#280： Why Growing Up Is a Subversive Act
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Summary
Looking around, there seems to be a dearth of grown-ups in our culture. We put a premium on seeming cool and hip, and we'll spend inordinate amounts of money to retain our youthful looks. Meanwhile, being known as mature has become something to avoid entirely, as it signifies you become a boring, stodgy old coot. As a result, we ve got a lot of folks in our society who are adults by merit of their chronological age, but don t appear or act like grownups. But what if growing up doesn t mean you have to be boring and lame? What if growing up is actually a really rebellious act? Well, that s the argument guest today makes in her latest book, Why Grow Up? by Susanne Nieman.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast looking around
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there seems to be a dearth of grown-ups in our culture we put a premium on seeming cool and hip
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and we'll spend inordinate amounts of money to retain our youthful looks meanwhile being known
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as mature has become something to avoid entirely as it signifies you become a boring stodgy old
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coot as a result we've got a lot of folks in our society who are adults by merit of their
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chronological age but don't appear or act like grown-ups but what if growing up doesn't mean
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you have to be boring and lame what if growing up is actually a really rebellious act well that's
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the argument guest today makes in her latest book her name is susan nieman and she's the author of
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why grow up subversive thoughts for infantile age today on the show susan i discuss why becoming a
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grown-up has gotten a bad rap how our culture including smartphones infantilizes us and what
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the enlightenment thinkers jean-jacques rousseau and emmanuel kant can teach about how to become a
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grown-up susan then goes on to share ideas of what you can do to feel more like an autonomous adult
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and why embracing that role is such a subversive thing to do really interesting podcast after the
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show is over check out the show notes at aom.is slash why grow up where you find links to resources
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where you delve deeper into this topic susan nieman welcome to the show i'm glad to be here
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so you wrote a book that i i loved it's really interesting it's a topic that i thought a lot
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about too um it's called why grow up where you make the case of why people should grow up where
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you look to enlightened philosophers like rousseau and kant uh to make that case but before we get
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into those arguments why did you feel like it was necessary to even write a book making a case on
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why adults or why people should grow up because grown-ups get such a terrible rap um you know
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the standard view in our culture and and not just american culture it's um certainly in western europe
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uh pretty much the same is it growing up as a matter of giving up of resigning yourself
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to uh the world as it is of um losing your dreams your hopes your passions your uh ideals and uh
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it's a pretty depressing prospect the interesting thing is when i wrote the book i mean you never
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really know who you're writing for um but if i imagined a reader it was somebody sort of in their
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late 40s who felt they had to adjust to the idea that their life was basically over
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and a lot of those people have have liked the book but um i've gotten some of the nicest
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responses and reviews from people under 30 who have said number one um thank heavens somebody is
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telling us that uh this is not the best time of my life you know sort of this we have this idea that
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the time between i don't know 20 and 30 or 18 and 28 is supposed to be the high point of your life
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and anybody who's over that uh over those years i have yet to meet a single person who would like
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to repeat them and there's empirical evidence as well that there's no way in which this is the
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happiest time of one's life but people uh are told that and i can certainly remember in my 20s
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um feeling that first of all this was not true of me but i would keep hearing oh enjoy the best years
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of your life and then i would think not only uh you know am i struggling with figuring out who i am and
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what my strengths are and weaknesses and what i want to do um but i'm also not enjoying the best years
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of my life you know so it was this kind of thing that you beat yourself with but uh so i i met a lot
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of people in their 20s who have said thank you for saying this is not the best part of uh my life
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and that i have something to look forward to that's why i read the book yeah and but besides this
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narrative that growing up is terrible um and just not fun and you have nothing to look forward to
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except you know slowly sliding into the grave um you also argue that our modern culture in a lot of
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ways infantilizes us so it makes it hard to grow so can you explain that how how does modern culture
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make us makes it makes it hard to grow up sure um let me um just back up a step before i answer that
