Being an adult is too scary!
Getting up early in the morning – to get ready, nicely dressed, and in the car, for a long commute to a workplace with stress and discomfort. And you actually needed much more, just today, to sleep an hour longer, or two.
Sitting in the queue, breathing the combustion gasses from the other cars, and your own too, probably, while getting stressed even before the day has really begun, because you may be late.
Late for what? For being there on time. That’s the kind of logic you have to deal with. Nobody needs you at the office at any particular time, so the fixed hours are really just arbitrarily set – just a means to show you that you are not a free person.
You could have done the work from home, just as well – or better. There are so many disturbances at the office, so you truly don’t get half the work done, that you can do when working from home. But then your boss can’t see you all the time and feel that he’s in control. And nobody can trust that you actually do work from home – that you are not just enjoying time, leaning back in the sofa with a cup of tea, thinking about your tasks, instead of sitting like on needles on an office chair, with your eyes glued to the screen, to look busy.
But new rules say that you must go to the office. There’s hardly enough room for everybody there, and since some of your colleagues will be coughing and sneezing, no doubt, you and everybody else are in serious danger of getting that same flu, or whatever it’ll be this time.
Most of your colleagues have small children, and such little people spend their time in kindergarten playing, laughing, sleeping a bit in the middle of the day, and having a good time – plus, catching every thinkable virus, which they then give to their parents, and, the chain is long, so soon the whole society has that.
You remember kindergarten. Sort of. Not really, actually, but you know what it looks like from the outside, and you know that you once were part of that – that you were a child, in kindergarten. And a thing you really do remember, was that you didn’t have to sit in a car queue for an hour to get there, and another to get home. And you wouldn’t be shouted at by a boss, or talked about behind your back by some colleagues. You wouldn’t feel or do anything at all that wasn’t direct, mindful, and both teaching you and making you feel comfortable.
Any problems at all, whatever they were, would be handled by the adults. In the kindergarten, or at home. Anywhere. Your task was to enjoy life. Nothing else.
But growing up led to more and more tasks that didn’t make you enjoy life at all. Sometimes you wonder how you survived the teenage years, with all the problems of not feeling to fit in anywhere, and with those new obligations of all kinds that you couldn’t live up to. The many tests at school and in social life.
But you got through it, only to discover that it was just a taster. The adult life had even more challenges, now expanding outside your own life. Such a thing like “world politics”! As a child, you hardly knew that there was a world – everything was either local, or somebody took care of it for you. Whoever was the president of a remote country wasn’t a topic at all.
But now, you know that this remote president is doing something, almost every day, that will harm you, somehow. And not just this one – there are many of them. And multinational companies, Big Tech, pollution, climate crisis, and a million other problems that suddenly have become yours.
Even when you want to just sit and relax in the evening, in front of the TV, watching something relaxing – well, then, first of all, they are all shooting at each other in almost every film you can find, and the nature programs will show you lions killing the zebras, or whatever. There’s no sanctuary. Everything seems to be about shouting, attacking, stealing, or destroying in some way or another. Just like at work. Just like almost every single second of your adult life.
How you wish that you again were that child in kindergarten! Okay, being a child means that you can’t decide yourself what you want to do – almost always, some adult will tell you when to sleep, when to get up, when to eat, and when to put away that interesting worm you found in the garden. No freedom. But still, as an adult, you have that same “no freedom”, now just in disguise: now you are made to decide on things, but without the freedom to decide what you want. You must decide what others have already planned for you – such as when to go to the office, and what to do there.
Some lacks of freedom are nicer than others. In childhood, it is a guided lack of freedom, sort of, where someone who loves you and wants you to be healthy and happy makes decisions for you. That’s opposite of adult lack of freedom, where everything you are not deciding in reality is what benefits others, not you. Nobody loves anybody at work, and they certainly don’t make decisions that are for the sake of your happiness or health.
The paradox is, then, that the child longs to become an adult – to be that free person who decides themselves when to go to bed and which toy to play with, and who can take that worm inside and put it in the aquarium, if they want, without anyone complaining. And the adult, having gained that freedom, wants to get rid of it, because of its fake nature, where every decision has requirements and consequences coming with it.
The solution seems to be to get some children yourself, so that you can let them be as free as possible, and help them through life. That will, of course, take away whatever tiny bit of real freedom you may have had left, before getting the children, but you will be doing it for the love of your children – and being bound by love isn’t the same as being “not free”, is it?
But sitting here, in the car queue, won’t bring you any children, that’s for sure. Your boss will shout at you, and you’ll be busy to catch up on what you didn’t do for the first 20 minutes, because you’ll be late, so there will be no lunch for you today. And you’ll be tired, stressed, and sad – and angry, due to the missing blood sugar, when going home in the late afternoon. No children come out of that, either.
Perhaps it is, after all, easier to just dream about becoming a child again, and start doing all those childish things people do. Watching cartoons on TV, and playing computer games. Building Lego kits, and playing with a drone, a camera, or something else that is mostly for the joy of unpacking it and looking at it.
Toys! That’s the omen! Toys for adults, of course, but for the same reason. To make you feel that you have some freedom to do something that you decide.
That’s how you can be an adult and a child at the same time. Like most of your colleagues, who you never really understood before, and like most of the world, to judge from the amount of toys available.
No children for you – but that new electric guitar, perhaps, or a Porsche. You always wanted to have a Porsche, you suddenly realize. Sitting in the car queue in a Porsche must be something! All the other car drivers will then envy you – and your freedom. And your newly found childhood.
Forget about remote presidents and angry bosses – inside that dream car, the world belongs to you. It will be your cubic meter of adult freedom.
Image by Atlantic Ambience at Pexels.com
