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Children want to grow up, and they often look forward to the prospect of becoming young adults with considerable excitement. Even when they feel unhappy, the thought of growing up gives them hope. In the back of their developing minds is a vague and amorphous but compelling feeling that the future will be good and better, perhaps, unimaginably better.
This state of youthful hopefulness and optimism tends to persist throughout adolescence and one’s early 20s – if checkered by some heartaches and frustrations – but there often comes a point in life at which many begin to feel as though childhood’s promise was a false one. For some, this feeling intensifies and leads to a midlife crisis. Why? What exactly is it that childhood promises and that adulthood fails to deliver?
It may seem that, perhaps, the answer has to do with particular aspirations such as becoming a singer, an astronaut, or a world-class athlete. Many children dream of such things and most do not, as adults, become what they dreamed of. This can be a source of disappointment. The situation is captured pithily and well by Joe Dator in a cartoon which features two preschoolers, one playing with a toy car, and the other arranging Lego pieces. One says to the other, “What do you want to be when you give up?” In a related vein, novelist George Eliot writes in Middlemarch that among the large number of middle-aged people “who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.”
But failure to make one’s dreams come true is probably not a sufficient explanation for two reasons. First, there is often something inauthentic about early aspirations, because children don’t know themselves very well yet. As they learn more about their own proclivities and talents, they conclude that they don’t really want to be singers or astronauts.
On the flip side, no one is immune from disappointment and crises later in life, no matter who they became. In fact, many have difficulty dealing with life as a highly successful person. There is no shortage of famous people who died early because of a drug overdose – Truman Capote, Marilyn Monroe, Whitney Houston, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Elvis Presley – and many others. These are remarkably high-achieving people. German director Fassbinder, for instance, who died at the age of 37, had managed to produce 40 feature films and a couple dozen plays and to win more than one prestigious award in his brief career. Presley is, to this day, known as “The King of Rock ‘n Roll.” Mark Twain, who may have been the first author to become a world celebrity, struggled with depression and suicidality for a long time. The editor of the Mark Twain project at Berkley wrote that: “He ... had not embraced his talent. He was tormented by it. He was drinking too much and didn’t know what to do with himself.”
What then? It may be that the imagination of a child holds up what seems to us the most exciting part of what we think we would like – the finished product, the world’s recognition, and so on – and not, for instance, the unavoidable criticism (there is always someone who doesn’t like what you do) or the hours spent working alone. But I suspect there is more to the explanation.
One other piece, perhaps, is this: We do not imagine that as we grow up, we would make mistakes, accumulate regrets, and come to carry the distinctly human burden that one may call “mental clutter.” When we picture growing up, we fancy becoming freer and more autonomous, not people whose memories hold them back. We cannot imagine this, in fact, because short of traumatic events such as early parental death, the pains of a child, while acute, tend to be short lived and are often replaced by moments of pure joy.
There is something else. As children, we look forward to transitioning to the next stage of life, young adulthood, not to middle age or old age. In fact, I suspect children do not quite believe they are going to grow old and die. To a 5-year-old, old age and death are things that happen to other people. It is as though the early twenties serve as a screen, occluding what comes after. Once we become adults, we see what follows afterwards much more clearly.
But the most important element, perhaps, is this: The world is new and exciting for a child. A child does not need to make an effort to see it that way. Every day is full of discoveries. (Some come to believe on this basis that the world itself was better when they were children.) Indeed, a child may not want to go to bed, because life is so interesting to her that she does not want to miss any of it by sleeping. When adults stay awake, that’s generally due to insomnia.
The promise of childhood is, at its core, not the promise that you would become this or that but rather, that the world is full of treasures, and will remain so. There often comes a point, however, at which it begins to seem to a person that he has seen it all before. What a child does not anticipate is jadedness, particularly jadedness now known to precede old age and death.
Still, a child is not mistaken that it is better to be an adult and in ways she can’t quite imagine. Peter Pan’s Neverland is not truly attractive to adults, except in fantasy. If it were possible to stop growing older at any age, I am quite certain most would pick 30 or 20 rather than 3 or 13. This is true despite the decrease in energy levels that comes with age and the fact that excitements available to adults are mild compared to those available to a child. (Some try to preserve the thrill by falling in love every other month, but the success of this strategy is dubious.) Aging works a bit like sedation.
Still, I suspect that few would trade their middle-aged selves for their child selves even though the younger version may have been like motorboats, while an adult may have to manually row the boat down the river of life (and go upstream too). The magic of endless novelty and the superpower of unlimited energy supply may have been taken away, but we are able to exert more control over our circumstances as well as over ourselves. The promise of childhood has been not so much broken as replaced: The dreams of effortless great things have turned into plans about achievable goals. We are better at dealing with disappointment too and can even direct negative emotions toward productive ends. Childhood offers many gifts, but there is one that only adulthood can give us – the gift of maturity.
