growingolder

Growing older

by Bob on January 5, 2008

I read an absolutely brilliant quote yesterday. It said:

"Growing older is mandatory. Growing up is optional"

This is an amazing insight and so pithy.

We can be calendar-wise older but not necessarily mature and wise. As we get older, we should be more mature and wise. But not for everyone.

Charles Dickens advocated still retaining some innocent vision of a child as an adult which is understandable and a defensible point of view.

Being immature and totally irresponsible and utterly childlike as an older adult is not a good deal for society. But it happens often. There's even Infantilisation in clinical psychology.

Artists used to be able to get away with immaturity as adults. Not much anymore since art has become a business and so has music. No longer "Ars gratia artis" (Art for art's sake) as the MGM movie slogan went. Although it was originally said by French writer Theophile Gautier in the 1800s as "L'art pour l'art".

So we see that growing up into maturity is useful to society and its social contract just to keep the trains on time, just as the physcial model of the world, and universe, as supported by formulae held up by theoretical matchsticks, is also useful to keep the trains on time. But not all metaphysical truth. Hardly. Merely a provable useful agreed-upon illusion.