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which is um to say look so why if um nobody i have met would like to repeat their 20s i mean you can
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sometimes say if i knew what i knew now uh you know but uh but we don't so the the condition would
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be repeat them just the way they are uh they were actually um full of doubt full of um anxiety full of
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i don't know who i am and um i don't know if i'm going to be able to meet the demands that life places
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on me i don't know if i'm allowed to make a mistake um there's the view that sort of every decision
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you make in your 20s is going to be absolutely faithful and you can't turn around so the question
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is you have all this empirical evidence against the idea that growing up is a long that that the
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your 20s are the happiest best times of your life um and you have empirical evidence that people
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actually get happier as they get older so the question is why are we fed this particular view and
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we're fed it all the time from all the media um and i think it's in order to convince people
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that they shouldn't expect very much from their lives and they certainly shouldn't demand it so i
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think in in a complicated way it's a political claim the view that growing up it you know basically
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sucks um right so then the question so how does the culture infantilize itself um just at the
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moment you're catching me i normally live in berlin germany but you're catching me in mississippi
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where i'm uh taking a sabbatical and working on a new book and uh maybe you're completely used to
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this everywhere uh in the states but i was just shocked yesterday when i went to get gas um and uh i
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there was a screen at the gas pump uh i don't know is that something common in now in uh in the states
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i mean there is no minute of your life when there is not a screen to distract you so so what is the
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distraction doing okay why of course you can say well um on a micro level um it's uh it's providing
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advertising and selling products and making money but uh on a micro on a macro level it's making sure that
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we never have a moment in which we can actually reflect on what's going on and i in in the book i
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talk about uh what we do with with babies so i raised three kids um and uh you know that if a baby
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grabs something that it's not supposed to have you left the scissors somewhere or you know whatever
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um a little baby just needs to be distracted i mean there are two choices okay there and there
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are authoritarian parents who will hit a baby still uh who grab something they're not supposed to have
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or that might do them uh damage um but less authoritarian parents of whom i hope most of us
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are or will grow up to be uh use this other trick which is distracting and with babies it's very easy to
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distract them you you know stick a bunch of keys in their face or a bright ring or something oh they
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forgotten all about what they wanted to have as a child gets older the distraction gets more complicated
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but it's a huge form of manipulation i mean you know it's carrots and sticks and and um if you're
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raising children you know that uh you you have to use one or the other so um carrots tend to be
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better but what we have and now i'm not talking about um raising children who are going to uh you
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want to prevent from doing themselves harm which is certainly in the first uh years of life that is
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something you need to do but uh talking about a whole society who dazzles us with insignificant choices
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you know between uh you know walmart or wherever it is you shop in mississippi there's kind of no avoiding
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walmart an entire aisle full of toothpaste uh or breakfast cereal and of course if you live in a
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culture like that uh you get used to it it's very interesting to move back and forth between countries
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because uh the things that you take for granted if you only stay in one place um become actually
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something you think about if you get a chance to compare it with other cultures which is why one of
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the things i i strongly recommend in the book as a part of the process of growing up is traveling not as a
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tourist preferably working in another culture but in any case um you we don't realize how dazed we are
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and exhausted by the process of um deciding which toothpaste to buy or which breakfast cereal to buy
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that by the time we get out of the gigantic supermarket we our brains have kind of had it um
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and we we are so um drugged basically by trivial choices and by the energy that it takes to make trivial
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choices that we forget that the really important choices are not in our hands um how the world is run
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uh how uh you know what uh you know what the government does with our tax money what uh you know our
