'Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!' (Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian…

'Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!' (Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray.) Wilde inadvertently saw our future. All of our worst problems are not the political problems we think they are. That’s just our youth culture’s inability to see. /1 https://t.co/oyYq5fgUBs

I Tweet about the replacement of adult life with adolescent life. And the mechanism that brought that about, mass high schooling, with the schools separated from adult life. Students only know that high school culture. And then remade adult life with it, when graduating. /2

Wilde wrote a story about a man wanting to live an eternal libertine (adolescent) life, with all of the excluded consequences borne by a painting of him. That painting is now our whole world. /3

The concepts and frames we use for adult life today are ludicrous in their vanity. That we have ‘systems’ of government in opposition, that ‘politics’ drives our world. Ask yourself this, at a more human level. How does a kid leaving school suddenly enter this adult world? /4

How do they go from being the kid negotiating the popularity status hierarchies of school, to suddenly living inside ‘political systems’? We’ve all made that transition. I remember no induction, no training, nothing that marked that transition. And I know why. /5

Because it never happened. That adult world is a fiction. It’s the same culture we experienced at school, with the parts renamed. We make that transition easily, because we never leave school. The adult world is just school, with the bits called other things. /6

Before you question my sanity, ask yourself too whether it’s more sensible to believe humans are really quite simple social creatures, following the same basic social rules. Or instead they reach an age where that all stops happening, and suddenly they act in ‘systems’. /7

I’ve never found an adult environment that acted much differently to being at school. The endless jostling for status and recognition. Cultures are made, in practical ways. Our heads are up in the clouds in meaningless abstractions like ‘capitalism’ and ‘Left and Right’. /8

Unpack all those supposedly adult categories and you find exactly the same social behaviour we learned as kids. They’re just adult teams for us to join and battle against other teams, to boost our own status. To be accepted and recognised. /9

There’s clear research on this. Schools shapes our whole lives. Most of us are still prosecuting our social position at school, throughout our adult lives. Once you know that, the ‘adult’ world reads like a large print book. /10 https://t.co/q6ZWKbQWeC https://t.co/N4A554Q9Ts

It’s much more human to recognise these social behaviours as responsible for all the things we do. Without that, the world looks like a Star Wars movie, with competing goodies and baddies abstractions, like the -isms, and ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ teams. /11

It’s all just ordinary people trying to belong and to boost their own status. Forming teams, and battling other teams. Like we did at school. Our group was our existential home. Adult life doesn’t change that. /12

Go to somewhere like Linkedin, one home of this supposedly separate adult world. And wallow in the humblebrags there. It’s like watching a school playground. /13

We’re human, all too human, as Nietzsche said. Doing the same social things, our whole lives. There used to be a separate adult world. And actual inductions to that world. /14

Here it is. That induction was throwing kids straight into that adult world, to work alongside the adults. Now of course we don’t want kids back down the mines. But the social/cultural difference here is profound. The existence of two distinct worlds. /15 https://t.co/118voIy0Ln

Neil Postman wrote about the collapsing into a single world or culture. Of just adults. What I don’t think he saw though was that we collapsed the adult world, not the child world. Practically, by decoupling schools from adult life. /16 https://t.co/e6ClF3Ehtn

Kids remake societies as high schools when that’s the only culture they know. The team sports, the imitative rivalry of ‘politics’ that dominates our ‘polarised’ societies now? That’s just them becoming giant high schools. How do we not recognise it? /17

And social media’s entire methodology is this same mechanism, of the battle for status, through popularity. Through likes. Forming teams, battling other teams. Look at your ‘grown up’ news today and it’s what you’ll see. You can’t unsee it. /end