The Childishness of Ordinary Adulthood

Jadedness, symbolic cognition, and the playacting of our social roles

The experience of being a child differs tremendously from that of being an adult, which is the basis of our nostalgia for the innocence and rapture of being shepherded by guardians when we encountered the world for the first time.

Children experience the world as a magical place because their brain is in the process of being hardwired, of forming millions of neural connections at a faster pace than their brain will form at any other time in their life.

As a Berkeley report says, “Before preschoolers enter kindergarten, their brains are more active and more flexible, with more connections per brain cell, than the brains of adult human beings, the researchers have discovered. By age three, the child’s brain is actually twice as active as an adult’s. It has some 15,000 synapses or connections per neuron, many more than in the adult brain.”

Edutopia points out that “Children’s brains develop in spurts called critical periods. The first occurs around age 2, with a second one occurring during adolescence. At the start of these periods, the number of connections (synapses) between brain cells (neurons) doubles. Two-year-olds have twice as many synapses as adults. Because these connections between brain cells are where learning occurs, twice as many synapses enable the brain to learn faster than at any other time of life. Therefore, children’s experiences in this phase have lasting effects on their development.”

As a result, although an adult can sometimes recapture a sense of childlike joy, adult experience is generally one of comparative disenchantment. Children are enthusiastic to learn because their survival depends on their ability to spark engagements with adults. Adults are more likely to be overstimulated than children, to be “stuck in a (mental) rut.”

This is known as jadedness, the dulling of experience by overindulgence. Collectively, this jadedness manifests as the decadence of an elite class or of a whole, pampered society, of a population that’s infantilized only in the negative sense. Aristocrats are liable to be overprotected, which makes them mentally fragile and unwilling to explore the unknown. Children are protected because their bodies are weak, but their curiosity makes them brave and even reckless in seeking out fresh stimuli.

Paradoxically, though, the difference between the child’s enchantment with the newness and thus the seeming inherent meaningfulness of interactions, and the adult’s comparative dullness due to overfamiliarity indicates a way in which adult experience is fundamentally childish.

The nature of jadedness

The key is to notice that the adult is overly familiar precisely with the same neural hardware that the child uses for the first time. It’s not as though childhood and adulthood are powered by different mental substrates. The child grows into the adult, and it’s because of the commonalities between the child’s brain and its developing neural connections, on the one hand, and the adult’s entrenched character and greater mastery over his or her mental functions, on the other, that the adult can be jaded and tends to be so.

A precondition of jadedness is some continuity between the child’s and the adult’s minds. The jaded adult is overly familiar with what is original and exciting to the child — and indeed with what was so to that very adult in his or her bygone childhood years. The fact that the child’s brain establishes more neural connections than does the adult’s or at least lays the neural foundations for the adult’s way of processing experience makes for a neural definition of “jadedness”: instead of relishing the flurry of intriguing, new mental associations, the adult is comparatively jaded because all the well-established brain can do is retread the same old pathways of thought and feeling, making the adult mind like a prison.

What are these mental features that children and adults share? They’re just the ones that distinguish the mentality of our species and that are currently best explained by cognitive science. Crucially, we have a cerebral cortex, which is a brain within the brain. Whereas the brain of most animal species controls the animal’s body and its behaviour, a human brain is split into a more complex hierarchy, enabling what we call the “person” or the “self-aware mind” to engage with its mental states. To some extent, we can control not just our limbs and our actions, but ourselves. Our brain gives us some access to itself via the workspace of consciousness.

Consequently, we’re preoccupied with language, symbols, and other abstractions since they comprise the ghost in the machine, as it were. We experiment with our thoughts and feelings, in imagination, art, self-reflection, conversation, and enculturation, not by speaking as neurologists with access to our individual neurons, but by abstracting from that overwhelming level of detail and by engaging in creative generalizations. We reason inductively, playing with concepts, rules, arguments, metaphors, models, and worldviews.

Thus, the child’s and the adult’s mind and brain are still, of course, human.