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representatives do with uh uh you know basically with our lives i mean i'm i i would avoid at the
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moment talking about the political situation that we're in at the moment because it is so extraordinary
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and um really defies um defies kind of normal interpretations when i wrote the book i certainly
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didn't expect that um the white house would look the way that it looks now so i don't want to talk
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about um you know partisan political choices but about an entire system which keeps us distracted just
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in the same way that you would distract a little baby with a keychain right and what's interesting
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when you talk about like these choices that we have as consumers um the insidious thing about that
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is it makes us feel like we're in control right um exactly we think oh i'm i'm deciding which
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toaster to buy or which microwave or which app i'm going to download on my phone but then
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which car to buy which yeah you know smartphone but yeah distracts you from like the stuff that
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really really will affect your life on a on a big level exactly and it it it gives us the the
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appearance of choice in these trivial ways without realizing that actually um you know the important
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choices are out of our hands so so the funny thing is um when people tell you to grow up
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what they mean is stop thinking about the big questions like you know why do i don't know the
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numbers uh right now of how many children die every day of preventable diseases my favorite question
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at the moment because i don't know how to answer it was asked by malala uh and it wasn't given a lot
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of press um she won the nobel prize when she argued that women should be uh girls should be
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allowed to be educated and she you know her life was threatened and nearly lost for that
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and that was wonderful but when she used the education that she then got to figure out that you could
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educate every child on the planet for 12 years on the profits the weapons industry makes in eight days
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this is an extraordinary figure i checked it with a um major economist he said it was right
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and um that is a the question why don't we do that um is a question that i don't even know how to
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begin to answer but the message that we tend to get is to you know as we grow up we should stop
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thinking about these very large questions about justice and hunger and um you know um who runs the world
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and why and we should start thinking about grown-up questions namely getting a job and figuring out
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how we're going to buy a bunch of toys and the toys are of course not described as toys they're
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described as crucial um you know uh tools for becoming an adult and the truth is unfortunately
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a smartphone and a computer um are in the world we now live in uh tools for becoming uh an adult in some
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parts of uh this country certainly where there's no decent public transportation a car is also part of
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that but you know you get you get it's like a reversal um i think malala's question is a really
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grown-up question but uh and the question of which smartphone to buy which app to download
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is a pretty childish question in the end but we are taught this reversal so yeah let's let's talk
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what do you mean by what do you think it means to grow up so you're you're saying that the common
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idea of being grown up is okay you got to get a house get a job figure out how to buy this stuff
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for yourself and for your family so they have a quote-unquote good life um and you're arguing well
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those are actually pretty trivial um so if that's not what it means to be a grown-up how do you define
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it well let me step back a second i would not say um you know that providing uh for yourself and
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your family it is is a trivial question of course it's not you know um those are uh those are sort
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of crucial for being able to to do a bunch of other things it's just that a lot of people get trapped
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in the idea of what it means to provide for uh themselves and their families and um it tends to
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mean you know it it overtakes them uh in ways that uh uh it doesn't need to you know i mean um
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yeah i have a job i um i raised three kids actually by myself so i was the uh sole provider for them
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after their uh father died quite early and uh i do know what it means to um you know to have to work
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hard and put food on the table and a roof over people's heads but um first of all it doesn't
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need to happen as quickly as it's often uh supposed and secondly there are lots and lots of ways to raise
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a family and put food on the table so um but let me just say that i think there's one thing and it
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ties into you know this whole question um one way to summarize what i think it means to grow up
