WE DON’T CHOOSE OUR PARENTS, BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN WE HAVE TO BE STUCK WITH THEM ALL OUR LIVES!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 8, 2012
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s Written as a Novel (2003), I profiled several youths of that period, including an especially good baseball player who was short in stature but the complete player, being able to play all positions, hitting for power and average as well. He is now suffering an incurable (macular degeneration) disease of his eyes, which prompted me to write a celebratory piece on him about that 1940s' period.
It turns out that he was shuttled about between families, often lived with his grandmother, then family friends in which the father of that family, a former professional baseball player, saw athletic potential in the boy, and breathed life into that promise, but not without creating angst and acrimony among his own boys.
Several candid exchanges with one of these boys, who is now in his mid-sixties, illustrates the difficulty of growing up without some resentment of one’s parents in the process, especially when there is a sense of little positive reinforcement.
WE DON’T CHOOSE OUR PARENTS
Sometimes parents make the way easy for us and sometimes not so easy. Most parents provide adequate shelter, food, clothing and a climate for maturation into adulthood, but not always. Psychological and emotional trauma are sometimes the result when everything is provided but love and affection. When that happens, pervasive anxiety can last a lifetime.
We live in a compare and compete society. This can foster envy, imitation and self-negation, the putting of ourselves down if we don’t realize parental attention. It doesn’t necessarily end there if this is believed to be a motivational strategy when clearly it has the opposite effect.
Parents compound the frustration by creating rivalry between siblings. Children know what talents parents value and who among them possess such gifts. All children are uniquely gifted but gifted differently. Comparing one child to another, either inside or outside the family, finds the spurned child struggling to please pursuing assets not its own.
Our institutional culture sets arbitrary norms as to what is important. Currently, it is that everyone should go to college when societal needs and individual interests range far wide of this delimiting prescription.
The consequence is that children become obsessed with what they are not at the expense of what they are. With the focus on a person's flaws, the process is counterproductive and everyone loses. We try, sometimes desperately, to pursue what we are bound to fail in, while blind to what we do well. Should we succeed at what is unnatural to us, we are likely to be unhappy in work and life, and to drift into mediocrity.
THE DIFFICULT TERRAIN OF SELF-ACCEPTANCE
The hardest person to like, the most difficult person to accept is ourselves as we are, warts and all. We are all imperfect but perfectible. Perfection is the metaphorical rabbit chased around the greyhound track that is never caught.
From our earliest experience, unless we have the fortitude to resist, we are told what we are, what we are capable of, what we can and cannot do, and where we fit in the scheme of things.
It never occurs to us, because we are impressionistic, that the tellers and sellers have a vested interest in us seeing things as they see them. Society is in the image business and we as children are seen as projections of that image. It starts with our parents; is then reinforced by our teachers in school; our priests in our church; our leaders in the community, and more remotely or indirectly by pundits, politicians and entertainers in the media reinforcing the cultural biases and the pervasive madness of that moment in time.
Social thinker Murray Kempton reflects, “Why America, did you, in your arrogance, teach so many of your children to hate themselves.”
Alas, we do have trouble liking ourselves, which means accepting ourselves as we are. We are too often in the pleasing business, which leaves little time for self-acceptance. The psychology of the crowd prevails. It personifies “true believers,” who incapable of believing in themselves move instinctively to amorphous identity with the mob.
Sociology professor Billy Gunter calls this “ambient deficiency motivation.” We become obsessed with what we are not: the sinner desiring to be the priest, the criminal the cop, the poor student a professor, the ugly person a film star, the bully the counselor, the beauty the scholar, the nerd the athlete, the introvert the comedian, the coward the soldier, the alcoholic the preacher, the fraud the crime buster, the drug addict the vice squad leader, the farmer the dentist, the embezzler the banker.
