Transcription
Everywhere you look online, there are people behaving horribly. Karens and kins, Peter Pans, overgrown manchildren roam the earth with nothing to contain their baby rage. And if you're like me, you've probably wondered, are people getting worse? Did people used to always act like this? Are there more Karens and man babies running around in the world, or are we just more exposed to them than we used to be?
Now, to figure this out, we have to look at what it actually means to grow the [ __ ] up. What is maturity? What is acting like an adult and [music] what can get in the way? So, in this video, I'm going to go through the science in three different parts. The first one is psychologically speaking, what makes a child [music] a child, an adult an adult, and what can get us from one to the other. Secondly, I'm going to look at what can prevent or screw up that maturation process. [music] And then third, we're going to return to the question, are there more childish, selfish people today, or are we just more exposed to them on TikTok?
Now to begin we have to go back to the 1920s in Paris, France. Now Jean Pia was a graduate student in psychiatry from Switzerland. He took a very prestigious job at the Alfred Benet Institute in Paris. Alfred Benet, if you don't know, was the person who invented the IQ test. He basically invented the whole concept of measuring human aptitude. And at the institute at the time, the scientists noticed something very interesting. Children were [ __ ] stupid. They were terrible at IQ tests. They couldn't get any of the spatial configuration questions right. No vocabulary. They clearly were not studying very hard. So when Jean Pia came on board as a young, hungry scientist, they gave him the task of trying to understand why are children so stupid and at what point do they actually start to become smart?
Now Jean Pia invented and came up with dozens of tests to the point where he was actually running experiments on his own kids and documenting the results. And what resulted was the sub field of developmental psychology. Basically, what PJ found was that the human intellect develops in a very repeatable and predictable process that you have four stages that children go through before they end up fully intellectually mature at the ripe old age of 13 or 14. Now, after PJ, multiple other developmental psychologists came along, people like Eric Ericson, John Bulby, Robert Keegan, and they developed and fleshed out this maturation process of the human intellect. So we have a much better understanding of how the human mind develops through each stage of childhood and adolescence. And so what I'm going to do here is kind of summarize the findings of all of these great thinkers in a way that's simple and coherent and that we can work with as we answer this question.
Whether there are more Peter Pans in the world or not, the most important thing to understand about a child is that they have no conception of the world outside of themselves. They essentially understand. If you think about playing hide-and-seek with a young child, they will just go stand in a corner and cover their eyes like this. And because they cannot see you, they assume that you cannot see them. PJ called this a lack of formal operational thinking. Basically, a a lack of understanding of things existing in the real world when they're not present. If you ask a child if a tree fell in a forest and nobody was there to hear it, did it really fall? The child will respond, "I want cookies and milk, [ __ ]"
The other aspect of this is that a child will assume that its emotions are factual. So if a child is angry, then the world is wrong. You must be angry. He must be angry. The dog must be angry. Everything must be angry. If a child is scared, the world must be dangerous. There's no recognition that emotions are these subjective, temporal things that come and go and that are completely self-contained. If a child feels it, it must be true. And finally, because children have no conception of the world outside of themselves, they are incapable of planning ahead. They can't really see second-order effects, third-order effects. They don't understand that if I do this, these people are going to think this, and therefore that's a bad decision because I don't want those people to be mad at me. No, the child just wants what it wants. It wants ice cream. You either give it ice cream or it gets upset, and you're a meanie head. End of story.
So, how do children mature and develop? Well, ultimately, the child has to be thwarted a certain amount. The child has to realize that just because she is upset doesn't mean that the world is wrong. Just because she is scared doesn't mean that there's danger. That just because she wants ice cream doesn't mean that you're going to give it to her. See, once the world plays out contradictory, is that a word? Contradict. Contradictorily. Is that a word? Once the world plays out in opposition to the child's feelings and impulses enough times, the child starts to realize something that, hm, maybe there are people and things outside of myself that don't feel the same way I do and don't react the same way I do. Maybe I'm not the center of the universe. Maybe I'm not the sole arbiter of truth in reality. Maybe I am not God.