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and it means keeping one eye on the way the world is and one eye on the way the world should be
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and unfortunately we're often taught to close that other eye about the way the world should be
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and only focus on the way the world is and uh it's not necessary it's not good for the world as a
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whole and it makes for a pretty unhappy life so um you know keep keeping an eye on the way the world is
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um sure you gotta make a living you gotta figure out how to do that somehow um but uh keeping your eye
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eye on the way the world should be which involves both um uh your own personal dreams um
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which i actually think is is perhaps the most crucial part of people's education because you
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don't really know your own culture until you can see it in the light of another you just take
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everything for granted until you live somewhere else um or i don't know maybe you want to become a
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musician maybe you want to you know they're a potter there are a million things that people um keep as
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their own personal aspiration that may not at all relate to um making a living but there's also
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being engaged in some form of making the world slightly better than it was when you entered it
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and i think there's a deep human need to do that it can be through beauty i mean somebody who becomes a
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you know a wonderful musician is is creating beauty that wasn't there before she uh she got there uh
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beautiful uh beautiful ceramics beautiful um art of any kind but um i think moving the world a little
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bit forward is um part of our sense of what it means to be human and the ways in which our culture
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infantilizes us is by keeping us passive i mean that's the you know i just saw the pump at the
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at the uh the the screen at the gas pump last night just this is amazing i'm not supposed to have one
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thought of my own i'm simply supposed to be taking in somebody else's stuff all the time
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um and uh that means having a being a receptacle basically for um you know other information um
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most often false information that's blaring at you so that you have no space to be an active human
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being to think for yourself and uh that is what i think uh part of being human part of being grown up
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you see this with children i mean it's interesting um basically as soon as they're able to hold a
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crayon or or um you know make a mud pie children are making something in the world they're doing
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something in the world they want to do it um they they don't simply want to be passively distracted
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so it sounds like being grown up is a matter of balancing idealism with pragmatism sure with that
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absolutely yeah yeah okay well so let's get to these enlightenment thinkers that you look to
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rousseau and kant you argue in the book that coming of age or you know becoming an adult
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um is a problem of the enlightenment uh why do you why is that why is becoming an adult an
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enlightenment problem so basically before about the 1750 um there wasn't a lot of choice in your life
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um what you did with the rest of your life um usually where you lived unless you were fleeing
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a war or uh a famine uh where you lived and what you did was basically where your parents had lived
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and uh what they did there just simply wasn't uh uh uh for a whole variety of of historical reasons
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individual choice did not play much of a role in people's lives okay and suddenly again for complicated
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reasons that historians uh can can go into certainly around the 1750 the idea that you might determine
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some of the course of your own life you might do something that your parents hadn't done you might
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live somewhere uh where your parents hadn't lived you might marry someone who your parents didn't pick
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out for you um all of that became uh began to be open the interesting thing is we don't realize how much
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choice we have the if you think about who really doesn't have much choice in their lives uh look at the
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royal family of england you know i mean prince george is very clear what prince george is going to be when
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he grow up grows up i'm not saying um that one exactly feels sorry for him he'll be raised to expect that
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certainly a very luxurious life but it's also a very predetermined life um in you know um as
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part of uh basically a feudal hierarchy that's been left over from pre-modern times so we have certain
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choices we don't always uh realize how much choice we have but we do have them since you know the last
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250 years or so and people began therefore to think about growing up as uh as a task as a question
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um rather than taking it for granted and the first person to to do that was uh the french uh philosopher
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and writer jean-jacques rousseau who very much influenced uh the german philosopher emmanuel kant
