Home > Work > Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
1 " Everything short of an explanation of the world as a whole is frustratingly partial. An explanation of the world must include an answer to why the world as a whole is just that way. And the only truly satisfying answer would be: because it’s the best of all possible ones. "
― Susan Neiman , Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
2 " It’s an embarrassing fact that we are more afraid of embarrassment than a host of other discomforts, but it isn’t less true for all that. How often have you refrained from voicing hope or indignation for fear of being dismissed as childish? Oddly enough, that fear is adolescent, born of a time when few things feel worse than being regarded as a less grown-up than your peers. "
3 " And we have seen how Rousseau’s insistence on creating a world that makes sense ultimately vitiates his attempt to educate a child for a world that does not. "
4 " Freedom cannot simply mean doing whatever strikes you at the moment: that way you're a slave to any whim or passing fancy. Real freedom involves control over your life as a whole, learning to make plans and promises and decisions, to take responsibility for your actions' consequences. "
5 " ...most of us no longer have the luxury of asking whether a job is genuinely productive, but only whether it pays well and has tolerable conditions. "
6 " When consuming goods rather than satisfying work becomes the focus of our culture, we have created (or acquieced in) a society of permanent adolescents. "
7 " Rousseau introduced the idea of false needs, and showed how the systems we live in work against our growing up: they dazzle us with toys and bewilder us with so many trivial products that we are too busy making silly choices to remember that the adult ones are made by others. "
8 " Given all the forces arrayed against it, no wonder Kant thought growing up to be more a matter of courage than knowledge: all the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement. And judgement can be learned — principally through the experience of watching others use it well —but it cannot be taught. "
9 " Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way it should be, while never losing sight of the way it is, is what being a grown-upmcomes to. "
10 " We want to make an impact on the world, but we end up making or selling playthings that are developed to keep us distracted and designed to deconstruct. We have turned the activities that were meant to be the stuff of life into mere means of subsisting in it. "
11 " Growing up means realizing that no time of one's life is the best one, and resolving to savor every second of joy within reach. You know each will pass, and you no longer experience that as betrayal. "
12 " When education is overwhelmed by hypermedia, travel facile or ruinous, and work a blurred mixture of more dependence and less meaning, it’s harder than ever to use those experiences to grow. But growing up, I have argued, has been dogged by dilemma ever since it was a real option. As Enlightenment philosophers knew, it’s a process that is as socially determined as it is profoundly individual. "
13 " A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it. "
14 " Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world. "
15 " not only deprives workers of the fruits of their labour by paying them 1/200th of the salary that goes to their CEO (the international average as of this writing, not including bonuses and stock options); it deprives workers of the very meaning of labour itself "
16 " By the time you are old enough to pick up a book like this one, you have learned it: the world is not your world, and you don’t have another. (p.107) "
17 " What we rarely see receive is a picture of adulthood that represents it as the ideal it should be. (...) What better way to keep people longing for childhood than to paint a picture of adulthood no right-minded soul could ever want? "
18 " If the right to happiness is not an idle piece of wishful thinking but a demand of reason, the consequences can be revolutionary. "
19 " Keeping an eye on the way the world ought to be, while never losing sight of the way it is, requires permanent, precarious balance. It requires facing squarely the fact that you never get the world you want, while refusing to talk yourself out of wanting it. "
20 " It’s a matter of logical structure: what is, just is, and any claim about what ought to be is a claim about our own wishes and desires. Why ever should we imagine that the two would be related? "
