nektros - Cynicism in a Hot Dish

Ask anyone – of whom you know for sure you already have a good gauge of – what their self-perceived level of maturity is, and their answer won’t sound so unfamiliar.

“I’ve felt old for a long time.”

This was my immediate candidate for an answer today when asked the question most commonly utilised to draft the bare bones of a thesis on the size of an asshat’s ego.

Upon reflection, the realisation that maturity is a sum of our experiences, and not merely a connotation of the grim, came to the forefront.

There are two strains of wishfulness when it comes to seniority of the spirit – those who would rather have remained trapped in perpetual ingenuousness or immaturity before their mortality had a chance to crash-tackle them, and those who would rather have transgressed (cerebrally, at least) to their post-adolescent selves once their opening quintet of years had transpired, in order to avoid the undisputed trauma of their median years.

In other words, anyone would jump at the chance to relegate their own pain and sorrow to obscurity. Maturity, on the conflicting other hand, is largely defined by the pain and sorrow in our lives.

“I’ve felt old for a long time. I’ve been through more shit than you could fathom in your lifetime. That means I’m better than you.”

Even as a grossly exacerbated generalisation, those who would attach their own maturity to only the unhappy stepping stones of their past would also – in a bid to satisfy their innate thirst for approval regarding their courage in the face of such hardship – most proudly proclaim their off-the-charts maturity.

What would your most self-pitying friend respond when asked their maturity level? What would your most positive friend?

And yet, in the end, maturity on the negative end of the life experience spectrum reigns the favoured supreme.

P1: You think you’re so mature, don’t you?

Me: I can call myself that without ruminating on my life and ending up completely depressed. So, yeah. I’m mature.

It’s a disjointed feeling, associating maturity with the good things in life and not for a second forgetting the bad.

But that in itself is the fine line between stagnantly growing older and maturing.