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and it's interesting because they were both very different stylistically but what they had in common
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is that each of them came from basically what you'd call a working class family i mean parents were
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small artisans um it's not clear how literate if they were literate uh at all they were and the idea
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that either of those boys would become you know one of the leading lines of western thought was not
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even something that could be conceptualized by their parents um but that is what happened to them so it's
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not surprising that both of those uh thinkers wrote about the question they also wrote about it of course
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because they thought um it was also point in time when you were beginning to think about general education
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uh there were very very few schools uh during the renaissance and early modern period um people of a
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certain class got tutored at home people uh who were below that class did not but you were beginning
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in the 18th century to think that uh it was important to educate boys not girls but um at least to educate
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boys and uh the question was what kind of influence what what kind of influence does education have
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on the individual person and how does the individual person then fit into or help create
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uh a political society you know we take all this for granted in the states but actually um
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thomas jefferson and benjamin franklin all these people were reading enlightenment philosophy all the time
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and uh the idea that you had to have educated citizens if you wanted to have a democratic republic
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is um thomas jefferson wrote a lot about it but it was a new idea at the time we sort of take it for
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granted we should take it more seriously now because uh i don't think we have a citizenry that's
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educated in you know picking through the uh mass of information to get the um facts picked out from
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the alternative facts but um in any case this is an enlightenment idea that that if you want to have
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i mean it's a progressive enlightenment idea obviously the people who did not want to have a
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democratic uh republic did not want to educate um the bulk of the population but the people who
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wanted a democratic republic realized you uh if that's going to work and if people are not going
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to be fooled by um any narcissistic demagogue who comes their way you need to educate them we're
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going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors
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and now back to the show so let's talk about rousseau he wrote this book emile um it was a
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work of fiction where he takes this kid named emile and sort of raises him and takes him through like
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what he thought was an ideal education to create um you know an adult um can you kind of summarize i
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mean what are some of the stuff that rousseau thought that children should be put through um in order
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to become a grown up sure i mean it's a kind of crazy book it's it's totally unique it is fiction
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but it's also the first child raising manual that was ever written and it also has some um and it's
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also philosophy but it's fun to read um which is why people should um take a look at it and it really
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began uh you know every thought about modern pedagogy so let's say right off that rousseau himself knew
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that what he was proposing was not practical um and uh he begins by saying uh people are telling me
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proposed what can be done um that's not human nature and he says we do not know what our nature permits us
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to be because our nature has been um filtered through particular set of social practices
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so let us here i'm just going to set out the ideal here and the person who does it best uh who comes
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closest to that ideal will have done the best so um he also begins the book by saying everything is
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good as it leaves the hands of the author of nature everything degenerates um in the hands of men
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that's a pretty strong statement but he wants to reverse that okay i mean i'm i you asked you to talk
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about i don't agree with everything that rousseau says in that book but it's a terribly important book
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the idea is um to that children are born natural democrats without ideas of hierarchy
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they are born uh without ideas of authority they are born intensely curious
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and one should allow them to figure out what they should learn okay so um rather than forcing kids to
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and everything we uh think about progressive forms of education all began in rousseau you know
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hit of course at his uh in his day the you know non-progressive education was worse certainly than it uh
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than it is now but you know kids were supposed to memorize everything said no follow the child's natural
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curiosity um he actually thought the child should not learn to read until uh he or she was 12 which is
