I'm Not Growing Up

I've been told on more occasions than I care to count that I need to grow up. And I suppose it's a fair assessment. I'm not particularly good at making sensible decisions, my career has hardly been a testament to careful planning, and my understanding of financial responsibility is largely limited to knowing that I ought to have more of it.

But the more I think about it, the less convinced I am that I want to grow up at all.

You see, growing up seems to involve a rather peculiar transformation in our understanding of right and wrong. As children, we're taught to be kind, honest, considerate, and courageous. We're told to stand up against injustice, to help those less fortunate than ourselves, and to leave the world a little better than we found it. Some of us were foolish enough to take all of that seriously.

And then we're told to grow up.

Get a sensible job, even if it means nodding along in a fluorescent-lit room while someone explains how a fundamentally predatory product is actually "adding value." You have bills to pay, after all. Make smarter financial decisions. Don't worry too much about where the money comes from, or whose labour made it possible. Understand that the world isn't fair, that institutions don't care about you, and that there's very little you can do about any of it. Learn to pick your battles. Be practical. Be realistic. Grow up.

People do have families to support. Financial security is important. Not everyone has the luxury of turning down a paycheck because of some grand philosophical disagreement with the employer. I understand all of that. I might very well have made the same compromises already.

What I cannot understand is why making these compromises must eventually require us to stop recognising them as compromises. Somewhere along the way, we are asked not just to tolerate the things we once found objectionable, but to admire them. Looking at suffering and shrugging gets repackaged as maturity, while believing that things ought to change is dismissed as childish idealism.

I find this particularly amusing when I look at how we respond to young people protesting against injustice. We spend years telling children to stand up for what is right, only to complain when they take to the streets and do precisely that. They're naive, apparently. They don't understand how the world works. They should concentrate on their studies, find employment, and leave these matters to people who know better. They should be adding zeros to the country's GDP.

Perhaps some of their ideas are impractical, and some of their efforts will amount to very little. Still, the appropriate response to somebody who wants to make the world a better place isn't to convince them that the world isn't worth improving.

I sometimes wonder whether we've mistaken our ability to tolerate injustice for an understanding of it—as though becoming sufficiently accustomed to something unpleasant somehow makes it acceptable, and the longer a broken system has existed, the more reasonable it becomes to leave it alone. And nowhere does this resignation seem quite as convenient as in our response to a warming planet. We know what we're doing is unsustainable. We know that our decisions have consequences for people we've never met and generations that haven't been born. Yet we're also certain that our individual sacrifices won't accomplish anything, especially when everyone else seems determined to carry on as usual.

So we carry on, it being the sensible thing to do.

I don't think I can save the planet by refusing to burst a few crackers, or by making a handful of environmentally conscious choices. I don't think I can single-handedly fix institutions, eliminate exploitation, or convince humanity to be nicer to one another. I'm not even particularly confident in my ability to fix my own life at the moment.

I don't know how much difference any of it will make. Perhaps very little. But I'd like to keep trying anyway, because I've come to realise that the alternative isn't simply accepting the world as it is. It's allowing the world to turn me into someone I wouldn't particularly like.

Besides, why must injustice become our personal problem before we're allowed to be troubled by it? We shouldn't have to explain what we stand to gain from wanting somebody else's life to be a little better.

Maybe that makes me naive. Maybe I'll spend the rest of my life getting frustrated over things I cannot change. Maybe I'll have to make a thousand compromises along the way, and maybe I'll even disappoint myself with a few of them.

But I hope I never become so comfortable with the world as it is that I stop imagining what it could be.

And if growing up means learning to make peace with everything that once troubled my conscience, if it means dressing up indifference as wisdom and selfishness as pragmatism, if it means surrendering the belief that we owe something to people other than ourselves, then I think I've made up my mind.

To hell with that.

I'm not growing up.