Whether it is intentionally misspelling words to sound like a child, or you're buying Lin Manuel Miranda's "self-help" "book" "Gmorning, Gnight: Little Pep Talks for Me & You," people from the ages of 18-70 are acting like complete children, and it is time to put a stop to it.
This is not a rag exclusively on millennials, although they are the most obvious offenders. After all, it was baby boomers that invented the mid-life crisis which was code for grown men abandoning their families to have sex with 22-year-old girls and buy ridiculous cars.
Of course, the mid-life crisis can be explained by having too much money to know what to do with, which is the case with a lot of boomers. My dad is a baby boomer who has not had a mid-life crisis. The most obvious explanation? He still works for a living.
Instead of following in the path of people like my father, adults from all generations prefer to do stuff that should be for kids. The majority of people who buy comic books are adult men. Comic books failed as a medium because rather than remain appealing to children, they are only bought by people who read them as children and are continuing to read them as adults.
A lot of adults do fantasy football leagues too. In a simpler time, creating an entire game of make-believe would have been the activity of children, and an adult's fantasy would be starting a family or something.
And you can see this with movies too. I actually saw several people say that they better not see any children in the movie theater when Disney releases their "Aladdin" and "The Lion King" remakes because the original Disney films were "made for us".
Is this where we are supposed to be as a society? Refreshing your computer screen every five minutes to buy tickets to see the next Avengers movie instead of letting a child go.
Don't get me started with the whole self-help/self-care environment. Look, nobody is saying never talk about your feelings. I think modern psychology shows us talking about your feelings and opening up will, in the long run, be the healthiest option for everybody.
People, especially men, should not idolize the whole "strong, silent type" nobody wants to go back to "I work at the docks 50 hours a week and haven't spoken two words to my wife since our third kid was born. And now I've died at the ripe old age of 37."
That is unhealthy, but, we have become far too infantile when it comes to dealing with mental health. The online self-care community has gone way too far with its often performative measures.
And sometimes self-care is detrimental to someone's health. Staying in your pajamas and eating whatever new flavor Ben and Jerry thought up should be a rare luxury, not something you do to make yourself feel better. As a person who is prone to long stages of melancholy, I assure you that will never make you feel better.
Twitter has "self-care" bots programmed to tweet things like "please go eat today" which may be totally necessary in extreme cases, but it puts the job of performing the most basic functions (all the stuff we learn as babies) to someone other than you.
Should we not be worried that marketers and corporations are going to pounce on that? There are already phone apps that remind people to eat, sleep, and breathe for a monthly fee. How is that not a major red flag for all the people that have read any dystopian fiction?
You just see more and more people publishing articles like "How to Enjoy an Adult's Only Trip to Disney World" and "We Put the 2020 Presidential Candidates in Hogwarts Houses!" and now we need to do something about it.
Of course, I would be a fool to overlook how we got to this position in the first place. Why would an adult want to escape to a fantasy world where they can ride dragons and have sex with their aunt (Game of Thrones reference, still not going full Freud) or manage their own sports team?
It is probably because their life sucks. All of the infantile examples I just went over are rooted mainly in one thing: escapism.
Marx once said, "religion is the opiate of the masses," but people never hear the end of the quote. He goes on to explain that when your life is so horrendous, you need opium to make your life seem less… horrendous!
When you're a factory worker who has to live in a shanty making pennies a day, the expectation of divine reward was probably the only thing that got you out of bed.
When you're waist deep in student debt on your second internship, maybe the next Avengers movie is all you have to look forward to.
If Marx was alive today, he'd probably say "Marvel Cinematic Universe is the opiate of the masses."