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getting pretty old but he thought if you if you don't force the child to do anything except
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through force of natural necessity um that the child would um would grow up being nobody's master and
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nobody's slave so as an example um you know if uh if you tell a child uh no you can't have a cookie
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before dinner i'm not saying we should never do this we sometimes have no choice um the child will react
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often you know um not happily if you tell the child there are no more cookies left has a very different
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reaction so for example his uh his punishment if a child misbehaves and breaks the window is not to
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beat him but to say okay you're gonna have to um sleep in a room in the cold now obviously you know
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again um not all of his suggestions are are possible or perhaps even right but i think the basic idea of
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of uh that first of all children want to learn they want to be active they want to um be a part of the
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world and if you treat them with respect they will usually live up to it is a deeply important idea
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and how did rousseau's ideas you know influence kant you say they're you know different in their style
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but uh kant actually borrowed a lot or found a lot of inspiration in rousseau it's one of the um
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the most famous stories about kant so so kant um uh i mean he had a huge amount to do so he was extremely
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disciplined and he took an afternoon walk every day after lunch for an hour and he was so regular that
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they say the the people in town could set their watches by him and there were only two times when
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he didn't um take his normal afternoon walk um the second was when he heard the news of the french
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revolution but the first was when he heard when he was reading rousseau and he was so fascinated by it
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that he forgot to um take his walk what kant learned from rousseau was the idea that if you know and this is
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still a controversial idea but if people are treated decently and with respect they are not evil they will
00:32:11.000
behave decently and uh with respect towards other people okay so the idea that um basically and and this
00:32:23.260
is the way in which which emile is is also a theological book and it was banned by the way it was
00:32:30.900
banned and burnt in paris when it was written he's basically denying original sin he's saying that no
00:32:38.480
you know what um the evil that we see in people is a result of the way that they have been raised and
00:32:50.100
result of the expectations that they're given and a result of the way that they're treated and if we go
00:32:56.460
back to more natural ways of um raising children and living with them um which means doing without
00:33:05.160
ideas of uh domination and uh humiliation um you will be able to raise good human beings now
00:33:17.940
it's often said and that was for kant incredibly important okay and it's been important for everybody now
00:33:26.120
this idea is often um you know it's often um made fun of so you get you know people like david brooks
00:33:38.460
of the new york times but you know all kinds of people will say things like you know well there are two
00:33:43.240
views of human nature one is hobbes and hobbes says that a life in the state of nature is uh
00:33:52.040
oh gosh a nasty brutish and short solitary poor nasty brutish and short okay basically that um
00:34:00.300
people in the state of nature are uh in a state of war and this is often called the more realistic
00:34:07.660
uh position and rousseau people turn their noses up at rousseau and say um oh well um rousseau
00:34:18.640
believed in the state of nature everybody was kind of you know peace love and sunshine and uh
00:34:25.020
unfortunately that's not the case now rousseau did not have that view at all he simply said people
00:34:30.780
in the state of nature are morally neutral okay and what they have is an innate idea of freedom
00:34:38.660
and of action they don't want to be dominated so that if you raise a child um
00:34:44.980
to be as free as possible um and as undominated as possible you can bring her to a you know to
00:34:57.300
become a moral grown-up okay so it's not that children are uh are naturally good or never um
00:35:07.440
never do brutal things anybody who's watched a you know two-year-old fight over a shovel in a
00:35:13.500
sandbox knows that um and and the real point about the the state of nature is we don't know the
00:35:23.740
question is not settled and there's no way to settle it okay we can't go back there i know the
00:35:30.480
evolutionary psychologists um have a lot of hypotheses but it's all just hypothesis okay they're not you
00:35:39.620
you know you will also get in you know various newspapers popular magazines or whatever people
00:35:45.940
will say well evolutionary theory says that our ancestors um you know were altruistic because
00:35:55.180
they hoped to get a piece of somebody else's pie when if they gave uh a piece of their own
00:36:04.100
we don't know what people were like uh 20 000 years ago we we're clueless and rousseau's insight was
00:36:13.680
to say you know what um the state of nature could have been this way it could have been that way we
00:36:21.120
don't know but we do know that what we assume about human nature will affect what we do and affect
00:36:30.760
how we treat other human beings and what kind of a society we build so let's think about what we'd
00:36:40.220
prefer to build would we prefer to build a society in which people were basically respectful of each
00:36:47.180
other basically free um basically not infantilized not in um uh you know not needing to be dominated in
00:36:57.600
order not to kill each other which is basically hobbes view um if we want to work for a just and
00:37:06.560
democratic society let's assume that people are naturally basically democratic because we don't
00:37:16.040
know either way okay and so yeah that was the whole point of emil is you you uh treated your treated
00:37:21.340
the child as a democratic free individual and uh he learned how to grow into that role uh through
00:37:29.380