Because of the social climate and social networks, we run constantly from ourselves. We equate affluence to happiness, luxury to the ideal existence. So we read the books, copy the moguls, and become wealthy, only to discover we are a poor imitation of the self we once knew. Psychiatrist Willard Beecher in “Beyond Success and Failure” (1966) says:
“Competition is a sign of persisting infantilism if it is dominating us after adolescence, a sign of retarded psychological development, a persisting childishness of monkey see monkey do, as we are trapped in imitation.”
PARENTS ARE PEOPLE
Parents as people identify with what they are or believe themselves to be largely by projecting and experiencing ego ideal projections through their children. If they don’t find that identity or dense of achievement through their children, they look for it elsewhere.
Parents as people don’t always choose the right mate. As a result, they and their children suffer sometimes a common torturous existence.
Over fifty percent of the baby boomer generation end marriage in divorce. Two generations earlier it was much less common. Yet, divorce may prove the medicine that saves the family and preserves a modicum of happiness and sanity.
Children born a half century or more ago often suffered through loveless marriages and contentious divorces. Love is hard to survive in such circumstances, especially for the children. Once adults, children of sterile acculturating emotional climates are likely to find it difficult to love, to make commitments, to take hold, as they have little or no acquaintance with the power of love.
Parents as people often struggle to make a living. They don’t have to apologize for this; they don’t have to make excuses to their children for not being able to give them everything they want, everything they see their children's friends having; they just need to be honest with their children about their economic circumstances. Children appreciate such candor and have a remarkable capacity to adjust once in the know.
Love has no price tag. When I was five, and we were finally a family, my sister and I had no understanding why our father had no job. It was during The Great Depression. At Christmas, he took me aside and told me he had gotten my little sister, age three, a doll, but he had no money for anything for me. I still remember that candor; that expression of love. Perhaps it explains why I have never been materialistic. Things don’t turn me on, ideas and behavior do.
Parents are likely to find it impossible to be loving if love does not fuel the marriage. Too often parents express words of love as a substitute for caring, using material success and the gift of “things” as a substitute for love or emotional involvement.
An equally devastating posture is for parents to act as if they were never young, never vulnerable to mistakes and blunders as they seek to be heroes to their children, as knowers not as learners. Yet life is a constant learning process. There is no safe middle ground where it is permissible to coast. It is why we call graduations “commencements,” for it is a new beginning.
Parents as people don’t have to carry their children throughout life. Nor do they have to provide a safety net for them when they fail. Failure is the best teacher in life, success tends to be the worse. If children are prevented from experiencing the consequences of their actions, then no learning takes place, much as children might like to think otherwise.
That failure without taking stock, and dealing accordingly with the consequences will be likely be repeated, ad nauseam. Parents can be there for moral support but they cannot own their children’s problems or mistakes once they are of a certain age.
PAIN + RISK = GROWTH
There is a lot of pain and confusion for children in growing into adulthood, especially between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. During those years, they are transitioning from being a child and an extension of their parents into a person.
From that point forward, matters become somewhat complicated. There is a natural competition between being a satisfactory projection of one’s parents, and dealing with the pressures and influences of peers.
Peers can be more dictatorial and demanding than any parent ever was. They do this by taunting, cajoling and pressuring us to behave as they would have us behave. There is no cowardice in refusing to drink alcoholic beverages, smoke cigarettes, do drugs, or have casual sex, but peers can make it seem so. This gets truly complicated because there is another simple formula I have devised to explain the difficulty:
BELIEF (VALUES) + BELONGING (ACCEPTANCE) = BEHAVIOR
Implicit blackmail is a device of peers in withholding friendship and inclusion in a desired group. Philosopher Gustave Le Bon says three people can be a crowd. He goes on to say a crowd is never a good index of rational behavior or authentic identification. If there is a clash of values, and the values promulgated compromise our values and integrity, it is not the right group for us. Respect is key, and if none is shown, then acceptance and inclusion is a ruse.
