"Dad, what are you doing? It's shark week!" In the past I always loved Will Ferrell and his portrayal of various characters of adults acting like children that refused to grow up. From his role as Brendan Huff in Step Brothers to Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights, the list of his hilarious characters was endless. Fast forward to 2024, after discovering self-sabotage and reflecting upon my unconscious programming and subsequent behaviour, I began to notice one common thread that was holding me back from unlocking my potential, my inability to transition from a child like mindset into a fully functional and empowered adult.
At 32 I found myself refusing to embrace the societal responsibility of being an adult and leading by example for the younger generation to follow. I’d still go to bars and do everything that the teenagers were doing, partying myself into a messy oblivion and illogically yet frantically be clinging on to anything that’s youthful. I was living the life of a professional teenager and making it my full time job to never mature. Everything from eating junk food to my screen addiction, and from stinkin' thinkin' to hoping someone else would solve all my problems, it all started to become clear as part of a very wide spectrum of my arrested development. Was this stalling of my natural evolution from child to adult something that has always been taking place? And why couldn't I stop quoting those Will Ferrell characters?
I began to look at my environment and noticed that everything I was watching was celebrating and promoting the youthful lifestyle as the only safe lifestyle to be living and where all the fun is to be found. As children we make daily decisions that revolve around our safety, children are naturally scared and therefore safety is their primary concern, they're immersed in scanning their immediate environment for the bigger and safer group. This is proven a normal process in our early years so that we fit in with a bigger group when we’re very young, increasing our chances of survival. This survival-based adaptation from our formative years becomes a problem however when these infant based coping mechanisms aren’t let go of in adulthood. As adults we are always aware of where the bigger and safer groups are, but a true adult isn’t concerned about safety or group backlash if the group disapproves of their behaviour, choices, or opinions. Being a member of the group used to control if we lived or died many years ago and that’s where this pressure to conform comes from, but this genetic survival mechanism is counter productive today when the group we unconsciously seek to be a part of is self-sabotaging under the guise of having a good time. Our subconscious mind never sleeps, and mine had paid close attention to the repetitive behaviour in the Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey marathons and was helping me mimic that childish behaviour wonderfully in order to help me gain approval of the ever expanding happy-go-lucky tribe.
When we think like a child we always put our own goals on the back burner, if any are developed at all. Due to the fact that safety is the primary concern of the "adult child" (an adult with a child's mindset), personal goals may displease some of the other tribe members and in their minds this would lead to a decrease in safety. For the adult child it’s simply better to nod and agree with everyone around them, and to adopt the group’s attitudes, goals, and beliefs, as this increases safety and helps them to bond harder with the group. The opposite is true for those who have stepped into their adult power, who are only goal focused toward accomplishing their dreams and exploring their innate creativity, regardless of group approval or any other factor that would only concern a child looking for safety.
Because children only think in 5, 10 and 15 minute increments into the future, we see the adult child doing the exact same. Children don’t think long term and neither does the adult child. I personally never had any long-term financial planning in place, no long-term health strategies, no long term self-education based goals, no long term anything. Every day was a brand new day to me, just like the day I was born. I focused on short term gratifications, "What’s going to make me feel good now?” Forget about tomorrow. My instant gratification-based behaviour was infinite, whether it was consuming brain destructive alcohol, wasting 2-4 hours per day watching TV, mindless spending, working a futile and soulless job, take out meals, drugs, not exercising enough, I was refusing to delay the gratification in regard to accomplishing any major life goals. The safest role for me to play in an unhealthy society was that of an unhealthy person, and I was always seeking out what felt most familiar. It became time for me to pursue the unfamiliar, to stop telling stories of my vast success potential never achieved and to do what scared me most, move out of the herd and into my own personal self-hood.
Below is a good video confirming the topics discussed above. This is a real problem, documented for hundreds of years. The adult child can indeed destroy and take down entire cultures and has done so in the past, so I think it’s very important we understand the key behavioural differences between an empowered adult and a person of adult age, who’s simply acting, thinking and communicating as the forever child.
Adults are supposed to be responsible and moral, so they’re generally hard to govern as they abide by their principles and don't let others walk all over them. Children, not so much. This is handy information for a ruling class that controls the majority of what we see and hear on a daily basis. Are we witnessing an agenda being playing out to get the members of society living as perpetual children? Could making everyone in our society act and think like a child be why the totalitarian governance we are seeing is rocketing skywards?
“This house is a prison, on planet bullshit! In the galaxy of this sucks camel dick!” Says Brendan Huff when the TV remote is taken away from him. I used to throw a tantrum when things didn’t go my way, blaming everyone but myself for my problems and waiting for someone to rush to my aid to help me. As an adult child I was intently focused on entertainment because children are exactly like that. Children don’t want to work towards bigger goals if there’s any potential that fun could be had instead. Adults, in their true adult power, focus on education, which is the polar opposite of entertainment. The adult child entertains, the true adult educates. Acting like a child is always advertised as funny and about living the good life, so it's no surprise we see a growing population with personalities that appear to have been directly downloaded from a teen movie or youth based music video. This is also because the adult child is afraid to stand out, so what’s already available in the market is proof positive that it’s already accepted by the herd. The reality is the quicker we rid ourselves of our childhood rituals, customs, and beliefs, the easier life becomes and the happier we get.
We're all kids at heart, but at what point do we have to accept that our child like behaviour isn’t taking us where we want to go in life? Take it from me, we can’t lead any sort of empowered life high and polluted on chemicals, regardless if those chemicals are socially approved or not. Adult infants are taking over our culture and have been the downfall of many societies throughout history, so if you're reading this and thinking maybe you've downloaded some traits of the adult child like I did and are ready to grow up, show up and adult up in your own life, check out my new program Stop Playing Small, where I'll show you exactly how it can be done (hint: it doesn't involve watching Will Ferrell).
Stay tuned for more blog posts like this where I'll delve even deeper into why we struggle to control our behaviour, and how we can reprogram at anytime. Thanks for reading!
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