This is why parents setting boundaries with young children is so important. We're going to come back to parenting in a minute, but just know that many parents' instinct is to please and placate and soothe their child at any given situation and at all costs. But this will eventually backfire because if you don't allow the child's worldview to be thwarted, they will never be forced to develop an understanding of the world outside of themselves.
Now eventually you get to adolescence, and that understanding of an external world does start to take root. This is where you see a real understanding of cause and effect. See, a child will do something that mom doesn't like and thinking that if mom's not around, she'll never find out. But an adolescent understands that if you do something that mom doesn't like and she finds out later, you're still going to be in trouble.
Now, it's because of this awareness of the outside world that different people have their own preferences and ideas and feelings, that the world moves without them, that teenagers become absolutely obsessed with their identity. Because after all, if every single person they meet is their own individual and has their own thoughts and feelings that are often contradictory to their own, then it makes sense that they become completely preoccupied with what other people think of them. And this is because adolescence largely sees the world transactionally. Because the way you interact with a world of external, independent things is that you bargain with them. You say to yourself, "Well, I'll take out the trash for mom because then she'll want to give me ice cream." And this is where you get all the toxic, insecure, manipulative behavior that has since become known as high school. Everything an adolescent wants, everything an adolescent thinks, everything an adolescent says is likely largely determined by what's going to get them approval and affection and benefits from the people around them. They learn that if you want people to like you, you need to make them feel a certain way. If you want the teachers to approve of you, you need to prove something to them. If you want to earn privileges for mom and dad, you've got to do certain things to keep mom and dad happy.
The only way out of this stage of life is the same thing that helps people out of the childlike stage of life, which is you have to have your desires thwarted a certain amount of times. See, what people with an adolescent mindset eventually start to understand is that even if you do get what you want, the method by which you went about it causes it to be dissatisfying. Even if you convince an attractive person to like you by being fake or saying all the right things, the relationship will be dissatisfying because it was a performance. Even if you take the job that's going to earn you all the money and status, it's going to be dissatisfying because it's not the thing that you actually wanted to do.
What adolescents eventually realize through young adulthood is that the most important things in life, they cannot be traded. They can't be manipulated. They can't be bargained for. The most important things in life are fundamentally non-transactional. They're done without conditions, without any strings attached. The relationship is only valuable if the person is there unconditionally for you because of you. The job is only satisfying if you're there because you're there unconditionally because you love doing what you do. Eventually, the adolescent has to learn that it's better to be disliked for who you are than loved for who you are not.
And this brings us to the sponsor of today's video, BetterHelp. Are you stuck in adolescence? Hell, baby, are you a grown manchild? Well, then BetterHelp can take your baby hand and help you cross some barriers into adulthood so you finally stop crying all the time. Oh, sorry. Wait, where was I? So, so you can stop crying when you don't get your ice cream. Through an onboarding survey, BetterHelp matches you with a therapist who can help you with your problems. From there, you can communicate with them any way you wish, through text, phone calls, video calls, or however you want to do it. And the best thing is that with BetterHelp, you can switch therapists at any time for any reason, no questions asked. Now, therapy has been hugely impactful in my life, especially when I was younger. It took me from being a brash, insecure, selfish [ __ ] to [music] a real man who makes real YouTube videos. Use the link in the description to get 10% off your first month of therapy or go to betterhelp.com/markmanson. Grow up.
Now, there's a couple reasons people might get stuck in an adolescent mindset. And interestingly, it's it's for two completely opposite reasons. The first reason is that some people are so good at transactional relationships and operating in the world transactionally. They're very, very persuasive. They're very charismatic. They're very smart. They know how to get what they want. They never feel the failure of the transactions. They never feel the dissatisfaction of getting the thing that they want and then still being dissatisfied because they're so good at getting the next thing that they want that they just move on to that. Ironically, people with the opposite situation also get stuck at a transactional mindset. People who are so bad at the transactions that they never realize that that's not what they want. They never get to the point where they realize that that's not the thing that's going to satisfy them. So they never leave the transactional mindset.