The adult world looks ominous even threatening when we look beyond the bosom of family to other connections. Often we find these new associations as conflicting and contradictory as we once judged our parents. Yet the desire to connect is a normal one.
Adulthood, once taken for granted as an ordinary progression, is now avoided as if a chimera.
People of fifteen to fifty today escape into an elaborate world of fantasy once the domain of childhood is left. It is the digital age. More excuses exist today to never grow up than ever existed before. It is now possible to remain suspended in an adolescent mindset from birth to death constantly distracted in some kind of nonsense. It is not the digital age that is bad. It is that it owns us rather than we own it. So, by default, the digital age has become a device to postpone growing up forever.
PARENTAL CONTROL AND ITS FALL OUT
Some parents refuse to relinquish control of their children as they fail to see their children capable of being persons independent of and from them. As Kahlil Gibran says in “The Prophet” (1972):
“Our children are not our children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through us but not from us, and though they are with us yet they belong not to us.”
Parents must earn the love of their children; children deserve the love of their parents without qualification.
Parents should not expect their children to love them because they are their parents. Parents should be obliged to take a course in parenting before being allowed to be parents, but of course that will never happen, although no job is more difficult.
Often parents demand the love of their children, which is impossible, and instead receive compliance at best and resentment at worse. Love is not automatic. Nor is it a quid pro quo proposition. Parents can neither demand love nor respect but must earn both.
This involves guiding, not controlling; encouraging, not demanding; discovering what children do well (strengths) and where they need help (weaknesses). Parenting is not a zero sum game where children accumulate debt owed to the parents later to be collected.
Nor is it wise for parents to live through the achievements of their children as if it were their own achievements if they are not equally willing to share in their children’s failures.
Children loved with genuine affection will return it to parents ten fold. Children want to make their parents proud of them, but they want to think it was their idea and not their parents. There are many convolutions in a loving family.
Children would prefer to see their parents as facilitators rather than controllers of the choices they make. Controlling parents see their involvement as an expression of love when it cripples independent engagement. Moral character is shown when children as young adults stand up to their parents politely and respectfully in pursuit of their own agenda.
Two controlling mothers of history might scoff at this suggestion. The mother of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt left her comfortable estate in New York to live in Washington, DC when he was president. The mother of General Douglas MacArthur not only dominated her son, but his wife as well.
Psychologist Judith Rich Harris considers parental dominance a myth. In her book, “The Nurture Assumption”(1998), she suggests that parents have far less influence in the way their children turned out than do their peers. Put another way, peers are more controlling.
The book resonates with me as I have written, “Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are” (The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, 1996). Obviously, the last word has not been written on the nature/nurture controversy.
It is clear, however, that we are attracted to people who accept us as we are. When I asked a young man I was counseling, who had gone to prison for petty crimes, why he had associated with such unsavory characters? He answered, “They were the only ones who would accept me.”
STIGMATA
Childhood can mark us with a stigmata of shame that never fades forcing us to be obsessed with what happened years ago, a fault line that may handicap us for life.
A professional woman was telling me that her hundred-year-old mother, still with all her faculties intact, constantly complains to this day that she had to drop out of school to work and was denied an education.
A few generations ago, especially during The Great Depression, many could echo her sentiments, but not today. Despite this positive climate, there are people in there thirties, forties and fifties who are still waiting to find traction. They suffer from a similar stigmata escaping into elaborate digital distractions not realizing that the future is rushing upon them with toxic regrets.
No one is immune to this fatal syndrome whatever their socioeconomic situation, education or profession.
Seldom in my working life as an industrial psychologist did I find people without emotional scars of regret or senses of betrayal.
Rarely, would they admit their psychological disfigurement was a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy. Invariably, they complained and looked for scapegoats for their failure to make adequate progress. Even if they made suitable progress, but found little satisfaction, guilt and remorse were the drivers of their despair in the form of “I could have been . . . .”
