Everything Is F*cked(39)
. . . and somehow won.11
But to understand Kant’s Herculean struggle, first we must take a detour, and learn about psychological development, maturity, and adulthood.12
How to Grow Up
When I was, like, four years old, despite my mother warning me not to, I put my finger on a hot stove. That day, I learned an important lesson: Really hot things suck. They burn you. And you want to avoid touching them ever again.
Around the same time, I made another important discovery: ice cream was stored in the freezer, on a shelf that could be easily accessed if I stood on my tippy toes. One day, while my mother was in the other room (poor Mom), I grabbed the ice cream, sat on the floor, and proceeded to gorge myself using my bare hands.
It was the closest I would come to an orgasm for another ten years. If there was a heaven in my little four-year-old mind, I had just found it: my own little Elysium in a bucket of congealed divinity. As the ice cream began to melt, I smeared an extra helping across my face, letting it dribble all over my shirt. This was all happening in slow motion, of course. I was practically bathing in that sweet, tasty goodness. Oh yes, glorious sugary milk, share with me your secrets, for today I shall know greatness.
Then Mom walked in—and all hell broke loose, which included but was not limited to a much-needed bath.
I learned a couple of lessons that day. One, stealing ice cream and then dumping it all over yourself and the kitchen floor makes your mother extremely angry. And two, angry mothers suck; they scold you and punish you. That day, much like the day with the hot stove, I learned what not to do.
But there was a third, meta-lesson being taught here, one of those lessons that are so obvious we don’t even notice when they happen, a lesson that was far more important than the other lessons: eating ice cream is better than being burned.
This lesson was important because it was a value judgment. Ice cream is better than hot stoves. I prefer sugary sweetness in my mouth than a bit of fire on my hand. It was the discovery of preference and, therefore, prioritization. It was my Feeling Brain’s decision that one thing in the world was better than another, the construction of my early value hierarchy.
A friend of mine once described parenthood as “basically just following around a kid for a couple decades and making sure he doesn’t accidentally kill himself—and you’d be amazed how many ways a kid can find to accidentally kill himself.”
Young children are always looking for new ways to accidentally kill themselves because the driving force behind their psychology is exploration. Early in life, we are driven to explore the world around us because our Feeling Brains are collecting information on what pleases and harms us, what feels good and bad, what is worth pursuing further and what is worth avoiding. We’re building up our value hierarchy, figuring out what our first and primary values are, so that we can begin to know what to hope for.13
Eventually, the exploratory phase exhausts itself. And not because we run out of world to explore. Actually, it’s the opposite: the exploratory phase wraps up because as we become older, we begin to recognize that there’s too much world to explore. You can’t touch and taste everything. You can’t meet all the people. You can’t see all the things. There’s too much potential experience, and the sheer magnitude of our own existence overwhelms and intimidates us.
Therefore, our two brains begin to focus less on trying everything and more on developing some rules to help us navigate the endless complexity of the world before us. We adopt most of these rules from our parents and teachers, but many of them we figure out for ourselves. For instance, after fucking around near open flames enough, you develop a little mental rule that all flames are dangerous, not just the stove ones. And after seeing Mom get pissed off enough times, you begin to figure out that raiding the freezer and stealing dessert is always bad, not just when it’s ice cream.14
As a result, some general principles begin to emerge in our minds: take care around dangerous things so you won’t get hurt; be honest with your parents and they’ll treat you well; share with your siblings and they’ll share with you.
These new values are more sophisticated because they’re abstract. You can’t point to “fairness” or draw a picture of “prudence.” The little kid thinks, ice cream is awesome; therefore, I want ice cream. But the adolescent thinks, ice cream is awesome, but stealing stuff pisses my parents off and I’ll get punished; therefore, I’m not going to take the ice cream from the freezer. The adolescent applies if/then rules to her decision making, thinking through cause-and-effect chains in a way that a young child cannot.
As a result, an adolescent learns that strictly pursuing her own pleasure and avoiding pain often creates problems. Actions have consequences. You must negotiate your desires with the desires of those around you. You must play by the rules of society and authority, and then, more often than not, you’ll be rewarded.
Figure 6.1: A child thinks only about his own pleasure, whereas an adolescent learns to navigate rules and principles to achieve her goals.
This is maturity in action: developing higher-level and more abstract values to enhance decision making in a wider range of contexts. This is how you adjust to the world, how you learn to handle the seemingly infinite permutations of experience. It is a major cognitive leap for children and fundamental to growing up in a healthy, happy way.
Young children are like little tyrants.15 They struggle to conceive of anything in life beyond what is immediately pleasurable or painful for them at any given moment. They cannot feel empathy. They cannot imagine what life is like in your shoes. All they know is that they want some fucking ice cream.16