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  • Why Grow Up?

  • Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
  • By: Susan Neiman
  • Narrated by: Leslie Howard
  • Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (7 ratings)

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Why Grow Up?

By: Susan Neiman
Narrated by: Leslie Howard
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Summary

Our culture is obsessed with youth - and why not? What's the appeal of growing old, of gaining responsibilities and giving up on dreams, of steadily trading possibility for experience?

The philosopher Susan Neiman argues that the absence of appealing models of maturity is not an accident: By describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect - and demand - very little from it. In Why Grow Up?, she challenges our culture of permanent adolescence, turning to thinkers including Kant, Rousseau, and Arendt to find a model of maturity that is not a matter of resignation. In growing up, we move from the boundless trust of childhood to the peculiar mixture of disappointment and exhilaration that comes with adolescence. Maturity, however, means finding the courage to live in a world of painful uncertainty without giving in to dogma or despair. A grown-up, Neiman writes, helps to move the world closer to what it should be while never losing sight of what it is.

Why Grow Up? is a witty and concise argument for the value of maturity as a subversive ideal: a goal rarely achieved entirely, and all the more worth striving for.
©2014 Susan Neiman (P)2019 Tantor
Developmental Psychology Society
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A book we all do well to read

Neiman takes us to questions basic to our lives but which we often neglect. Reading it is only a small step in helping ourselves and the world, but it leads to others. A book I recommend to everyone who takes pleasure in becoming more aware of matters that count.

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