People can make a great deal of money and hate their work if it is not what they would prefer doing. They feel duped, having sold out, feeling shame for the doing. It can be a matter of being in the wrong company the wrong profession the wrong work or in the wrong relationship.
WE DON’T CHOOSE OUR PARENTS
Sometimes parents make the way easy for us and sometimes not so easy. Most parents provide adequate shelter, food, clothing and a climate for maturation into adulthood, but not always. Psychological and emotional trauma are sometimes the result when everything is provided but love and affection. When that happens, pervasive anxiety can last a lifetime.
We live in a compare and compete society. This can foster envy, imitation and self-negation, the putting of ourselves down if we don’t realize parental attention. It doesn’t necessarily end there if this is believed to be a motivational strategy when clearly it has the opposite effect.
Parents compound the frustration by creating rivalry between siblings. Children know what talents parents value and who among them possess such gifts. All children are uniquely gifted but gifted differently. Comparing one child to another, either inside or outside the family, finds the spurned child struggling to please pursuing assets not its own.
Our institutional culture sets arbitrary norms as to what is important. Currently, it is that everyone should go to college when societal needs and individual interests range far wide of this delimiting prescription.
The consequence is that children become obsessed with what they are not at the expense of what they are. With the focus on a person's flaws, the process is counterproductive and everyone loses. We try, sometimes desperately, to pursue what we are bound to fail in, while blind to what we do well. Should we succeed at what is unnatural to us, we are likely to be unhappy in work and life, and to drift into mediocrity.
THE DIFFICULT TERRAIN OF SELF-ACCEPTANCE
The hardest person to like, the most difficult person to accept is ourselves as we are, warts and all. We are all imperfect but perfectible. Perfection is the metaphorical rabbit chased around the greyhound track that is never caught.
From our earliest experience, unless we have the fortitude to resist, we are told what we are, what we are capable of, what we can and cannot do, and where we fit in the scheme of things.
It never occurs to us, because we are impressionistic, that the tellers and sellers have a vested interest in us seeing things as they see them. Society is in the image business and we as children are seen as projections of that image. It starts with our parents; is then reinforced by our teachers in school; our priests in our church; our leaders in the community, and more remotely or indirectly by pundits, politicians and entertainers in the media reinforcing the cultural biases and the pervasive madness of that moment in time.
Social thinker Murray Kempton reflects, “Why America, did you, in your arrogance, teach so many of your children to hate themselves.”
Alas, we do have trouble liking ourselves, which means accepting ourselves as we are. We are too often in the pleasing business, which leaves little time for self-acceptance. The psychology of the crowd prevails. It personifies “true believers,” who incapable of believing in themselves move instinctively to amorphous identity with the mob.
Sociology professor Billy Gunter calls this “ambient deficiency motivation.” We become obsessed with what we are not: the sinner desiring to be the priest, the criminal the cop, the poor student a professor, the ugly person a film star, the bully the counselor, the beauty the scholar, the nerd the athlete, the introvert the comedian, the coward the soldier, the alcoholic the preacher, the fraud the crime buster, the drug addict the vice squad leader, the farmer the dentist, the embezzler the banker.
Because of the social climate and social networks, we run constantly from ourselves. We equate affluence to happiness, luxury to the ideal existence. So we read the books, copy the moguls, and become wealthy, only to discover we are a poor imitation of the self we once knew. Psychiatrist Willard Beecher in “Beyond Success and Failure” (1966) says:
“Competition is a sign of persisting infantilism if it is dominating us after adolescence, a sign of retarded psychological development, a persisting childishness of monkey see monkey do, as we are trapped in imitation.”
PARENTS ARE PEOPLE
Parents as people identify with what they are or believe themselves to be largely by projecting and experiencing ego ideal projections through their children. If they don’t find that identity or dense of achievement through their children, they look for it elsewhere.
Parents as people don’t always choose the right mate. As a result, they and their children suffer sometimes a common torturous existence.
