Listen to the maxims of a culture and the values and aspirations become clear. Resounding words of wisdom still come to mind: “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Of course, few people in post-modernity express such sentiments with any seriousness. The expressions tossed around in daily life, even among the solidly middle class and college-educated, are more along the lines of: “F*** my life.”
The words we use color our existence, insulate our experience, and can even, at the extreme, create a world of our own. What, then, prompts people in droves to endorse ideas that are dismal? What could be enticing about viewing one’s life as a ceaseless catastrophe, an endless string of misfortune providing infinite possibilities for ingratitude.
A study in angst
An impromptu interview with disgruntled adolescents gives a window into this dim world. On a fall day, gaunt pimpled teens with neon stripes dyed into their hair sat atop play structures designed for small children. To the toddlers below the youth proclaimed, “Just wait ‘til you have to go to school. It’s horrible. Enjoy your freedom while you can!” They warned ominously that life “get so much worse.”
Naturally, upon direct interrogation, the teens slouched, apologized, and looked askance. When confronted with the possibility that life gets better after high school they were doubtful. “I’ve seen how my parents live!” said one with a bitter smirk.
Now, that is hard to argue with. It’s really not that life inexorably gets better. Rather, the reverse is a bit more likely given human nature. But must it get worse? To sardonically shout to the godless skies “f*** my life” is to remain a childish victim of circumstances and never to confront the question of how one could forge a different path than the one worn by the steps of your unhappy forebears.
The invention of “adulting”
So many of us, then, choose never to fully enter adulthood. The obligations of life often necessitate actions that used to be reserved for the mature and responsible in our society, so one might erroneously assume this means some people still come of age. However, signing a mortgage and begetting children are no longer viewed as an attainable identity, being an adult, but simply a set of activities undertaken while play-acting, the concept of “adulting.”
It seems no coincidence that the most popular fiction of recent decades, from Harry Potter to Star Wars, devolves to a sobering world in which there are no adults in the room. Those who should be sagacious and reassuring shirk responsibility or cower in fear leaving the neophytes to make their own way in the face of danger. Orphans are left to mature without examples, uncivilized young in the wild.
Enter the expert
Someone has to fill the void of such a parentless landscape. These would be the experts. People equipped with sufficient statistical analysis to know what to do are entrusted with an increasing number of decisions in our lives. So long as we avoid making the decisions ourselves, we bear little responsibility for the result, the siren song suggests. Like the smartphone wielding teen, we can stay entertained along the way to becoming our unhappy parents without feeling responsible for the result.
We are often today astonished by hypocrisy in the people we have elevated to expert status. Arguably, it is not hypocrisy writ large but more simply ordinary human frailty. It is not necessarily that the experts don’t aspire to the standards they suggest, it’s just that we’ve collectively forgotten how people ever manage to do anything. From the expert to the lowly pleb, we are all subject to the infuriating inability to perfectly enact our ideas of the Good.
The crux of the matter
To the Christian, or any thinking person for that matter, this reality comes as no surprise, as it is at the core of the human condition. As Romans 7:15 states, “For that which I work, I understand not. For I do not that good which I will; but the evil which I hate, that I do.” In our hapless perpetual state of childish “adulting” we have become lost to ourselves. Fretting over the calamities of the cosmos, we forget that we have a cosmos within us that cries out for order. Here, in the battlefield of the individual human heart, we can stand against the ravages of ugliness and irrationality. Recognizing the battlefield is only the half of it because winning the battle requires more than brute force.
C.S. Lewis describes the recognition well in Mere Christianity. He wrote:
When I come to my evening prayers and try to reckon up the sins of the day, nine times out of ten the most obvious one is some sin against charity; I have sulked or snapped or sneered or snubbed or stormed. And the excuse that immediately springs to mind is that the provocation was so sudden or unexpected; I was caught off my guard, I had not time to collect myself…Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is? Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth? If there are rats in the cellar you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create rats: it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man: it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am…Now that cellar is out of reach of my conscious will…I cannot by direct moral effort, give myself new motives. After the first few steps…we realize that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God.
Paradoxically, by surrendering to the limitations and shortcomings of our being, we gain the possibility of real progress. This uncomfortable posture of recognizing where we lack control is the key to gaining control of ourselves in small but meaningful ways. This is the path of virtue.
There is no per se fault with the person who is blind to virtue. Asking a room of college students what “virtue” is might return the answer that no one knows but someone might speculate it might have “something to do with being a prude.”
The etymology of the “adult” is the Latin adultus, the past participle of adolescere, “to grow mature. In adolescere are the roots ad-, “to/toward,” and the verb alere, “to nourish.” In order for the human person to mature and flourish, adequate nourishment is required. What feeds the soul and induces the path of virtue? The things of everyday life. At least, they ought to be if there is any chance of success.
Self-mastery is surprisingly unattractive due to its quotidian nature. Rendering order where there once was chaos occurs with slow and faltering steps. Reading old books and watching old movies, one can sense that perfection was not expected because it cannot be achieved. There was an air of patience for another’s faults. Perfection is the vice of those who dwell in ideas. Recognizing how people really are gives us much more modest expectations for behavior and accomplishment.
For the Christian, hope springs eternal. Jesus appeared in vision to St. Gertrude and showed her his heart, saying, “I give it to you, and like a faithful, zealous servant, this heart will be ready, at any moment, to repair your defects and negligence.” The brief description of her life reads, “Indeed, Gertrude’s mystical writings show that her shortcomings never held her back. She trusted Christ completely, certain that he had made up for them.”
Likewise, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque shortly before her death wrote, “His Sacred Heart will do everything for me if I let him. He shall will, he shall love, he shall desire for me, and make up for all my faults.”
Onwards and upwards
The path of virtue is the time-tested way out of the dead-end angst of “F*** my life.” It requires nourishment, the materials that feed the soul and mind in the process of fully maturing. We should not seek to simulate with “adulting,” but to thrive as fully-fledged adults. Yet, as these mature and full-grown adults, maintaining awareness of our dependence, our inadequacy, and our need should feed our child-like wonder.
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