Why I Still Hate "Adults"

It's worse than ever

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Several years back I wrote a piece called Why I Hate Adults, I think it’s time to revisit that. (There’s no link for the original article because I deleted all the old Medium stuff)

I’m defining “adult” as someone who exhibits some or all of the following traits:
A narrow referential field.
I described referential field to someone, who wanted advice on writing an essay for an English class, as the sum total of all the resources you have at your disposal, everything you’ve read, everything you’ve heard, everything you’ve studied, everything you’ve watched or seen. Most “adults” have a very narrow referential field, in a lot of cases they talk as if they’ve lived under a rock for 50 years. They don’t grasp analogy, they don’t grasp metaphor, they don’t grasp the interaction between, for example, playing the violin and learning to use an indoor rowing machine or doing a flip turn when swimming. Things are connected, things relate to each other in surprising and very real ways and if you have a narrow field of reference you are going to miss those connections.

A complete and total lack of curiosity.
”Adults,” typically, have lost the sense of wonder, the magic of exploration, the joy of discovering something new and interesting or examining their ideas to find new ways to think about old things. They just rely on ideas that they’ve maintained for years. They stopped learning and exploring and absorbing and processing, they’ve become solidified. Their “knowledge” is unassailable, there is no more room in the inn, so to speak. What they know is all they’ll ever know.

The complete conviction that their ideas and their beliefs are the only ideas and beliefs.
You just can’t talk to them. In nearly every conversation with one of these people you will find out, very early in the interaction, that you are wrong, and you will find out why. You will find out that you’re ideas have validity but only if viewed through their lens. Terms such as, “I see what you’re saying, but….” or variations are sure signs that you are talking with, or more accurately, being talked at by an “adult.”

The dismissal of, or marginalization of younger people and their ideas.
I walked into a gym that I used to go to and the 20 year old behind the front desk was reading a book that I had read the previous year. I asked if he liked it. That question magically morphed into a three and a half hour discussion on the merits and drawbacks of post-modern literature. This 20 year old, worked full time, went to school full time, played in a band and still found time for fascinating conversations. There was, at the time, only one older person with whom I could have had that conversation. Most older people for some inexplicable reason believed that young people didn’t read books they only looked at their phones, that they were lazy, that all they did was stare at screens all day and never did anything. This belief was always predicated on the “adults” experience. The young people I have interacted with both then and now are fascinating, engaged, capable of an actual exchange of ideas and a conversation as an exploration and this is something that very few “adults” are capable of.

This may seem like a trite concern considering what we are dealing with now but it’s not.

We have seen what happens when “adults” dig their heels in and insist on their correctness.

It is most obvious in the case of the ongoing pandemic. The “adults” have spoken and there is to be no more discussion, despite the increasing numbers of Long Covid cases devastating the population, despite the increasing levels of chronic illness in children, despite the continuing deaths and rising numbers of other diseases related to repeated bouts with Covid.

Right now the last thing we need is a bunch of stilted, solidified, misinformed, ignorant (dare I say stupid) people telling us what we should do and what we shouldn’t care about.

What we need is the one thing that we will never get.

What we need is for the “adults” in the room to STFU.

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