Over fifty percent of the baby boomer generation end marriage in divorce. Two generations earlier it was much less common. Yet, divorce may prove the medicine that saves the family and preserves a modicum of happiness and sanity.
Children born a half century or more ago often suffered through loveless marriages and contentious divorces. Love is hard to survive in such circumstances, especially for the children. Once adults, children of sterile acculturating emotional climates are likely to find it difficult to love, to make commitments, to take hold, as they have little or no acquaintance with the power of love.
Parents as people often struggle to make a living. They don’t have to apologize for this; they don’t have to make excuses to their children for not being able to give them everything they want, everything they see their children's friends having; they just need to be honest with their children about their economic circumstances. Children appreciate such candor and have a remarkable capacity to adjust once in the know.
Love has no price tag. When I was five, and we were finally a family, my sister and I had no understanding why our father had no job. It was during The Great Depression. At Christmas, he took me aside and told me he had gotten my little sister, age three, a doll, but he had no money for anything for me. I still remember that candor; that expression of love. Perhaps it explains why I have never been materialistic. Things don’t turn me on, ideas and behavior do.
Parents are likely to find it impossible to be loving if love does not fuel the marriage. Too often parents express words of love as a substitute for caring, using material success and the gift of “things” as a substitute for love or emotional involvement.
An equally devastating posture is for parents to act as if they were never young, never vulnerable to mistakes and blunders as they seek to be heroes to their children, as knowers not as learners. Yet life is a constant learning process. There is no safe middle ground where it is permissible to coast. It is why we call graduations “commencements,” for it is a new beginning.
Parents as people don’t have to carry their children throughout life. Nor do they have to provide a safety net for them when they fail. Failure is the best teacher in life, success tends to be the worse. If children are prevented from experiencing the consequences of their actions, then no learning takes place, much as children might like to think otherwise.
That failure without taking stock, and dealing accordingly with the consequences will be likely be repeated, ad nauseam. Parents can be there for moral support but they cannot own their children’s problems or mistakes once they are of a certain age.
PAIN + RISK = GROWTH
There is a lot of pain and confusion for children in growing into adulthood, especially between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. During those years, they are transitioning from being a child and an extension of their parents into a person.
From that point forward, matters become somewhat complicated. There is a natural competition between being a satisfactory projection of one’s parents, and dealing with the pressures and influences of peers.
Peers can be more dictatorial and demanding than any parent ever was. They do this by taunting, cajoling and pressuring us to behave as they would have us behave. There is no cowardice in refusing to drink alcoholic beverages, smoke cigarettes, do drugs, or have casual sex, but peers can make it seem so. This gets truly complicated because there is another simple formula I have devised to explain the difficulty:
BELIEF (VALUES) + BELONGING (ACCEPTANCE) = BEHAVIOR
Implicit blackmail is a device of peers in withholding friendship and inclusion in a desired group. Philosopher Gustave Le Bon says three people can be a crowd. He goes on to say a crowd is never a good index of rational behavior or authentic identification. If there is a clash of values, and the values promulgated compromise our values and integrity, it is not the right group for us. Respect is key, and if none is shown, then acceptance and inclusion is a ruse.
The adult world looks ominous even threatening when we look beyond the bosom of family to other connections. Often we find these new associations as conflicting and contradictory as we once judged our parents. Yet the desire to connect is a normal one.
Adulthood, once taken for granted as an ordinary progression, is now avoided as if a chimera.
People of fifteen to fifty today escape into an elaborate world of fantasy once the domain of childhood is left. It is the digital age. More excuses exist today to never grow up than ever existed before. It is now possible to remain suspended in an adolescent mindset from birth to death constantly distracted in some kind of nonsense. It is not the digital age that is bad. It is that it owns us rather than we own it. So, by default, the digital age has become a device to postpone growing up forever.
PARENTAL CONTROL AND ITS FALL OUT
Some parents refuse to relinquish control of their children as they fail to see their children capable of being persons independent of and from them. As Kahlil Gibran says in “The Prophet” (1972):
“Our children are not our children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through us but not from us, and though they are with us yet they belong not to us.”
