Only valuing a relationship for the momentary bliss of being close to someone new is a problem of emotional immaturity.
The problem arises when we consider the facts that a person’s emotional development depends on parenting, and people tend to partner with others of similar emotional maturity. If you’ve got one immature parent, you’ve more than likely got two. It takes extra work to shed that baggage and start being your genuine self.
It’s definitely a cultural ill, but I can’t credit the notion that our emotional development comes from our media. We need to be teaching people what emotional maturity is, how to get there, and how to heal from having emotionally immature parents.
Emotional immaturity is so pervasive at this point you’d need to put this stuff in the curriculum of every school and have that initiative succeed for multiple decades to change the culture.
My belief is that emotional immaturity is the natural state of humanity. Without guidance, some wise people will reach maturity, but that’s really a small subset of the population, and the vast majority of people will not make this growth.
The vast majority of people do things because that’s what they’ve always known; it takes special effort to question why you do what you do. Saying that these people are emotionally immature may be true, but I don’t think that the cause is that people have emotionally immature parents. People have to be specifically taught to value rationality and wisdom over vibes and feelings, and without this concerted effort, most people will simply be emotionally immature.
I don’t think humanity has a “natural state” so much as a rock bottom - and I’m not even convinced it has one of those. It’s not really a state of being we should promote or excuse.
You speak of guidance as if it comes from some unknown external source - the source is other people. That’s exactly why I said we should teach about emotional maturity in schools, to give kids necessary guidance.
You speak undiluted truth. That’s my thinking as well, growth is, for better or worse, a collective effort even when talking individually. It is unreasonable for us to expect a single person to figure everything out by themselves, especially when societal conditions are heavily biased toward romanticising everything down to friggin’ toilet paper. This also applies to larger groups in my opinion - thinking about how many languages have entirely unique words for concepts which basically don’t even exist within others, that’s a clear sign to me.
Speaking from personal experience, the only reason why I reached the opposite conclusion about love is because I had the (mis)fortune of being an awkward bookworm from the start, which meant I got an extra dose of information and managed to develop relatively robust critical thinking (at least enough to know not to trust everything which pops into my head by default). But I can clearly see every point where things could’ve gone very differently in my development. Which is also why, as frustrating as it is, I cannot blame an individual for this. Not until they demonstrate that they’re in wilful and fully cognisant contempt of the truth.
We really need to up our game in terms of education and the standards we choose to promote - not saying “we” as though you and I have a say in this matter, appealing to the collective yet again.
Only valuing a relationship for the momentary bliss of being close to someone new is a problem of emotional immaturity.
The problem arises when we consider the facts that a person’s emotional development depends on parenting, and people tend to partner with others of similar emotional maturity. If you’ve got one immature parent, you’ve more than likely got two. It takes extra work to shed that baggage and start being your genuine self.
It’s definitely a cultural ill, but I can’t credit the notion that our emotional development comes from our media. We need to be teaching people what emotional maturity is, how to get there, and how to heal from having emotionally immature parents.
Emotional immaturity is so pervasive at this point you’d need to put this stuff in the curriculum of every school and have that initiative succeed for multiple decades to change the culture.
My belief is that emotional immaturity is the natural state of humanity. Without guidance, some wise people will reach maturity, but that’s really a small subset of the population, and the vast majority of people will not make this growth.
The vast majority of people do things because that’s what they’ve always known; it takes special effort to question why you do what you do. Saying that these people are emotionally immature may be true, but I don’t think that the cause is that people have emotionally immature parents. People have to be specifically taught to value rationality and wisdom over vibes and feelings, and without this concerted effort, most people will simply be emotionally immature.
I don’t think humanity has a “natural state” so much as a rock bottom - and I’m not even convinced it has one of those. It’s not really a state of being we should promote or excuse.
You speak of guidance as if it comes from some unknown external source - the source is other people. That’s exactly why I said we should teach about emotional maturity in schools, to give kids necessary guidance.
You speak undiluted truth. That’s my thinking as well, growth is, for better or worse, a collective effort even when talking individually. It is unreasonable for us to expect a single person to figure everything out by themselves, especially when societal conditions are heavily biased toward romanticising everything down to friggin’ toilet paper. This also applies to larger groups in my opinion - thinking about how many languages have entirely unique words for concepts which basically don’t even exist within others, that’s a clear sign to me.
Speaking from personal experience, the only reason why I reached the opposite conclusion about love is because I had the (mis)fortune of being an awkward bookworm from the start, which meant I got an extra dose of information and managed to develop relatively robust critical thinking (at least enough to know not to trust everything which pops into my head by default). But I can clearly see every point where things could’ve gone very differently in my development. Which is also why, as frustrating as it is, I cannot blame an individual for this. Not until they demonstrate that they’re in wilful and fully cognisant contempt of the truth.
We really need to up our game in terms of education and the standards we choose to promote - not saying “we” as though you and I have a say in this matter, appealing to the collective yet again.
What is emotional maturity?
That’s a big subject, so I’m just going to recommend my favourite book about it:
Highly recommend. Bravo for suggesting this book.