Tuesday
Those Child-like Nuts
My son uploaded a YouTube video and it now has over 100,000 views. It's apparently eligible for the "YouTube Monetization Program," but he can't figure out how to enroll. I looked for some information yesterday and clicked on various videos. None of them were helpful. Well, none of them were helpful during the first half of the video. I couldn't watch the whole thing because the creators of the video wouldn't get to the damn point.
All of the people who created the videos were younger. One guy identified himself as "under 18," another looked like he was in his 20s, another sounded like he might be 15. I then thought about my hours of conversation with my children, who have exercised my patience over the past 15+ years with their inability to parse through the extraneous information and cut to the chase.
It would definitely seem that development of the ability to distinguish relevant v. non-relevant information is part of the maturation process, but why? What is it in younger people that doesn't allow them to slice through the mountains of irrelevancy?
I don't have an answer, but I think it's related to the process of objectification. We know that children, around age 7, start to develop the ability to objectify. They can detach themselves from a situation and look at themselves as separate from the thing they're experiencing. Prior to age 7, children live in a highly subjective world, where they don't experience themselves as separate from it.
A five-year-old child, for instance, doesn't realize he is enjoying something. An older person may sit back and say, "Man, I'm really enjoying this." The child doesn't. The child simply enjoys. It's a simple trait, a good trait, a Zen trait. I've often speculated that it's this trait that prompted Jesus to say the kingdom of heaven is for the child-like.
But it's a trait that doesn't come naturally once a child hits the age of reason, and it's a trait that needs to be an option. If a person can't objectify, he can't function well as a member of society. I would also add that this child-like trait is not, if unaccompanied with the ability to objectify, a saint-like trait. The saints were able to objectify. As Thomas Dubay liked to point out, saints, due to their lack of inner noise and ego, see things as they really are, thereby enabling themselves to see immediately what's relevant and what's not, to see what's important, to cut to the chase. It's no surprise that saints have made great administrators.
If a person can't cut to the chase, it's a sign of deficiency, either in raw intelligence (a definite possibility) or the maturation process. In my practice, I often get calls from adults who never seem to have developed the ability to cut to the chase. Sometimes I can attribute their inability to the stressful situation that prompted them to call an attorney in the first place. Sometimes I realize that they don't know what's relevant in their case because they're not lawyers. But usually, their inability to cut to the chase--and their corresponding rambling recounts and detours and verbal parentheses--points to an emotional deficiency of sorts.
I would also add that it seems to point to a type of excessive self-regard, the type that says, "If I'm saying it, it must be relevant, no matter how blathering." I normally don't take these kind of people as clients (and I've turned down many, just because they daggone near prompted me to suicide during the initial phone call), but when I do, I normally find that they're odd and intensely irritating.
Which brings me back to something I've said for years: self-regard leads to instability. I've occasionally ran across people who have experienced a breakdown or some other mental instability, and I've thought to myself, "That's not a mental illness. He's just an extremely vain or self-centered person and things aren't going his way. It's causing him to break down." I know this, because I've experienced a measured dose of it myself ("Hey, no kidding Scheske! Talk about self-indulgent rambling. Check out the length of this post!"). There's genuine mental illness, I suppose, but there's also the type that, at some level, is self-induced. The people who never developed the ability to objectify would seem to fall in the latter bin.
