Juvephilia Is Silly And Condescending
Young people are just as fallible as everyone else — and in certain ways, more so
My last one was long, so let’s wrap up the month with a shorter take that’s been rattling around in my head for awhile: I’m tired of juvephilia.
Young people, like people in general, have a range of abilities and personalities and ideas. You can’t really overgeneralize, except in one sense: Since they are young, their brains aren’t quite fully developed and they’re going to be slightly more susceptible to certain forms of… excess than other, more fully developed humans.
There are counterexamples, to be sure — instances in which the very young dominate their older peers. Some athletes peak as young as their late teens or early twenties. Some virtuoso artists do the same, and some bands release their best album when they are all mere babes. In certain academic fields that require intense forms of abstract thinking, like mathematics, if you’re a genius, that will almost always be apparent by your early twenties.
But in most cases, people are a lot more baked-through at 30 than at 20. They’re more careful, reasonable thinkers, and have a better sense of the limits reality imposes on idealism. They also just plain know more stuff since they’ve had more time to accumulate knowledge.
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