Parents must earn the love of their children; children deserve the love of their parents without qualification.
Parents should not expect their children to love them because they are their parents. Parents should be obliged to take a course in parenting before being allowed to be parents, but of course that will never happen, although no job is more difficult.
Often parents demand the love of their children, which is impossible, and instead receive compliance at best and resentment at worse. Love is not automatic. Nor is it a quid pro quo proposition. Parents can neither demand love nor respect but must earn both.
This involves guiding, not controlling; encouraging, not demanding; discovering what children do well (strengths) and where they need help (weaknesses). Parenting is not a zero sum game where children accumulate debt owed to the parents later to be collected.
Nor is it wise for parents to live through the achievements of their children as if it were their own achievements if they are not equally willing to share in their children’s failures.
Children loved with genuine affection will return it to parents ten fold. Children want to make their parents proud of them, but they want to think it was their idea and not their parents. There are many convolutions in a loving family.
Children would prefer to see their parents as facilitators rather than controllers of the choices they make. Controlling parents see their involvement as an expression of love when it cripples independent engagement. Moral character is shown when children as young adults stand up to their parents politely and respectfully in pursuit of their own agenda.
Two controlling mothers of history might scoff at this suggestion. The mother of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt left her comfortable estate in New York to live in Washington, DC when he was president. The mother of General Douglas MacArthur not only dominated her son, but his wife as well.
Psychologist Judith Rich Harris considers parental dominance a myth. In her book, “The Nurture Assumption”(1998), she suggests that parents have far less influence in the way their children turned out than do their peers. Put another way, peers are more controlling.
The book resonates with me as I have written, “Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are” (The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, 1996). Obviously, the last word has not been written on the nature/nurture controversy.
It is clear, however, that we are attracted to people who accept us as we are. When I asked a young man I was counseling, who had gone to prison for petty crimes, why he had associated with such unsavory characters? He answered, “They were the only ones who would accept me.”
STIGMATA
Childhood can mark us with a stigmata of shame that never fades forcing us to be obsessed with what happened years ago, a fault line that may handicap us for life.
A professional woman was telling me that her hundred-year-old mother, still with all her faculties intact, constantly complains to this day that she had to drop out of school to work and was denied an education.
A few generations ago, especially during The Great Depression, many could echo her sentiments, but not today. Despite this positive climate, there are people in there thirties, forties and fifties who are still waiting to find traction. They suffer from a similar stigmata escaping into elaborate digital distractions not realizing that the future is rushing upon them with toxic regrets.
No one is immune to this fatal syndrome whatever their socioeconomic situation, education or profession.
Seldom in my working life as an industrial psychologist did I find people without emotional scars of regret or senses of betrayal.
Rarely, would they admit their psychological disfigurement was a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy. Invariably, they complained and looked for scapegoats for their failure to make adequate progress. Even if they made suitable progress, but found little satisfaction, guilt and remorse were the drivers of their despair in the form of “I could have been . . . .”
People can make a great deal of money and hate their work if it is not what they would prefer doing. They feel duped, having sold out, feeling shame for the doing. It can be a matter of being in the wrong company the wrong profession the wrong work or in the wrong relationship.
Such a person has gravitated to where he or she is by avoiding risk or enduring the pain of delayed gratification to be and do what they prefer doing. Then there are those who have never sat down and asked themselves what they would actually like to do or be.
The ninety-nine percenters of “Occupy Wall Street” are not new. They have been legion wherever I worked in the United States, Europe, South Africa or South America. They are people who have never connected. Miffed that they are so handicapped, unable or unwilling to do anything concrete about it, they join the crowd, or stay where they are and retreat into six passive behaviors. In “Six Silent Killers” (1998), these behaviors are shown to have contributed mightily to our global competitive disadvantage.
