Psychological Insight into Maturity

~ Clarissa

People said they wanted psychological insights. OK, I’m happy to oblige.

If you are over the age of 30, you shouldn’t be having emotions when somebody criticizes a lifestyle that happens to be yours. If a football player says that women should be into childbearing above anything else or a random woman online criticizes men who carry water bottles, it’s perfectly normal to joke, shitpoast, quote for clicks, etc. But if it actually upsets or angers you (and you know deep inside whether it does), that’s a sign that you are having a problem with reaching maturity.

Real adulthood is when getting upset that somebody doesn’t approve of your lifestyle sounds exotic. The locus of approval or disapproval moves inside. A mature individual has a system of values in place, and that system is impervious to strangers.

If you observe this issue in yourself, the solution isn’t to panic or feel bad about it. Trace which issue specifically knocks you back into a defensive, child-like role. The examples I gave, for example, speak to femininity/masculinity. Judging by the extreme reaction of many people to these recent scandals, this is a complicated issue for many. That’s fine, it happens. If you feel that this is a touchy subject for you, start asking yourself, “Why do I feel that I’m not in full control of this? Why do I find it threatening? What would it feel like to be confident enough in my choices that this kind of thing wouldn’t be threatening?”

When you are 24, and somebody says, “all women / all men should…”, it’s completely normal and healthy to get sore. If you are 34 and you still get sore over it, that’s not great. And if you are 44, you should really be over it big time. Beyond that age, I’m not even saying.

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Published by Clarissa

12 thoughts on “Psychological Insight into Maturity”

  2. Part of the issue is the distinction between an honor/revenge culture and a dignity culture. Your dignity is something that is inside you and no one can ever do something to take it away. Honor is about other people. As such, you will constantly be dishonored and need to take revenge. Russia and the Palestinians are great examples of this. They feel humiliated and it is now the “responsibility” of the world to fix this or else.

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    1. That’s a very good point. Since nobody can undo one’s feeling of humiliation, then nothing is ever enough for such people. They will wail to the skies for as long as they have an audience.

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  3. This is why the whole thing with Harrison Butker and his commencement speech didn’t bother me, although I’m Catholic myself I thought the speech was too old school for my tastes. But although I disagreed with his speech, it didn’t bother me since I’m an adult and I’m living my life. Adults becoming unhinged over an innocuous speech is disturbing, I’ve heard worse.

    I was disappointed when Eddie Vedder, the lead singer of one of my favorite bands Pearl Jam did a profane rant about Butker’s speech and called him a “f*cking p*ssy” onstage at a concert. Eddie is an outspoken male feminist and I can see why he was upset, but it was still upsetting since Eddie’s a middle aged man in his 50s and married with kids. Then again, rock singers aren’t known for their maturity 🙄

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    1. Yeah I was a little mystified about that– A Catholic dude said some Catholic things to a Catholic audience at a Catholic college.

      The only weird thing going on there was that a bunch of non-Catholics who didn’t go to that college got their panties in a twist about it.

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  4. Is there such a thing as a prematurely internal locus of approval? I can’t remember being upset/angry when someone said that all X should Y since my mid-teens, but a lot of that was because of math olympiad experience, where it was pretty obvious that the authority figures making proclamations were the teachers whose star students were going to get trounced in the test the next morning, and that generalized. I wouldn’t say that this says something about my levels of maturity though.

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