Toying with abstract symbols in fantasyland

But those very abilities are inherently childish even when they’re mastered by adults in our professional capacities, and even when they’re enrolled in technical, seemingly sophisticated, and serious businesses such as logical argumentation, scientific experimentation, or legal maneuvering. All symbols are fictions. Therefore, any use of symbols is a case of playing in a fantasy. No matter how rigorous or jargon-ridden the thought may be, every human thought that proceeds from a concept or a model (an idealization that simplifies the data) is a case of toying with ideas.

Rather than engaging directly with the environment, we retreat to our mental playpen, which we carry with us from childhood to adulthood, and we ponder our symbolic representations. This enables us to experiment more safely with possibilities. Our imagination runs wild, and we develop our schemes for exploiting opportunities. Yet this distance between the human mind and the real world makes every adult human thought childlike.

Thus, the difference between the child’s and the adult’s engagements isn’t that the latter are inherently more serious and sophisticated; again, our young and old neural hardware and capacities are the very same, and only the pace of establishing neural connections differs. Rather, the child is enchanted with the newness of his or her mind’s utility, whereas the adult typically wearies of it. The child is excited by the unfamiliarity of the mind’s power to outthink nature, whereas the adult takes that power for granted until unleashing it becomes a routine business.

Nevertheless, with the aid of a philosophical or a religious perspective, adults can evidently appreciate this humiliating absurdity, that our adult attachments are misunderstandings based on tricks of perception.

Take the most serious human task imaginable, such as Albert Einstein’s theorizing about space and time, the trading of hundreds of billions of dollars on the stock market, or a trial lawyer’s defense of someone facing execution for a crime.

To the extent that such activities depend on mental symbols, they’re inherently childish from an existential standpoint. Existentially, due to the gulf between symbols and reality, it’s inevitable that our preoccupation with the former makes us childish. When we take ourselves to be scientifically theorizing about physical systems, calculating odds to earn a profit by trading stocks, or negotiating the technicalities of the law to discharge a democratic duty, we’re just playing with toy symbols in fantasyland as far as the outer, cosmic wilderness is “concerned.”

The fictional characters we play

There’s a second continuity, too, which is that the child and the adult share the personal character and home culture that the child establishes from his or her early experiences and environment. The child is familiar neither with the outer nor with the inner world, whereas the adult may know himself or herself all too well.

We like to think our mental capacities give us absolute freedom of self-determination, but our character limits that freewill. True, we may be ignorant of our unconscious mental processes, and we may confuse the self-image that we entertain in our fantasies with the person we become in our real engagements with others and with the world at large. Still, there are objective patterns in how we behave that define us.

This is yet another childish aspect of human adulthood, since as real as our personalities may be, they too, like semantic symbols are fictions. Our character is a role we play, scripted not just by our childhood but by social obligations and our aspirations. Notice how readily children pretend to be something they’re not. The difference between the child’s and the adult’s role-playing is that the child isn’t yet attached to a single role, whereas the adult settles into a character as he or she takes on social duties and becomes accustomed to certain inner predilections.

To be clear, there’s a difference between the objective cognitive and emotional patterns that distinguish us as individuals, and the subjective selves with whom we choose to identify. The latter are just symbols, abstractions, idealizations, and exaggerations, which makes them fictional. We don’t identify as our body, brain, or mental patterns; rather, we consider ourselves people with a mind, a self, or even a spirit.

You’re not your brain, you think, but a person with a private name. You have a family, a job, a hobby, and a dream for your future — all of which depend on a thousand abstractions which make you, the subject of this narrative a fictional character. As a self with a personality, we have character in that we play a role in a narrative that we help to write with our inner monologues.

Personhood, then, is a special case of the childishness at issue. Our self is our most treasured symbol, the idealization to which we’re the most attached. And notice how blatantly childish our behaviour becomes when our ego is challenged or disappointed, in which case we may lose sight of decorum and throw a tantrum in public. We say in that case that our “inner child” emerged, to our embarrassment. We save face by pretending that adult decorum isn’t itself childish in other ways, even as we’re aware that children can be well-behaved too.