Maturity

Maturity is the set of prejudices we gain that give us an approximate representation of reality without needing to re-examine ourselves. This comes through experience and wisdom combined, and it doesn’t stop expanding if we wish to live well.

Those prejudices are common sense, but only “common” to someone who has come to understand those things for a long time. Nobody is born with common sense, but most people develop something like common sense if they’ve had common experiences and created common conclusions.

Awareness + Virtue

Immature people, as a general rule, are aware of injustice, but they tend to attribute it to odd causes like bystanders or claim their decisions are a product of victimhood. They will also tend to treat their bias as fact.

We gain experiences as we grow older. These experiences shape us to create accurate prejudices about life if we understand how they work and what they imply.

Maturity is mostly intuition. Like with all other intuition, maturity has multiple aspects that tend to scale with age. But, it scales more directly with wisdom.

One of the clearest indicators of maturity is that the person takes personal responsibility for what they do. They’ve become aware of the consequences they bring on themselves and claim title to all decisions they have made.

As people mature, they become increasingly unaffected by their environment because they experience less novelty from their experiences. If they’ve gained enough wisdom, they won’t react to how they feel as much as to what they know. Their increased understanding will mean most of their “soft skills” are usually better. They’ll be more decisive with words, speak more intentionally, walk more elegantly, and manipulate objects more precisely.

While we may still control our decisions, we don’t control 99.999% of our environment, and there’s a type of humility that always comes with the understanding of how little we really know or have control over.

A product of that humility is a form of gratitude. With enough understanding, people slowly come to realize how much other people established order in the past to permit people to currently confront chaotic things. Young people haven’t experienced life before technology or certain liberties, so the simple fact that their inexperience impedes their ability to fully understand the effort it takes to simply maintain everything.

Another quality of age is that we learn to be satisfied with less. This means we take less social risk as we age (since we’re fine with less grandiose returns) and tend to be happier.

However, at the same time, aging also tends to provoke us to more risk-averse actions. While this may be healthy for some things (e.g., higher-quality insurance policies), it also means we miss out on genuinely meaningful trends.

Stages

Every person, from birth to death, transitions through stages of questioning. Their entire existence is defined by the way they process their questions:

Can I trust the world? (~0-2 years old)

  • Concerned with mother over issues like feeding, receiving comfort, pain from teething, and sleeping.
  • If loved, we form a healthy degree of hope and determination to persevere.
  • When neglected, we’ll instinctively draw away from others or have a poor understanding of reality.
  • We require massive introspection to even budge the results of this stage later in life, and it determines most of our trust issues.

Is it okay to be me? (~2-4 years old)

  • Concerned with the relationship with both parents over issues like managing bodily functions, toilet training, controlling muscles, talking, and walking.
  • If loved, we build willpower and restraint.
  • When neglected, we end up highly compulsive or highly impulsive.
  • Most of our issues about identity come from this stage.

Am I okay to move, do, and act? (~4-5 years old)

  • Concerned with immediate family over issues like exploring, discovering, having adventures, and playing.
  • If loved, we give purpose to our actions.
  • When neglected, we either become ruthless toward others or needlessly inhibited toward ourselves.
  • Most of our issues about finding purpose come from this stage.

Can I make it in the world of people and things? (~5-12 years old)

  • Concerned with school, teachers, friends, and neighborhood with the need to achieve and accomplish.
  • If loved, we feel competent and naturally make methods from our actions.
  • When neglected, we either create a narrow sense of virtue or maintain mindless inertia toward tasks.
  • Most of how we approach work and play comes from this stage.

Who am I, and what can I be? (~13-19 years old)

Can I love? (~20-39 years old)

  • Concerned with lovers, friends, and work connections to find intimate relationships, make a work life, have a social life, and balance everything.
  • Our physical peak usually takes place around our late 20s.
  • If loved, we learn the true meaning of love and affiliate ourselves with healthy social connections.
  • When neglected, we either become sexually or emotionally promiscuous or exclude everyone and become antisocial.
  • Most of our view of the world is clarified and reinforced at this stage.

