All I Really Need to Know I learned In...

The title of this post is usually ended with "kindergarten" and what is said in the link is quite accurate that if everyone just followed the rules a civil society would ensue. The thing is, that those things that we are taught in kindergarten are what people want us to do, but have to be taught to us because it is natural to human beings to act in such ways. If you want to know the natural state of humanity, just go to a school playground with young children on their break. There will be moments of fascination, and caring, and love, but also lots of fighting, stealing, being mean and so on. The great difficulty of childhood is that we try to teach our children to be caring, loving beings in the face of humanity, which is less idyllic, all the while regimenting their lives in an oppressive regime of control, rules and punishment. There is not one of us who would voluntarily return to the environment of childhood.

The human brain is pretty much finished its development by the end of adolescence. When we are teenagers about to go off to college the basic structure of the brain is essentially finished, with perhaps a small fraction of development possible in some of the more intellectual areas. However, essentially your brain is as capable of understanding the world around us at that age as it will be in the future. This is perhaps why teenagers seem so adamant that they know better than adults, and you know what? I think they are right.

When I was a teenager I knew some things. I knew that nobody in the world would ever really understand me, and that was to a large extent because nobody ever really is interested enough to really listen to you. People are too interested in themselves, and too annoyed by the prospects of having to subsequently care, to really pay attention to others. I knew that people generally didn't think, but just did things out of habit, and that if you challenged whether something should happen or not what it really came down to was who had the most power. I knew that people wanted to be ignorant, self-centered, clannish, interested in little more than gossip, ridicule and the latest, shiniest thing. Perhaps this was the result of my upbringing, but I think it rings pretty close to true for many teenagers.

The thing is that all of those things are demonstrably true. What being an adult largely consists of is distracting yourself from all of these unpleasant truths because they are unpleasant. To avoid the unpleasant truth we wrap ourselves up in pettiness, mistaking it for the important things. The thing is that teenagers are mostly right about things and adults are mostly wrong, but we become too cowardly to act upon it.