I can promise you the entire world will appear fundamentally differently, with this one reframing. The…

I can promise you the entire world will appear fundamentally differently, with this one reframing. The battles and debates of our adult lives are not the adult world. They’re us trapped in a permanent childhood. How this happened is actually very simple. /1 https://t.co/uMbT1cHese

In the 19th century and before, there was no real space or culture for children. They were just little adults, sharing life and work in the adult world. Here they are, you can see it directly with your own eyes. Human life was just adult life. /2 https://t.co/DJF2w4ksf6

And then the thing happened, which turned our culture upside down and inside out. We invented compulsory, universal schooling. And that created a ‘child’, for the first time. Suddenly our world had adults *and* children. /2 https://t.co/sEsj9IXVjM

Our societies then had two separate cultures, adult culture and child culture. Schools created an entire cultural world, for children. They were separated from adults and their work. They weren’t just learning reading, writing and arithmetic. /3 https://t.co/ErHoNXKRFl

All of their social reference points were now other children. This is what creates a culture. We all know this culture, we’re all now products of it. Think about your time at school. The complex social worlds they are. This is how we now learn to live, as humans. /4

And then, as this model ran for decade after decade, something happened to society again. We’d gone from having an adult-only culture, to a child culture + an adult culture. And then, phase 3 happened. /5

The child culture replaced the adult culture too. In only a generation or so, we’d completely reversed our entire culture. From adults-only, to permanent child culture. When all these children left school, to enter the adult world, they brought their culture with them. /6

It’s all they knew. What else could they have done? What we call the countercultural revolution of the 1960s was this collision. We’re now nearly 70 years into the implementation of that revolution. Adult culture as we once knew it is terminal. /7

Have a look around now at what passes for adult life, and you’ll see that pretty much all of it is behaviour and a way of seeing the world we picked up at school. We see our adult ‘political’ lives as a battle between Left, Centre and Right. /8

Really these are just social teams, like schoolyard groups we belong to. In practical reality terms, the categories are meaningless. Our ‘activism’ is always ‘mobilising’ big groups of people to go into battle against other groups of people. /9

Classic schoolyard. Gang culture. Or we whine and complain about things ‘we’ all should be doing, like a collective “are we there yet?” We don’t see that this constant appeal to higher powers to fix things is kids complaining to mum and dad, or teachers. /10

We think elections are democracy, but universal suffrage and universal schooling were almost simultaneous inventions. The idea of running your society using a big popularity contest, where do you think that came from? Anyone? /11

Again, it’s the schoolyard. It’s how it runs. We stopped fighting a pandemic because it interrupted our eternal gap year travel, and gigs. The whining anti-lockdown narratives were teens complaining about being grounded. These aren’t analogies, this IS the culture. /12

Perceiving wider social life as some container we live inside governed by people whom we appeal to when things go badly. We never left school. That’s school, again this is not an analogy, it’s a cultural mechanism and model. /13

We’re happily letting the chronologically old die from Covid right now, and infecting kids repeatedly with the same virus. The idea of life having phases, from childhood through to adolescence, adulthood and then elders, is gone. /14

Everything is now adolescence, a culture of ‘living your best life’, and performing identity-based rituals in the ruins of catastrophes, to further your individual status. Team sports, status games. Trying to be somebody in the school, in a group, battling other groups. /15

We think these are analogies because the adult world we live in we mistook for an actual adult world. It never was, not in our lifetimes. If you look you will find an adolescent mindset now driving every facet of our societies. Re-badged as an adult life. /end