Can I make my life count? (~40-64 years old)

Was it okay to have been me? (~65+ years old)

Judging

Among the other prejudices we make when encountering people, we tend to gauge others’ maturity. We treat someone who behaves below what we’d expect for their age as “immature”, while we respect people we believe have attained a “mature” status.

When we look at someone younger, we track their maturity by how we imagine we were at that age. Often, for someone older, we only consider them immature if they behave worse than how we behave at our present age observing them (e.g., a 25-year-old not realizing a 50-year-old is immature until they behave like an adolescent).

We don’t think about maturity in others until it’s unusual by the standards of our cultural intuition. People don’t usually identify maturity in their peers unless the person is behaving very differently than them.

Frequently, under severe conflicts or hardship, we can regress back in age to any of our past life stages. But, that hardship can also grow us very rapidly through multiple life stages when channeled correctly.

We also tend to judge time differently as we age. When we’re young, our experiences are new, and time moves slower. As we experience more life, time moves faster, and we all inevitably experience years with the same speed as we had seen weeks or months.

Status

The largest standard of maturity comes through a group granting status to a member who has fulfilled a rite of passage, which typically starts around adolescence, but in modern societies can exist as late as the early 30s.

While it varies by culture, a rite of passage is a transition from childhood to adulthood, and represents several things simultaneously:

  • That person had a desire to prove themselves and asserted their actions to that end by doing (probably) stupid things, and they’ve realized their limits upon the world at large.
  • That person has come to understand what they can’t do and the right things to trust for handling the situation.
  • Their group believes from that person’s experience that they’ve changed enough that they’re now a junior member of society instead of a dependent child.

Children are often destructive, needy, and have a poor understanding of how to thrive. They hit critical learning periods where they absorb specific information, and their “child” place in society must be preserved for their benefit. A distinctive rite of passage empowers a child to find meaning in creating their self-identity through contrasting their decisions against how they were raised.

During the transition, and irrespective of the culture, a child will do a few things in an approximate order:

  1. Try to question everything their family has trained into them.
  2. Turn to friends to find alternatives to what they were raised in.
  3. Resolve their conflicts between the two or more competing views. This can frequently include vocally standing against authority figures.
  4. Make permanent decisions about what values they wish to honor. Others’ evil actions can stall their development, but they can expedite the decision-making process with wisdom.

This rite of passage is necessary for social harmony because it demarcates between “adult” leaders and “child” followers, as well as carving out a person’s identity in light of that distinction. Because of the risks of choosing wrongly, every single rite of passage will exclude at least some people who don’t fulfill it, from both aspects of laziness and incompetence.

The people who never fulfill a rite of passage will always represent a lower status in a culture’s hierarchy. They’ll typically exist as inferior in that group until they change their habits to find a new social group (which is a separate rite of passage) or accomplish something that proves their worth to their community.

In the absence of a clear rite of passage, most children end up persisting in a dead-end lifestyle until they find their path:

  • Working a miserable, low-wage job
  • Having trouble finding an identity, including with gender
  • Pursuing a career path that fails miserably
  • Getting fired unfairly, potentially repeatedly
  • Conflicts with law enforcement
  • Experiencing hardship or loss they must overcome

Often, marriage can mix with a rite of passage, though the culture can vary it dramatically. Some cultures value marriage as an inherent passage into adulthood, while others treat it as the termination of being young.

Advancing

As a person gains more life experiences, their decisions start developing clear patterns. Over time, the best measure of a person will frequently be expressed through the series of changes they engage in. They will endure more rites of passage through their life stages, which will slowly form into an ever-adapting, slowly solidifying story.

As someone keeps experiencing life and starts finding their ideal approach, they stop being as malleable as when they were younger. This is a sign someone’s experiences have conformed them to a distinct personality and expression, but anyone significantly younger will see them as more an “institution” than a changing and dynamic individual.

As a person gains experience, they will typically start fading in strength. By the time someone is middle-aged, they’re still growing in wisdom but are fading from their peak ability to perform, and growing old means all aptitude will start to fade.

As we get closer to the end of our lives, our time becomes more scarce, and we start pursuing ever-increasing meaning with our existence. This goes all the way to the end, where our health and time are waning, and we’re trying to build our legacy.

