A question about adulthood

I've held the idea for a long time now, that adults don't truly grow out of childhood activities. It occurred to me while I was walking in a park at night and realized that I was still drawn toward the playground swings and the seesaw.

I thought - "perhaps it isn't that we grow too old to do these things in an emotional and intellectual manner, maybe it is simply that they are not available to us in a larger form."

Because when you think about it, adults still like to pay to get into amusement parks and go on the roller coasters.

So then I thought - "Maybe if slides were bigger and swings were bigger and if the monkeybars were higher, I think adults would still like to play on a playground."

I know I would still go on a playground like that. I I know I'd still like to even if I were 50 years old. I really do think that adults should have their own public free playgrounds with their own age appropriate sized equipment.

Everywhere I look, I see that a lot of adults still like to play dress-ups (at comic conventions or parties) and still play at make believe (actors).

I wonder what life would be like if we all just had time to "play", if we made it a part of our lifestyle. If we started including recreational activities such as playing a hardcore version of hopscotch or even tag. If we just did those things together in parks in some of our spare time as we used to do when we were all children.

So I often wonder now, what holds most adults back from still doing these kinds of things? Do they think too highly of themselves intellectually? Is it a matter of responsibilities and having so many that people just don't have time for these things? Or do such activities really just not appeal to anyone over the age of 17? Am I just in the early stages of having a peter pan complex?

What do you think?

it's not about childhood or adulthood, it's about a specific action, and our inability to stay constant doing the same routines as time passes.

as for most things, we grow tired and bored of certain things we never thought we would forget.

we simply move on to bigger toys, for me it's my music and painting.

the one thing that keeps us from enjoying ourselves is that we take money-making too seriously. sometimes because we have to.

i envy whomever could combine their enjoyment with their income.

but i think the one thing that makes us grow old is that we let go of enjoyment and replace it with obligations.


anyway, i doubt we ever let go of what made us smile as we were kids. well we sometimes forget, but it remains dormant in our subconscience driving our current decisions, even tho we may never come aware of it.

it's a sad fact that we spend our childhood trying to grow up, and when we do we spend all our remaining days trying to remember our childhood.

now, teenage years usually reject all what we were and try become or take on our "own" choices, but i think we all eventually realize it was more the exploration than the actual choices we made.
again, such mistakes are what molds us.


we are in constant change, even through our autumn years.

when we chose to remain as we are, we become old.

i think "growing up" as put in today's culture is surrendering to "routing', something i still refuse to do. Since if we stop our constant motion (or our constant changing persona), i believe we start dying.

it's a sad fact that in today's world it's all zombies walking around.
Everyone doing what they're supposed to be doing, and nothing they want to do.
from that i see a very tastless world, a world empltied from anything "alive" or human maybe in a sense.

not sure if this answers anything, just my thoughts on the subject of adulthood as i have seen it.

"it's a sad fact that in today's world it's all zombies walking around.
Everyone doing what they're supposed to be doing, and nothing they want to do from that i see a very tastless world, a world empltied from anything "alive" or human maybe in a sense. ."

"i think "growing up" as put in today's culture is surrendering to "routing', something i still refuse to do. Since if we stop our constant motion (or our constant changing persona), i believe we start dying."

**

I agree with these statements completely Eye, that is exactly what the adult world feels like to me. This is the kind of world that I feel I am losing myself to sometimes and it frightens me more than I can say.

When I started working my first job in customer service, I couldn't help but sense a certain feeling that seemed to exude from most of the adults I was serving.

Perhaps it's all just in my head and it might sound a bit crazy, but I always felt this sense of their unhappiness mixed with arrogance, cynicism and helplessness. As I came into contact with more and more adults, the feeling became stronger.

Of course, such feelings were all influenced from the way they held themselves, the tone of their voices, the look in their eye, the way they spoke and how they treated you. Amongst all of them I could see how they seemed to share a common thread. I felt as if they were all of them stuck in a place in their lives they didn't know how to get out of, and that they knew this.

Majority of adults I come across always seem so rigid and routiine. They try to overcome one another in terms of 'power' and 'status'. How they judge the position they see each other in and use it to place the level of respect they should treat you with.

The way the world itself seems to try to push you toward obtaining all of these things that don't really seem to enhance your life in the end and how it makes it so very hard for you to strive to set your own standards and your own way of doing things.

It's as though the adultworld is built around rules and obligations and it pushes many of us into a lifestyle that we don't really want/doesn't satisfy us. Perhaps that is a too presumptuous remark for me to make, but that's how I have seen adultworld and those within it.

I suppose I am yearning for a world in which adults are full of zest for life, as children seem to be. Always doing something new or exciting, experiencing as much as they can and not having to care too much about things like money, status and obligation. Being able to let such things go at some point, the ability to have a certain freedom within their lives to express themselves, as children have.

I'm certainly not saying that adults shouldn't be responsible people and keep their things in order, but I believe there are certain extents to those things that we should draw a line at somehow.

Perhaps adults do these things every once in a while, but I don't think they do it enough, the ones I know and am aware of. They live the routine of adulthood day in and day out, nothing changes in their lives and they don't seem to strive for anything outside of the bubble they live in. They have dreams that they wait too long to live or are too afraid to live.


I applogise if my post is all too vauge, I do find it hard to convey what I am thinking a lot of the time and I lose track of things easily and go on tangents wihout realizing.

Your thoughts really helped to clarify my own though. A lot.