On maturity

I listen to a radio show (old recordings) from the 90s called Loveline. Its a great show-- both hilarious and very informative (its a comedian and a medical doctor). A theme that comes up over and over again is "energy" towards things and a general observation that there seems to be a relationship between age and the disproportionate amount of energy that one puts into conflict.

The Loveline hypothesis is that when youre really little your world is this big (holds up forefinger and thumb) and so when conflict happens (like your mom getting angry over your room being messy) then that's like 25% of your world, so you get angry! you get as angry as one would expect given that 25% of your world just got confronted. Then you get a little older, early teens, and your world is a little bigger, and now johnny dating sarah is a big deal. But maybe getting angry over mom complaining about the room is not such a big deal. College comes and now failing classes and getting internships are big deals, and maybe spending 8 hours gossiping about johnny dating sarah...not such a big deal. The point is that part of growing up is a _shift_ in perspective about the world, life, and your priorities.

That last sentence (above) is interesting to me. I could've read that sentence at 13, 15, 18, 21, 23, 25, and today and at every point it would've meant something slightly different. My worldview has changed every few years-- not by something dramatic, but by subtle things. Nonetheless it was different, and in each case I can look back at the "growth" and realize I was always wrong. EVEN THOUGH at EVERY point, I thought I was right. I'm sure in another 5 years I'll look back and think: wow I was naive, childish, and ignorant back then. And I'll laugh at myself a little, but remember that life is really about learning, growth, and maturity.

The moral is that (a) we have to remain extremely humble and skeptical of our opinions and outlook, because MORE THAN LIKELY those opinions and outlooks will change. If they don't then you probably haven't grown. I can't even imagine (nor do I think I've ever met anyone) who thought at 14 or 17 that they were "right" about how "things should be". (b) Remember that everyone goes through this journey differently. many will end up in the same place but at different speeds; others might end up in different places-- and that's ok. And (c) remember that putting a lot of energy into conflict is probably a waste of time as its just not that important. Obviously, this isn't always true-- there are plenty of conflicts that are worthy of standing up for principle. However, we just need to remain skeptical of our "immediate" fight or flight response to conflict.

You can observe the side effect of this "energy" hypothesis that Loveline hosts have. If you look at middle school kids (especially girls :p) there a lot of drama frequently. Friends and fighting with friends, stealing boyfriends, whatever. HS...not much better, maybe a little. College-- much better. By the time u observe late 20's, early 30's people-- the drama level has gone WAAAAY down. I'm trying to remember the last time I or any of my friends got into an actual fight. We can be upset about something every once in a while, but we talk about it-- and it goes away. We're able to "work through it" and compromise, whereas maybe our middle school selves wouldn't have been so adult-like :-)

On twitter I get to re-experience this all again. I think you could probably plot the "drama" (not indicating right/wrong, just observing "drama" in general) against the age of the people involved and I think you would see this hypothesis reinforced. Why is that? Maybe its worth thinking about.

This is part of the fun of us silly little humans: seeing how we behave, and how that behavior changes over time. The changes often slap our intuition-- as from our little minds eye, at any one point-- its easy to feel like we've got it all figured out...but we never do :-)

Steve