Civilization

In many modern civilizations, children are processed through an age-based system, where they reach new phases if they hit minimum age criteria.

Modern civilization is especially poor at rites of passage because of the niches and specializations that shift with technology, meaning there’s no universal standard in a large society. Without clear boundaries, most older adults in modern civilization condemn the youth for receiving privileges they didn’t earn (which was once true for them as well as children).

Group leaders often use “grades” to keep everyone motivated and measure if children are achieving what they must learn. However, those numbers are frequently arbitrary games to focus their attention. Some groups, however, don’t consider any criteria as worth holding them back, and it sabotages the meaningfulness that would have come from attaining high marks.

Eventually, in an age-based system, children reach an age of majority (~12-21 years old), where society presumes they’re likely to behave maturely at that age. In a society without any passage rituals, that age will get older as time passes to accommodate an ever-increasingly low maturity rate from older and older people having little to no competence from the resistance they should have faced.


Application

Older people always bemoan the youth because they imagined they weren’t as inexperienced as the youth are today. Every generation has its own cultural variation of the “kids these days don’t know how good they have it” speech, barring a group-affecting situation where the older generation worsened the situation for the younger generation. At that point, the older generation will either feel shame or arrogance, depending on how they internalized the story.

Older people have more experience with political upheaval, so most protesters and political activists are young people who aren’t being economical with their time and energy. For this reason, the only legitimately high-risk political conflicts are when the elderly start protesting as well.

Younger people are more often exploited by influential people who can distort their image to imply their virtuousness.

As people age, their decisions are always more well-considered, but not always wiser. Wisdom requires adding morality to understanding.

Without a demarcation that gives freedom to experiment, and the members haven’t been tested by a rite of passage, social groups will give as much time and consideration to both good ideas and bad ideas. This can be especially bad for ideas that have consistently been proven wrong.

A rite of passage will always have people who will never pass the ritual’s criteria. A group leader must know beforehand what to do with those people.

Most people in modern society don’t experience an adequate rite of passage. For this reason, they’re stuck with a childish view of the world and constantly trying to prove themselves until they learn from a severe hardship (such as having to maintain their automobile or file taxes).

It’s better to find meaning earlier in life when you have time and strength than later after you’ve expended much of your life.

An age-based social system only works if you believe children will naturally progress on their own. If they need prompting or nurturing to develop, age is only a rough estimate that won’t correspond to anything. Any system you use must use measurements based on achievement, or the gifted children will suffer.

An age of majority becomes socially complicated when it’s enforced as law. A romance between two people ages 16 and 19 is legally complicated, but a romance between two people ages 23 and 67 is more taboo.

To make life seem longer, experience new things. Time will move slower as you experience them. However, a well-experienced life will still yield the same time compression after enough life experiences (since they all will eventually have some overlap).

Generally, people who run the world are aged 48–55 because they’ve acquired the most understanding about avoiding exploitation by storytellers’ influence, but also haven’t started declining from aging yet. For this reason, society has a tendency to adhere to conservative trends that are usually 30–40 years old (because they’re nostalgically familiar with them), and “new” large-scale trends tend to be 10–20 years old.

Technology and culture that were around when you were a child is “normal” and how the world works, but is a new trend if it was developed between adolescence and about 35, and against the natural order of things above age 35.

The scope of risk we take demonstrates how mature we are. The older we get, the more precise and calculated our risks should be.

The age of majority can be complicated for young people across societies. Occasionally, they can fight in a war and drink alcohol in a foreign country, but not be allowed to drink, smoke, or rent a car in their home country.

Older people in societies without a rite of passage distrust their youth more, so they tend to put them away from mainstream society (e.g., high school) until they’re “ready” to become mature. However, this only forestalls or inhibits their development because they don’t have a chance to test their conflicting values, and the problem will magnify itself across decades.

Older people are considered an “institution”, so everyone expects different things for them than if they were “normal people”, and they always have a myth surrounding their existence:

  • When they think or believe something, it makes sense to those around them because younger people intuitively see them as predictable.
  • If they’re creating something, people assume they had comparatively more time to work on it, so it’s only natural they’d make it.