But eventually, once your transactions fail you, this brings you into adulthood. This brings you into an understanding that not only is the world external and outside of you, but you can't [ __ ] control anything. So you might as well just focus on controlling yourself. And controlling yourself means defining the things that you think are important and valuable and just optimizing your time and attention around those. It also involves accepting that some people are not going to like what you value, that there's going to be costs and sacrifices to the things that you value, that things are going to go wrong sometimes and there's nothing you can do about it, and it might not even be your fault, but you are still responsible for everything you choose to do in your life. In many ways, you could say that therapy is helping people get to adulthood. You could say that self-help is a way of helping people to get to adulthood. You could say half the videos on this [ __ ] channel are helping people get to adulthood. It's not an easy place to get and it's not a clearly defined before and after. It's something that you have to grow into through life experience and through seeing your transactional endeavors fail.
Now, let's talk about what can potentially go wrong. What would get somebody lodged in a childlike mindset or an adolescent-like mindset? Now, I mentioned bad parenting earlier. This is probably the number one reason why people are developmentally stunted. The developmental psychologist John Bulby had a great quote. He said that life is essentially an endless series of explorations from a secure base. Bulby originated attachment theory. And attachment theory basically found that children need two things. They need to explore the world, and then they need a safe place to return to when they feel threatened or scared or overwhelmed. So parents can [ __ ] up in one of two ways. They can [ __ ] up by not being a secure base. So, this is your deadbeat dads and alcoholic moms. If the child is only exploring and has nowhere to return to when they're frightened or overwhelmed, they can develop what Bulby called an avoidant insecurity. That basically they want to keep everybody and everything at arm's length, be completely independent and self-sufficient, and not put themselves at risk by committing to anything too much or too soon. The other way that parents can [ __ ] up is by not letting the child explore. By trying to keep them secure and safe at all times. The result of this is a child that develops an anxious insecurity. They become completely emotionally dependent on others to feel safe and secure and normal themselves. Now, both of these insecurities stunt you developmentally. The avoidance become just indifferent to any opposing thought or viewpoint, and the anxious become terrified and threatened by any other thought or viewpoint.
Now let's talk about education. You could say, in a nutshell, education is the process of teaching people that there is an external, independent world from themselves. Whether it's history, learning about all the humans who did things and why they did them before you were born, or it's math, learning how the relationships between different concepts and objects, even if you're not seeing them directly, or science, which is understanding the physics of the universe and why things happen the way they do, regardless of whether you understand them or not. All of these things, there's a subtle message that is coming through in all of the courses and course load, which is that the world doesn't give a [ __ ] about you. That what what you think and feel doesn't really matter. It doesn't really change facts. It doesn't change uh history. It doesn't change science. And it definitely doesn't change most other people's perspectives. In fact, there's a lot of great research on reading itself, developing PJ's formal operational reasoning, the ability to conceptualize abstract concepts and groups of people outside of yourself, to empathize with them, to see the world from their eyes, to walk in their shoes. All of these things take an immense amount of mental effort, and they must be driven into your brain through repeated mental exercises. Now, without getting on my soap box too much about modern education, uh, there is a lot of concerning data around student achievement, around how rigorous testing is these days, things like grade inflation and what kids are actually learning in school.
The last thing I'm going to cover that can get you stunted in an earlier developmental phase is, of course, trauma. One way to think about trauma is that it generates a chronic amount of cortisol in your brain. And when cortisol is in your brain, it kind of like freezes everything in place. I think one way to think about growth and maturity is that it is your brain rewiring itself to become more adaptive to your environment, to gain a better understanding of the world, to integrate new concepts and ideas and experiences in a way that is coherent with what you already understand. Now, when your brain is flooded with cortisol, essentially when you're chronically stressed, your brain rewires much more slowly. It's less adaptive. It's less integrative. And so the result of this is kind of a a downward spiral in which that people who experience trauma at a very young age are going to be much less likely to adapt to new experiences, uh, integrate new concepts and ideas, react to their environment in a healthy way, which is just going to cause more stress, more trauma, more anxiety, which is then going to cause them to adapt even less, and so on and so forth. Down the [ __ ] hole spiral we go.