that pedagogy okay so um let's talk about brass let's bring it today let's say someone's listening
00:37:38.680
to this they're a lot of our audiences are in their 20s and 30s and i know there's a common complaint
00:37:43.760
amongst people you know in that age like they're officially an adult right they're they have a job
00:37:49.520
um they might live by themselves they have their own place but they still don't feel like feel like
00:37:55.440
an adult um what are what are what are some brass tack things people can do to become a grown-up you
00:38:03.260
mentioned travel is one but what are some other things well first of all they should really think
00:38:08.500
hard about what being a grown-up means um the funny thing is uh when i was writing this book um a couple
00:38:18.460
of friends of mine people in their late 60s i guess 70 71 now uh good friends of mine said what are
00:38:27.560
you working on i said a book called why i grew up that said ew that's an awful subject um and one of
00:38:33.700
them said my hero was always peter pan and i thought this was amazingly funny three different people said
00:38:40.160
this to me and all of them are people who i would think of as fantastic uh fantastically realized
00:38:49.260
grown-ups um two of them are professionally successful one is not all of them are very creative
00:38:56.480
all of them are involved in their communities in some one case very political two cases politically
00:39:04.360
active um all of them um all of them uh all of them have children and grandchildren um but did not
00:39:14.160
raise them in particularly conventional ways all of them speak more than one language uh and you know
00:39:20.600
have lived in more than one place and i thought this is i started with that each of them were a terrific
00:39:26.260
model for me of being a grown-up but they did not want to think of themselves as grown-ups
00:39:32.620
because they thought growing up had such a bad rap so um you know i i would say the first thing to
00:39:40.260
think i mean the first comment is growing up is a process and i'm not sure that it ever makes sense
00:39:47.760
to say one is grown up because in a certain sense that would mean that one has stopped growing um
00:39:54.300
and that's kind of the end so so i'm not sure that being a grown-up is an ideal but the process of
00:40:02.220
growing up is an ideal and uh you know your listeners should just know i've met very few people i've in
00:40:11.640
the process of uh after after writing this book i talked to a bunch of people i gave a bunch of
00:40:17.420
lectures and stuff and um only met a couple who said they would consider themselves to be grown-ups and
00:40:25.700
and and they they weren't the they weren't the people most leading lives that that i would like to
00:40:33.120
lead but um the people who i would consider grown-up didn't feel grown-up in that sense either so i think
00:40:41.980
the first thing you need to do is to um you know re-examine your idea of what it means to be a grown-up
00:40:51.680
because if you think what it means is to give up your hopes of having an interesting and adventurous
00:40:58.740
life to always be on one track to not um do something or other to contribute to a better
00:41:07.980
world and you say well gosh i haven't given everything up yet so i can't be grown up hey guys
00:41:14.580
you don't need to give everything up to be grown up that's great i love that so i mean the books
00:41:19.000
you know why grow up i mean so it's like that's the question um you know and we talked about some
00:41:25.380
of the the voices in our culture that say it's you know growing up is a sucker's game right um
00:41:30.560
because it's boring tds and hard it's like why should people grow up i mean what what is your answer
00:41:35.720
like why what what what do they stand to benefit from growing up okay so i mean first of all you're
00:41:41.760
not going to be able to help growing old okay um and the you know so that's the that's the first part
00:41:51.360
of the question um so you might as well do it well right you might as well do it in a way that's as
00:42:00.280
what should i say as fulfilling as possible as meaningful as possible and doing that
00:42:08.160
actually winds up being subversive and see that's what's really interesting about the peter pan
00:42:16.140
question um i that i that i realized when i was talking to to these friends who said you know
00:42:22.980
i don't feel like a grown-up i always wanted to be peter pan these are not irresponsible people
00:42:28.280
at all these are i mean the person who said that is actually uh uh he's uh he's a very uh significant
00:42:37.880
political activist in israel um you know but so so i i thought it was hilarious that he said
00:42:46.520
his hero is peter pan and i think it's a it's a complicated thought but stay with me for a sec
00:42:56.480
um by painting um by painting growing up as as a sucker's game um i think we're because that is the
00:43:13.720
you know the prevailing view i think we are you know encouraged to stay infantile to stay like peter pan
00:43:23.700
okay okay and of course infantile people are much easier to control than grown-ups so um if you
00:43:34.140
actually realize that the subversive thing to do is not be peter pan not to refuse to grow up but
00:43:41.260
precisely to um become grown up in the sense that i've been talking about the sense of thinking for
00:43:50.500
yourself in the sense of being a free human being who is active in the world um you know then you're
00:43:59.340
you're actually doing something that's uh well it's subversive it's adventurous and if all of us did it
00:44:09.760
it would have important uh political consequences fantastic well susan this has been a great conversation
00:44:16.260
is there some place people can go to learn more about your work sure uh i have a website uh s-u-s-a-n
00:44:23.460
dot n-e-i-m-a-n and you can find reviews of most of my books there some interviews just click around
00:44:34.320
it's it's it's pretty extensive well susan thanks so much for your time it's been an absolute pleasure
00:44:39.080
a pleasure for me too great questions yeah enjoyed being with you my guest it was susan neiman she's the
00:44:44.220
author of the book why grow up subversive thoughts for an infantile age it's available on amazon.com
00:44:48.580
and bookstores everywhere you can also check out susan's website at susan-nieman.de where you can
00:44:56.520
find more of her writing and her work and make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is slash why grow
00:45:02.180
up where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic
00:45:05.280
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:45:17.500
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com if you enjoy this
00:45:21.540
show i would really appreciate if you give us a review on itunes or stitcher that helps us out a lot
00:45:25.300
as always appreciate the community support and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay