Growing Up Is Hard To Do

Becoming mature, becoming a normative adult, is certainly a pain point for many living humans now. ( Have you heard all the hand-wringing around "adulting?" )

Your body will mature without your consent. But cognitively, emotionally, and behaviorally, the human maturation process remains largely under individual control.

This means you can choose to make maturation happen. But it also means you can choose not to mature.

People don't know if they should "grow up," they don't know when. They don't know how and they don't know why.

My writing here covers the philosophy of life coaching, and I practice coaching with an explicitly philosophical way of thinking.

But my work is also something else. Yet I didn't have a name for it, I lacked a concept.

I think about lots of things: virtue and moral development, post-traumatic growth, transformative experience, parenting. But these are the trees, not the forest.

The umbrella concept has arrived. It visited me in the shower on the morning of 2 November 2019.

My work as a philosopher and as a life coach centers itself on the matter of maturity.

The maturation process is partially self-directed, but it is partially reactive. For that reason, the road to maturity is supremely path-dependent.

Failures to mature properly are commonly considered devastating. Delayed maturation is a pejorative all on its own: that's why "immature" is slung as an insult.

Emotional mal-maturation takes many forms, such as jadedness and nervous breakdown. Cognitive-behavioral delay to mature takes forms like foolishness and a stubborn refusal to take anything (or the right things) seriously.

There are no easy answers here. Cultural sources of wisdom don't reliably deliver. Deciding where to go for advice is a constant challenge.

Even when you can find promising advice, applying it often becomes a mess unto itself.

Nevertheless, I hope to shed light on specific issues of maturation in a way that many of my readers will find at least thought-provoking. I don't see many other sources attempting this work, but someone's gotta do it.

If you want to dive into maturity-type issues specifically as they pertain to you, check out ways to work with me.