Note from Tomas:
Kia ora! Huge thanks to all the new subscribers - we’re happy to have you here.
Early subscription notes and Field Reports submissions are showing a strong interest in exploring Human Adulthood, which Anicca is eager to address this month.
The Patterns piece below begins with the many convincing ways humans perform adulthood. Next week Fault Lines will go underneath that performance to look at how and why psychologically juvenile structures persist into adult life. And in this month’s Foundations piece Anicca unpacks what authentic existential maturity actually means, and what lies beyond the developmental plateau of conventional adulthood.
~Tomas
Not all planes fall out of the sky. But some do.
I’m standing in the airline lounge watching jets being refueled on the other side of a wall of glass and thinking how unlikely it seems that something that size can be airborne.
Is this how I go out? I think I’d prefer it to a lengthy illness, and I suppose there’d be some poetic irony in dying on the way to a funeral.
The gate for my flight has changed twice since I’ve been here. I’ve skipped the concourse migrations, but we begin boarding in 15 minutes so I make my way to Gate C17 where I find over a hundred highly functional adults who’ve just been told they can’t have what they expected.
Our flight is delayed.
Nothing dramatic. No blizzard, emergency landing, volcanic ash cloud, or flock of geese sucked into an engine. Just the sort of ordinary airline delay that occurs hundreds of times daily and is irritating mostly because everyone has somewhere else they believe they should be.
The departure board now says 6:10 instead of 5:15.
A collective disturbance passes through the room. Phones come out. People stand and look at each other with exasperation.
I have to be aware of my default stupid resting grinning face in situations like this.
A man in a blue blazer approaches the gate agent and asks to speak with someone in charge. She explains that she’s in charge of this particular gate.
This doesn’t satisfy him. He has an important meeting.
I know this because he tells her, and then tells someone on his phone, and then tells the man standing behind him in line. By the third telling the meeting has taken on the significance of an emergency NATO summit. He wants to know what the airline is going to do about this.
The gate agent says the aircraft has a mechanical issue and maintenance is looking at it.
Blue Blazer wants to know how long that will take. A mechanical issue doesn’t seem like something you want to rush, but, hey, this sounds like a big meeting.
She says she doesn’t know yet, which is apparently the wrong answer judging by the man’s facial contortions.
Next to me, a young woman keeps refreshing the airline app every fifteen or twenty seconds. The information hasn’t changed, but she continues checking as though persistence might eventually force reality to update.
A family of five is beginning to unravel near the windows. One child is lying across two seats whining that he’s hungry. Another is kicking a suitcase. Their mother is snapping at both of them while their father has disappeared into his phone.
“Stop,” she says sharply to the kicking child.
He doesn’t.
“I said stop.”
He kicks harder.
The theme selected by Tomas for this month’s Patterns piece is: The Pattern of Performing Adulthood - What does arrested development actually look like in ordinary “adult” life?
I just learned of this yesterday and haven’t given it much thought until now, when I consider the wide swath of humanity I’m being served here. I take a moment to settle into the perfection while all around me, as if on queue, dozens of people perform our culture’s version of adulthood.
Everyone here has successfully navigated a complicated system in order to arrive at this gate. Passports, schedules, credit cards, luggage restrictions, security protocols, parking, traffic, boarding passes, apps, gate changes.
These are competent people. They have jobs. They have homes. They raise children and manage employees and run companies and perform surgeries and repair plumbing and teach university courses and refinance mortgages.
One man near me is simultaneously conducting a business call, answering emails, and eating something from a plastic container using chopsticks.
Impressive, actually.
Then the gate agent announces the mechanical issue.
He stops chewing and says, “This is fucking ridiculous.”
A young woman a few seats away is on the phone with someone I assume is her partner.
“No, I’m not mad,” she says, in the unmistakable tone of someone who is very mad.
Pause.
“I just think it’s interesting that you didn’t even ask.”
Another pause.
“Forget it.”
She hangs up and stares at the phone. Thirty seconds later she picks it up again.
An announcement comes over the speaker stating that maintenance is still working on the aircraft. The gate agent promises another update in thirty minutes, which is past the 6:10 mark.
A groan moves through the crowd. Blue Blazer returns to the desk.
A woman behind me says loudly to no one in particular, “They can’t do this!”
When we call someone an adult, we seem to mostly mean that they can function. They can pay bills, hold employment, maintain a household, operate a motor vehicle, reproduce, remember passwords, purchase reasonably priced auto insurance. But successful adult functioning and psychological/existential maturity are not the same developmental achievement.
We see signs of arrested development passing for adulthood everywhere.
Someone gives a presentation at work and spends the rest of the afternoon trying to determine whether the boss liked it.
Someone posts a photograph and checks repeatedly to see who has responded.
Someone’s friend doesn’t invite them to dinner and a perfectly capable forty-seven-year-old spends two days trying to determine what it means.
Someone receives mild criticism and constructs a full-blown legal defense.
Someone else floats around for hours on the fleeting helium of praise.
This stuff passes for normal adult life. And, unfortunately, it is normal.
These are fairly innocuous examples; we could go just one more level down (or turn on a TV,) and be in some pretty unsavory territory.
A man at the charging station is explaining to another passenger that he owns three gyms. He appears confident, funny, and expansive. The stranger asks where the gyms are and the man’s entire posture changes slightly as he answers.
