“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.”
Source: Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
“The liberation of adulthood as we'd conceived it from below was a pipe-dream; with oppressors deposed we became our own tyrants.”
Source: A Perfectly Good Family
“...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.”
Source: Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
“When consuming goods rather than satisfying work becomes the focus of our culture, we have created (or acquieced in) a society of permanent adolescents.”
Source: Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
“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.”
Source: Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
“He remembered being here with Clark at three or four sometimes five in the morning, during what seemed at the time like adulthood and seemed in retrospect like a dream.”
Source: Station Eleven
“Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way it should be, while never losing sight of the way it is, is what being a grown-upmcomes to.”
Source: Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
“We want to make an impact on the world, but we end up making or selling playthings that are developed to keep us distracted and designed to deconstruct. We have turned the activities that were meant to be the stuff of life into mere means of subsisting in it.”
Source: Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
“The problem with most adults these days, they lose their wonderful imagination they used to have when being a child and take life far too seriously.”
“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.”
Source: Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age