Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
Susan Neiman
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Growing up means realizing that no time of one's life is the best one, and resolving to savor every second of joy within reach. You know each will pass, and you no longer experience that as betrayal.”
“Freedom cannot simply mean doing whatever strikes you at the moment: that way you're a slave to any whim or passing fancy. Real freedom involves control over your life as a whole, learning to make plans and promises and decisions, to take responsibility for your actions' consequences.”
“...most of us no longer have the luxury of asking whether a job is genuinely productive, but only whether it pays well and has tolerable conditions.”
“When education is overwhelmed by hypermedia, travel facile or ruinous, and work a blurred mixture of more dependence and less meaning, it’s harder than ever to use those experiences to grow. But growing up, I have argued, has been dogged by dilemma ever since it was a real option. As Enlightenment philosophers knew, it’s a process that is as socially determined as it is profoundly individual.”
“Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world.”
“It’s an embarrassing fact that we are more afraid of embarrassment than a host of other discomforts, but it isn’t less true for all that. How often have you refrained from voicing hope or indignation for fear of being dismissed as childish? Oddly enough, that fear is adolescent, born of a time when few things feel worse than being regarded as a less grown-up than your peers.”
“A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.”
“When consuming goods rather than satisfying work becomes the focus of our culture, we have created (or acquieced in) a society of permanent adolescents.”
“Rousseau introduced the idea of false needs, and showed how the systems we live in work against our growing up: they dazzle us with toys and bewilder us with so many trivial products that we are too busy making silly choices to remember that the adult ones are made by others.”
“Given all the forces arrayed against it, no wonder Kant thought growing up to be more a matter of courage than knowledge: all the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement. And judgement can be learned — principally through the experience of watching others use it well —but it cannot be taught.”
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Book Keywords:
adulthood-growing-up-philosophy, individuality, silence, indignation, kant, emotion, judgement, society, embarrassment