I recognize the movement. I used to know it well. It’s the almost invisible adjustment that occurs when the person you’re presenting yourself to appears impressed. The shoulders open. The voice gets a little more assured. The story improves.
Nothing fraudulent’s happening. He may indeed own three excellent gyms. The interesting part isn’t the role; it’s how much seems to be riding on the reception.
I’ve worn plenty of roles myself. Wife. Mother. Business owner. Competent person. Good person. Interesting person. Responsible person. Person who had her shit together. And now, author, even.
My ability to animate roles has winnowed down substantially, but I’ve performed some of them quite well.
We may hear the word performance and assume falseness, as if performing a role means you’re lying, but it doesn’t. Roles are useful. They allow us to coordinate with one another, divide responsibilities, and move through the shared world without having to renegotiate who we are in every interaction.
Being a parent, doctor, teacher, gate agent, or business owner tells us something about what’s required of us in a particular context. The problem isn’t that we perform roles. It’s when the role stops being something we use and becomes something we identify with and define ourselves by.
The gate agent is performing a role now. She has a uniform, a script, responsibilities, and an impressive capacity to remain pleasant while adults repeatedly ask her variations of the same unanswerable question. Nothing about that requires pretending.
But notice what happens when a role stops being something we do and becomes something we require other people to confirm.
The responsible one needs to be seen as responsible. The successful one needs evidence of success. The intelligent one can’t easily be wrong. The good parent requires the child to behave in ways that validate the parenting. The desirable person needs to be desired. The independent person becomes strangely destabilized by exclusion. The spiritual person needs to appear elevated. The person who doesn’t care what anyone thinks somehow finds opportunities to mention this quite often.
The performance can be quite sophisticated, but the underlying mechanism points to the same arrested development.
Let’s turn this lens around now. It’s easy to sit in a public place and observe grown people performing adulthood. But what does all this mean for you? How are you performing?
One of the most common challenges I’ve had working with Jumpers is that once you tell psychological children what Human Adulthood is and what it looks like, you’ve also given them instructions for how to perform it. And once you learn to see this happening you can’t unsee it.
Here are some common examples:
Performing non-attachment. “I don’t need anyone.” They appear independent, but their independence is organized around avoiding vulnerability, rejection, or dependence. Authentic autonomy doesn’t require proving that nothing matters.
Performing indifference to approval. “I don’t care what anyone thinks.” But they care very much about being seen as someone who doesn’t care what anyone thinks. Disapproval still threatens the identity; it’s just become an identity built around being above approval.
Performing self-authority. They reject teachers, institutions, experts, conventions, or social expectations because “I think for myself.” But reflexive rejection is still dependence. Contrarianism is authority dependence with the polarity reversed.
Performing comfort with uncertainty. “There are no answers.” “Nobody knows anything.” “It’s all Maya.” These can become answers used to prevent actual uncertainty. Genuine not-knowing doesn’t need a philosophy of not-knowing.
Performing emotional maturity. They remain composed, measured, almost impossible to provoke. But composure is actually suppression, dissociation, image management, or fear of appearing needy. Human Adulthood doesn’t mean never getting pissed off.
Performing acceptance. “It is what it is.” But underneath is resignation, avoidance, or fear of acting. Acceptance of reality doesn’t prohibit responding. You can accept that your roof is leaking while getting a bucket.
Performing identity-less-ness. “I’m not identified with anything anymore.” The person without an identity is one of the most performed identities.
Performing fearlessness. They deliberately take risks, reject security, leave relationships, quit jobs, or cultivate an unconventional life because adulthood supposedly means not being governed by fear. Instead, they’re governed by the need to demonstrate that fear doesn’t govern them.
Performing radical honesty. “I just tell the truth.” What looks like freedom from social approval is actually aggression, insensitivity, or the pleasure of occupying the identity of someone who “doesn’t bullshit.” Human Adulthood doesn’t require becoming an asshole.
Performing freedom from meaning. “Nothing means anything.” But nihilism can provide exactly what the previous meaning system did: orientation, certainty, identity, and protection from having to encounter life directly.
Performing freedom from relationships. They no longer “need” their partner, family, friends, or community. But if needing nobody becomes psychologically important, dependence hasn’t disappeared. They’ve just become dependent on independence.
Performing freedom from the dreamstate. Everyone else is asleep, society is juvenile, relationships are Maya, identity is false, emotional attachment is bondage. The conceptual understanding may be excellent, but spending one’s days performing the one who sees all this has become a sure-fire way to stay securely in the cocoon of arrested development until death. This one is super common among those who read a lot of books on nonduality but never actually move beyond the conceptual layer of it.
People can perform every recognizable feature of adulthood while remaining psychologically organized around the same basic needs for approval, security, belonging, validation and external authority that organize childhood.
But performing characteristics of Human Adulthood is itself another indication of arrested development.
The gate agent finally announces that the mechanical issue has been resolved.
The room changes instantly.
Blue Blazer returns to his seat. The app-refreshing woman stops refreshing. The parents’ tone changes and children are promised snacks when they board. Everyone begins gathering coats, laptops and carry-ons.
Order has been restored.
Nobody seems especially developmentally arrested now. That’s the brilliance of the arrangement. The performance works.
That’s why we mistake it for development.