What the world really needs? Some adults in the room.

Maturity is our calling

Welcome to Chapter 20 in this Book Serialisation adventure. It builds on the last chapter about Wisdom. Although, I think it probably precedes it. I might have to rejig things a bit for the final packaged book.

You’ll notice I bring in a section I wrote a few months back and flagged that I needed to find a spot for it. Well, I found it (it’s the hero v the fairytale bit.)

You’re new here? You can start at the beginning and navigate around using this Table of Contents if you like. The audio version is at the bottom, available only to subscribers. Ditto the conversation in the comments section where we workshop things together afterwards and support each other through the process.

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ADULTING

“How do you look straight on at these horrible things but not lose sight of what’s magnificent about human beings? It’s hard. It’s hard to be human. Maturity is an achievement.”

- Jonathan Lear, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life

*

Mostly we just need to be adults. Can we all just be the adults in the room? That would bring about some sanity.

*

In developmental psychology, an inability to see the world through any lens other than that of our own self-interest is associated with immaturity. I think we could argue that our civilisation is immature. The Oxford existential risk researcher and effective altruist Toby Ord writes in his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity that our post-industrial civilisation emulates the liminal period between childhood and adulthood, a treacherous period in which strength and whim outmanoeuvre wisdom and restraint, and the future is rarely considered. According to fossil records, the typical lifetime of a mammalian species is a million years. “If we think of one million in terms of a single, eighty-year life,” Ord writes, then humanity is “sixteen years old; just coming into our power; just old enough to get ourselves in serious trouble.” We are the reckless, over-confident teenager who can build the bombs and robots, but doesn’t have the restraint and maturity to use them wisely. (Or we can stick with the “four-year-old with the bedroom they can’t put back together” construal from an earlier chapter.)

Of course, it can be well argued that most “adults” in our culture are behaving like teenagers at an individual level, too. There are many theories for this, but most stem from the individualism and narcissism that comes with our post-Industrial, colonialism-enabled, extractionist privilege. (I particularly like the recent psychological theory that puts it in attachment terms - our culture has an insecure attachment style, that leaves us avoidant and needy. Research measuring differences between generations showed that 70 percent of university students scored higher on measures of narcissism than the average student did 30 years prior.)

A great many “adults” in our culture shirk hard things. We don’t follow politics and we find the Middle East crisis “too triggering”. We shop. Oh Lord, we shop. We shop like a teenager, indulging ourselves “because we’re worth it”, consciously ignoring the future implications. We cocoon ourselves in the childish desire for comfort and largely live life expecting “someone else out there” to attend to the difficulties. We blame rather than front up. We distract ourselves instead of sitting in - and with our goddamn noses right up against - the pain and despair. We seem to have forgotten that when shit hits fans, the adults in the room are meant to crank into gear. Instead we say things like, “Oh, the young people today give me hope everything will be OK.”, which is effectively passing the adult buck to the kids.

I watch myself avoid reality and the glaring invite to meet life where I’m needed by chasing cheap dopamine hits. Just writing this section here, I’ve toggled to Instagram three times (and not to look at the incoming feed, but to see how many “likes” my last post got). It’s embarrassing to witness and the shame sees my chasing more dopamine (I get up and eat a rice cake with butter and salt).

I also have a horrible habit of righteously blaming outwards when I experience discomfort. It’s become a default response. As I sit in this admission I realise I operate from a belief that I should not be experiencing discomfort, inconvenience or any minor injustice. That life owes me better!

*

We also like to say that we don’t have agency over anything, that we are defenceless victims; we say, “So what’s the point of even trying”, just like a surly teen.

But this is not true.

It is our calling to, 1., accept we were born into these times. And, 2., given the times, do what must be done, just as a parent currently living in Gaza, Syria, Ukraine or Sudan is currently being forced to, and just as billions of grown-ups who’ve lead communities through war and plague had to. It’s what we do. And we are more than capable of it. In fact, we can thrive in such conditions¹.

The Catholic monk and activist Thomas Merton wrote to this point, “Humans have a responsibility to find themselves where they are, in their own proper time and place, in the history to which they belong and to which they must inevitably contribute either their response or their evasions, either truth and act, or mere slogan and gesture.”

Or as Meg Wheatley said to me: “It’s just our turn”.

*

I met with a friend who lives just outside Paris last week for a coffee. Often when we meet she will tentatively ask about what I’m writing about. The conversation tends to peter out quickly with her saying she feels so bad that she doesn’t follow the news; she gets too depressed when she dips a toe in. This time, we got into a bit more detail and she nervously asked me what she should be doing. “Be the adult in the room and face what’s going on. Bear witness," I said. It hurts, it’s hard. We want to turn away. But the pain of ignoring the calling is worse, I said. Besides, we don’t have a choice but to step up once we’ve asked such a question. This kind of question - “who do I need to be?” - emanates from our deepest being. And it will not let up. It will niggle and torment until we meet it.