Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age Audiobook (Free)

Our culture is enthusiastic about youth-and why not? What’s the appeal of ageing, of gaining duties and quitting on dreams, of continuously trading possibility for experience?

The philosopher Susan Neiman argues the fact that absence of appealing models of maturity isn’t an accident: by describing life like a downhill process, we prepare teenagers to expect-and demand-very small from it. In Why Grow Up? she issues our tradition of permanent adolescence, turning to thinkers including about Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age Kant, Rousseau, and Arendt to discover a style of maturity that is not a matter of resignation. In developing up, we move from your boundless trust of child years towards the peculiar combination of disappointment and exhilaration that comes with adolescence. Maturity, however, means finding the courage to live in a world of painful uncertainty without providing directly into dogma or despair. A grown-up, Neiman writes, helps to move the world nearer to what it should be while never losing sight of what it really is.

Why Grow Up? is usually a witty and concise debate for the worthiness of maturity being a subversive ideal: an objective rarely achieved entirely, and even more value striving for.