NOTE: This work has been ABANDONED as too long-winded and
repetitive, but you are welcome to get whatever you can from it.
The essential ideas are best summarized in a single page.
Most of my new philosophical musings on relationships, etc. are now found in
Kilroy Cafe. —GC, 5/09
Reaching Your Plateau
The Case Against Marriage - Chapter 27 - 8/4/07
Childhood is a process of intensive intellectual and emotional
development. First, a child must learn how to function in a strange body
on an alien planet among a family of other creatures he didn't choose.
For one thing, he has has to learn a spoken language from scratch, and he
does it much faster than an adult ever could. Every day, he absorbs new
things and becomes more in tune with his environment.
When a child is old enough, he is sent to school, where new skills are
built upon previously learned ones. Elementary school is followed by
junior high followed by high school and possibly by college and grad
school. He learns professional skill, becomes proficient at it,
then settles into an adult career.
What happens then? In most cases, his learning slows to a crawl.
Between the ages of 5 and 15, the developmental changes are huge. A
personality and a physical body are formed which will probaby remain
stable for the person's lifetime. Between 15 and 25, there can be major
social changes as formal education is completed and an average person
settles into a career path. Between 25 and 35, the changes ar less
significant. Unless someone has been the victim of misfortune, like
war or layoffs, their growth tends to be only incremental: they advance further
along their previously chosen career path but don't deviate much into
new areas.
Between 35 and 45, personal growth may be imperceptible from the
outside. If you leave this person and come back ten years later, you
find that they have more gray hair and have stabilized in their role,
but compared to younger people it look like they have been held in suspended
animation, with little obvious growth.
In general, people don't change much between there and death. The body
slowly deteriorates and the mind becomes set in its ways. Older people
tend to be more interested in comfort than change.
Is this our destiny? Does the brain simply lose its ability to learn
after the first few years? Or is this a choice? Do people stop
developing only because they have decided that it is no longer a
priority?
A young child learns a new language effortlessly. If he is exposed
to three languages in his infancy, we will learn all three without an
accent and without any formal training. An adult could never do that. He
has to work hard for years to learn a foreign language, and even then he will
never grasp it as intuitively as the child. Does this mean the adult's
brain is no longer capable of rapid learning?
Not necessarily. The adult is usually trying to learn a language part
time, while the infant is devoted continuously to the task. If you
kidnapped an adult and threw him together with a caring family in a foreign
land where he had to use local words to get what he wanted, he would
probably learn as fast as the child does. The structure of the brain is
no doubt different between infancy and adulthood, but the raw ability to
learn is still present. The child is better at intuitive learning (like
being able to speak without an accent) but the adult can come up with
intellectually strategies for learning that are far more sophisticated (like
reading a book on the subject).
If an adult decides tomorrow he is fascinated by a new subject and
wants to learn everything he can about it, he will do it on his own,
probably much more efficiently than the child could. The only problem,
however, is getting the adult motivated to make this decision.
Between childhood and adulthood only the circumstances of
learning change. A young child is committed to nothing, and little is
formally expected of him. He can decide one day he wants to be a
firefighter and the next day a nurse. He can experiment with a lot of
different viewpoints without being tied to any one. His schooling sets
up a graduated series of challenges for him, so he is required to learn
every day. He develops rapidly because his environment makes it easy
for him to do so.
Adults, however, tend to get trapped by their commitments and stuck in
repetitive routines. They reach "plateaus" where no further learning is
expected of them and where the circumstances of their life discourage
experimentation. Once they have invested in a certain way of life,
unregulated learning becomes dangerous because it might lead them
in directions other than the one they have already invested in.
Instead, they tend to repeat the same comfortable activities over and
over—bowling every Wednesday night, boating on
weekends—because this protects their investments and presents
fewer risks.
Without the physical and emotional freedom to explore and experiment,
learning becomes much more unlikely. If you really want to learn about
a new country, for example, you can't just read about it in books; you
have to actually go there. If you are trapped in a prison cell, your
personal development is bound to slow down, not because your brain has
solidified but because your range of possible real-world experiments is now
so limited.
College students with few commitments can easily learn about a foreign
county: They just take their backpack and go! Married people with
mortgages and children can't do this. They are limited to their 2-week
annual vacation, and then they need someone to take care of their kids,
pets, lawn and prior commitments. Given their accumulated habits
and their established status, hostelling probably isn't good enough for
them. Their trip will end up being a big, expensive production that is
far less efficient and educational than the college student's.
Intelligence is a choice. Some adults are "smart" and others "dumb"
simply
because they choose to be. Smart people remain that way because they
deliberately seek out new experiences and are willing to experiment
with new ideas. They are smart because they have set up their life in
such a way as to encourage their own unpredictable development.
Dumb people choose to repeat the same ritualized activities, and they
allow their practical commitments to expand to the point where no
further change is possible.
For example, a vacation is a choice. People who want to learn are going
to go backpacking in Europe or engage in some other adventure in a
foreign universe where they don't know exactly where their road will
lead. People who don't want to learn are going to spend their vacation
in Las Vegas. They are going to go someplace that promises sensory
stimulation without any personal challenge or risk.
If you are going to grow as much in your later years as you did in your
early ones, you have to make a conscious decision to do so. You have to
adopt an attitude that learning is desirable and be willing to limited
your worldly commitments to those that are truly necessary.
Romantic love may be compatible with learning as long as it is flexible.
A lifetime contract is not compatible with learning. If you want to
develop beyond the state you are currently in, then you have
to leave yourself the ability to change.
