Terrible Ted

Those who live lives of immediate gratification, Huxley thought, would not be able to bear solitude of any kind. As Mustapha Mond explains, "people are never alone now. We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them to ever have it." A life devoted to instant gratification produces permanent infantilization: "at sixty-four . . . tastes are what they were at seventeen." In our society, the telescoping of the generations is already happening: the knowledge, tastes, and social accomplishments of thirteen-year-olds are often the same as those of twenty-eight-year-olds. Adolescents are precociously adult; adults are permanently adolescent.

Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It, p. 110.