So the takeaway from this is that growth really requires kind of a Goldilocks amount of challenge. If there's way too much challenge in a young person's life, they just become overwhelmed and traumatized and they get stuck in place. If there's no challenge in a young person's life, they never see their childlike intellectual mechanisms fail. So they never have to develop new ones or better ones or gain a better understanding of the world. So essentially, young people, and I wouldn't even say just young people, just people in general, have to experience a consistent and steady amount of challenge. Basically, it needs to be hard enough that it is difficult and there's lessons to be learned, but it can't be so difficult that you feel like there's no reason to try.
So, if you are a parent or a teacher or an educator or or some sort of responsible adult human watching this, essentially your responsibility with a young person is to keep them in that Goldilocks zone of challenge, to protect them from trauma and extreme overwhelm, but also nudge them outside of their comfort zone. Make sure that they're never completely complacent, never completely satisfied, that there's always something difficult in front of them for them to work on.
So, let's return to the question, are people more childish? Is there more immaturity in the world? Are people less tolerant of external ideas and feelings? Anecdotally, it certainly feels that way. And well, I started digging into a lot of different surveys and statistics and uh, yeah, it's not good. [laughter] Just a few of the things that I found, uh, most adult milestones are happening later in people's lives. So, people are getting married later, they're moving out later, uh, they're getting their first jobs later, they're becoming financially independent later. Now, I think there's a potentially a couple reasons for this. I think one of them is just that the world is much more complex and there are more opportunities and different paths you can take in life. It makes sense that young people are spending a little bit more time trying to sort themselves out. I would also say that there are some economic issues around this as well. Financially, it's probably harder to be a young person today than it has ever been in the past. And so, they need more time to get that first foothold in their career path and in their financial life. But I also think there's just more distraction. I think one way to look at it is that if we need that consistent, healthy amount of challenge in our lives to grow and mature, distraction is one way that we can turn away from that challenge, that we can just avoid having to deal with it in the first place.
Now, what's interesting is that statistically, there's less bad behavior overall. So there's less violent crime, there's less drug use, less alcohol, less teenage crime in general. But there's also less risk-taking across the board. So fewer businesses are being started, people are dating less, they have fewer social hobbies, people are joining social groups far less. Everybody's becoming risk-averse. From a developmental point of view, you could look at society and say there's a lot less exploration going on and there's a lot more secure base being sought.
So if I had to guess what's going on, I think the digital world inherently interrupts the maturation process in a couple different ways. For one, you don't get a completely objective signal of the world's indifference. Recall that for a child to develop or an adolescent to develop, they kind of have to realize that the world doesn't give a [ __ ] That if you don't get the ice cream when you want it, nobody cares. That if uh the girl you like doesn't like you back, nobody cares. When you're exposed to an infinite amount of information, there's just so many ways to turn away from that feedback. For one, the algorithm is constantly catering to your whims, which is kind of reinforcing a a childlike view of the world that whatever you feel or want, you deserve to have it when you want it. In many ways, the digital world is also infinitely transactional. There's an endless number of potential ways that you can manipulate people or groups to get what you want or get the validation that you're seeking. And then finally, to make things worse, adult virtue largely goes unnoticed. It doesn't really scale attention. Every horrible outburst on an airplane or a Starbucks immediately gets clipped and goes viral. Nobody's clipping the responsible dad who has an extra amount of patience when dealing with a [ __ ] child. Nobody is filming the CEO who is uh staying up late on a Tuesday night because he's trying to make the numbers work so he doesn't have to lay off half of his department. None of that [ __ ] gets clipped. What gets clipped is the bad behavior. So, not only is there a perception that these things are more prevalent than they probably are, but there's also just a reinforcement of that behavior. It sets a precedent socially and culturally that, oh, this is the era we live in now that if you don't get the right brand of oat milk in your Frappuccino, you can start cursing out the barista and call him a racist or something. Like it just the bar for social etiquette has dropped to such an extent. I think it reinforces some of these childlike and adolescent-like mindsets.
So that's my spiel on growing up. I'm curious what you guys think. Do you think you're an adult? Do you think it's gotten worse? Leave a comment. Watch a video. I'll see you next time.