ARE WE SUSPENDED IN PERMANENT ADOLESCENCE?
It may seem arbitrary but we are a nation that refuses to grow up.
Childhood is often extended well beyond the age of eighteen with children still living at home, being supported by their parents, in heavy debt to them, living in the virtual reality of electronic games, partying as if there is no tomorrow, or living off a partner without taking hold of anything permanent in a quest to postpone growing up until middle age. Stuck with the consequences of those postponed decisions, there is often no one to blame, but one’s parents.
It is our parents fault that they didn’t make us do the right thing; their fault that we didn’t buckle down when young and in school, but instead drifted from one thing to another; their fault that we didn’t go to college, or complete our college education; their fault that we married right out of high school; their fault that we are not in better financial shape; their fault that we are not happy.
When we reach the age of eighteen, we are attracted to its freedoms and privileges but intimidated by its responsibilities and sorrows.
We prefer consequences to dictate our decisions for then we have a built in excuse when things go awry. It wasn’t our fault. We allowed the situation to control us rather than for us to control the situation. The adult world is a competitive world, a world in which the idea of fairness does not apply. It is a political world in which people are attracted to people who think, behave and look like them. If you are not one of these people, no matter how good you are at what you do, you are unlikely to break through the network. So what do we do?
There are several things we do. We do nothing, pray that things will get better, or drift, afraid of failure so we have no chance for success.
We stay stuck in a job we hate and blame the world for being so stuck. The irony is where we are is exactly where we belong because we cannot see ourselves being anywhere else.
Or we have a meeting with ourselves, seek help, and come to understand we are the problem. We then adjust our desires to balance with our potential and prospects, and seek qualification in some kind of work. We grow up.
As much as our national tradition resents the idea of a class and caste system, no society since the beginning of time has ever escaped the business of social, economic, political, religious, cultural and ethnic boundaries sequeing to mutually satisfying connections.
We have a natural affinity to be with people like ourselves, a natural aversion towards people who appear to be different. As much as we are a melting pot of nations, we stay pretty much within our own ethnic group.
The irony about boundaries is that they exist mainly in our heads, which explains why we limit our parameters often to the point of suffocation. People are people the world over, and once we penetrate the façade of self-protection, we gravitate to what we have in common.
The support system of the family, as imperfect as it may seem as a child, can produce a rude awakening once it no longer exists. Once that safety net vanishes, we are exposed to the real world where the good, the bad and the ugly operate with enthusiasm.
As inscrutable as we might find our parents during our adolescent years, as contrary and clueless as they might appear, chances are we will have no idea what they have endured until we are ourselves are parents and have teenagers.
Generations change but disdain and intransigence of parents never changes in the minds of teenagers. Rebellion is therefore a natural phenomenon. It is necessary to achieve personal identity. Some children rebel early, others late, and still others, never. Those who never challenge their parents are unlikely ever to grow up. Their lives become a permanent lie founded in self-deceit in which unhappiness has a permanent home and adulthood is a distant mirage.
It is probably why we have so few adults today in our institutional society. Our collective culture has little interest in growing old and therefore growing up. American life is predicated on being a juvenile forever. We preserve our adolescence with tummy tucks and face lifts with mind enhancing drugs with films and books and music promoting virtual reality where entitlements have no limitations and the national debt causes no real sorrow. .
Last year I wrote a series of four missives on “Retreat from Adulthood” (June/July 2011). It was before I had read the nineteenth century philosopher Gustave Le Bon only to realize that we have a long Western history of juvenility.
We are our own parents, which means much as we may resent our parents it magnifies self-resentment. It is nearly impossible to cope in this world we have created with so little self-regard. A word to the wise: make peace with your parents now.
The ninety-nine percenters of “Occupy Wall Street” are not new. They have been legion wherever I worked in the United States, Europe, South Africa or South America. They are people who have never connected. Miffed that they are so handicapped, unable or unwilling to do anything concrete about it, they join the crowd, or stay where they are and retreat into six passive behaviors. In “Six Silent Killers” (1998), these behaviors are shown to have contributed mightily to our global competitive disadvantage.
