let them do anything interesting, like have cool jobs or take vacations to cool places, or drive a car. Kids--sorry parents, it has to be said--can't change the world the way adults can. They don't know enough about how things work. They don't have the wisdom or education to form a corporation or invent feasible, complex technologies. You wouldn't put one in charge of a country, an airliner, a spacecraft, a nuclear power plant, or a serious weapon--at least not if you had a healthy sense of self-preservation. These are the things I strove to do because they seemed important. As a kid, all you learned were the basics (if your teacher was good enough and your peers allowed you to) or you learned how to deal with your peers--and when you're young, they're as ignorant as you are, so what are you really able to learn from them? Not a whole lot.

So allow a moment, if you will, to give thanks for the grownups of the world: the people who show up every day to raise children, build our civilization, protect it, and keep it functioning. Adults do these things so that eventually their children can grow up, learn, and take over where the parents left off. And maybe, if the young are paying attention and do learn to mature, they might make things a little bit better for their kids. But that improvement process doesn't happen if they, we, and I don't accept that we have to grow up eventually.

As St. Paul put it to the Greek Christians living in First Century Corinth, "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me." (1 Cor. 13:11)

Self-Indulgence, Aimlessness, and Putting Things in Perspective

So today one of my Gen Y buddies posted an article on a new phenomenon: the "quarter-life crisis." This new, self-induced crisis is neatly summarized early in the article:

This phenomenon, known as the “Quarterlife Crisis,” is as ubiquitous as it is intangible. Unrelenting indecision, isolation, confusion and anxiety about working, relationships and direction is reported by people in their mid-twenties to early thirties who are usually urban, middle class and well-educated; those who should be able to capitalize on their youth, unparalleled freedom and free-for-all individuation. They can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who they are because they’re allowed to be anyone they want.

The Bartish shorthand for this might be called the "What am I going to be when I grow up?" crisis. Or simply ennui brought on by lack of bounds or direction (see Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice for an extended treatment of this problem). I probably had something like this in my mid-20s, but I very quickly got sick of my own whining with asking, "Why me?" and asked, "Okay, what do I want out of life?" My rather naive answer was, "I want to go into space." Trajectory set. Date: October 31, 2004. Everything else after that was a quest to figure out what I needed to do to get there.

Now other people might come up with different answers to the question I asked myself or ask themselves different questions entirely. After spending a lot of my teens and twenties as an intellectual, it was somewhat unique for me to think about applying practical considerations to the wild ideas roaming around my head. But I think it's safe to say that from that point on, I started applying what Ayn Rand would call reasoning, my mother would call "common sense," and I ended up calling "wisdom." Once I had a goal in mind, the rest was just details, and I went forth and lived my life.

But I have a lot of friends--not just Gen Yers--who still don't have an answer to "What do I want?" Other people might be more driven by family, or more Earth-based aspirations. Bully for them. If you've got a dream, chase it. If you can't pursue it right now, take a job that supports you while pursuing what you really want in your free time. Of course, as my buddy Martin put it, "Sometimes a job is just a job." Maybe. My time at Disney's Dixie Landing Resort front desk qualifies. Hated the job, did it to pay the bills, spent my free time with my friends, reading, writing, traveling, and drinking. I took what joy from my life as I could, and I lived low-rent. And I had a great time in Orlando. I still have great friends from that time.

Of course even I'm not immune to moments of self-involved boredom. Excellent example today: I could sense myself getting p!$$y with a couple of coworkers about an absolute non-issue in even the work scheme of things, and yet I was prepared to make myself a permanent annoyance to my boss over it. If I tell you it's over an issue of grammar, that will show how shallow and terrifying the concerns of my life are right now.

And then I remembered an 8-year-old kid Darlene the Science Cheerleader knows. This girl is by all accounts a sweet kid, winning smile, the whole nine yards of what you'd like a kid to be. Well, last week Dar informed me that this little girl is going in for serious chemotherapy, radiation, and bone marrow work to cope with leukemia. She's already got a head like a ping pong ball, but her smile lights up the room. They've been treating her like a queen this past weekend--whale watching, tea party, ice cream party, whatever the hell she wants. Today was the day she was supposed to go in for the full-court medical press, and I suddenly remembered that as I caught myself being a self-involved nincompoop.

So when I read/hear about twentysomethings who don't know what they want to do with their empty little heads/lives, I think of the stuff I have left to do with my life, and then I try to think of kids like this little girl and shut up. If I have too much time to worry about my own little problems, I need to take a page from my e-buddy Laura and just do something for someone else.

Or, as the article puts it, "In other words: it might just be time to grow the f@#$ up."