You're So Immature

 The vague judgments of maturity

    So childish. You laughed at the sex joke. You got giddy when your favourite artist dropped an album. You nerded out about a topic that interests you. Shut up and grow up.

    But we shouldn’t shut up! 

    I just finished rereading The Little Prince and it reminded me of our overabundance of seriousness. “We shouldn’t act like children; we aren’t children!”, but if we ditch every childlike behaviour we have, what are we to enjoy? We’ve created a box for ourselves by the name of “maturity”. This box has no explicit size, no objective location, and no concrete definition. It’s all up to the people around you to decide if you’re in it or not. Following these unclear guidelines is a clear path to being miserable. The many things deemed “immature” are just subjective human interests no different from the things deemed “mature”.

    To begin, one of the worst offenders of being “immature” is just natural human behaviour. He’s always daydreaming. She’s got a dirty mind. They like to wear their own disgusting style of clothes. God, is creativity really that insulting to you? Even in “mature” environments like office spaces, it takes imagination to get work done. Life’s a bit too glum if you look at it through your “serious” lens. Creativity invites you to see the world and everything that’s in it in your own way and brings you joy in the process. Maturity tries to shut that down. How immature!

    To continue, It’s considered quite childish and teenage-like to be too emotional. We make fun of those who cry when their relationship crumbles, and act like it’s normal when the same person suddenly spends their life at the gym and barely talks. There’s a healthy way of dealing with tough emotions: crying. However, crying is child’s play. It’s a tantrum. It’s your first time dealing with these emotions and nobody is here to teach you. It’s not their fault; they were taught the same. If you follow the guidelines of maturity, your emotions will be bottled up. How immature!

    In addition, maturity is also heavily based on independence, according to the “experts”. Asking for help is a luxury today. It’s not like this is everybody’s first try at living and we haven’t got a handbook or anything. Everyone older than us already went through it without a safety net, so they want us to suffer the same process. Life is hard. It’s cliché to say that because of how often we say it after experiencing life a little too much. That’s really a testament to the universal human struggle and nevertheless the indomitable human spirit. Just because our spirit is indomitable doesn’t mean it’s safe from getting beaten up from time to time. Maturity pulls away from the help we need. How immature!

    All in all, maturity is nonsense. We can’t enjoy life if we take ourselves too seriously, and there’s never a point where we’ll feel serious enough since there is no bar. Behaving as your natural self, treating your emotions as they should be and asking for help every now and then shouldn’t be as taboo as maturity makes them out to be. If we ditched these ridiculous medieval ideas of honour, manners and maturity we’d be a lot better off.