ARE WE SUSPENDED IN PERMANENT ADOLESCENCE?
It may seem arbitrary but we are a nation that refuses to grow up.
Childhood is often extended well beyond the age of eighteen with children still living at home, being supported by their parents, in heavy debt to them, living in the virtual reality of electronic games, partying as if there is no tomorrow, or living off a partner without taking hold of anything permanent in a quest to postpone growing up until middle age. Stuck with the consequences of those postponed decisions, there is often no one to blame, but one’s parents.
It is our parents fault that they didn’t make us do the right thing; their fault that we didn’t buckle down when young and in school, but instead drifted from one thing to another; their fault that we didn’t go to college, or complete our college education; their fault that we married right out of high school; their fault that we are not in better financial shape; their fault that we are not happy.
When we reach the age of eighteen, we are attracted to its freedoms and privileges but intimidated by its responsibilities and sorrows.
We prefer consequences to dictate our decisions for then we have a built in excuse when things go awry. It wasn’t our fault. We allowed the situation to control us rather than for us to control the situation. The adult world is a competitive world, a world in which the idea of fairness does not apply. It is a political world in which people are attracted to people who think, behave and look like them. If you are not one of these people, no matter how good you are at what you do, you are unlikely to break through the network. So what do we do?
There are several things we do. We do nothing, pray that things will get better, or drift, afraid of failure so we have no chance for success.
We stay stuck in a job we hate and blame the world for being so stuck. The irony is where we are is exactly where we belong because we cannot see ourselves being anywhere else.
Or we have a meeting with ourselves, seek help, and come to understand we are the problem. We then adjust our desires to balance with our potential and prospects, and seek qualification in some kind of work. We grow up.
As much as our national tradition resents the idea of a class and caste system, no society since the beginning of time has ever escaped the business of social, economic, political, religious, cultural and ethnic boundaries sequeing to mutually satisfying connections.
We have a natural affinity to be with people like ourselves, a natural aversion towards people who appear to be different. As much as we are a melting pot of nations, we stay pretty much within our own ethnic group.
The irony about boundaries is that they exist mainly in our heads, which explains why we limit our parameters often to the point of suffocation. People are people the world over, and once we penetrate the façade of self-protection, we gravitate to what we have in common.
The support system of the family, as imperfect as it may seem as a child, can produce a rude awakening once it no longer exists. Once that safety net vanishes, we are exposed to the real world where the good, the bad and the ugly operate with enthusiasm.
As inscrutable as we might find our parents during our adolescent years, as contrary and clueless as they might appear, chances are we will have no idea what they have endured until we are ourselves are parents and have teenagers.
Generations change but disdain and intransigence of parents never changes in the minds of teenagers. Rebellion is therefore a natural phenomenon. It is necessary to achieve personal identity. Some children rebel early, others late, and still others, never. Those who never challenge their parents are unlikely ever to grow up. Their lives become a permanent lie founded in self-deceit in which unhappiness has a permanent home and adulthood is a distant mirage.
It is probably why we have so few adults today in our institutional society. Our collective culture has little interest in growing old and therefore growing up. American life is predicated on being a juvenile forever. We preserve our adolescence with tummy tucks and face lifts with mind enhancing drugs with films and books and music promoting virtual reality where entitlements have no limitations and the national debt causes no real sorrow. .
Last year I wrote a series of four missives on “Retreat from Adulthood” (June/July 2011). It was before I had read the nineteenth century philosopher Gustave Le Bon only to realize that we have a long Western history of juvenility.
We are our own parents, which means much as we may resent our parents it magnifies self-resentment. It is nearly impossible to cope in this world we have created with so little self-regard. A word to the wise: make peace with your parents now.
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Awesome...
ReplyDeleteProfound and true.