Please Grow Up

Won’t you please grow up?

Oh, by the way, don’t you dare grow up.

You, and I, and our children, are pressured to grow up too quickly and then, as soon as we get close to maturity, we are pressured not to grow up at all.

From our first moments of consciousness, advertisers ask us to grow up faster—buy, consume, conform to the image we provide you; be sexy, be hip, and be cool. Also, be very, very self-conscious; be afraid to be yourself without our products.

And from our first moments of maturity, we are told not to grow up. Stay young, impressionable, incomplete, malleable, and insecure—buy, consume, be sexy, be hip, and be cool. Just, please, continue to be a teenager and buy our products. Products that will help you to continue to feel young and vibrant. Be afraid to be yourself without them.

You and I are the filling in an adolescent sandwich.

Why are we subject to these mutually supportive pressures to grow up fast, then stagnate and stay forever young? Because teens are in that in-between place, that nowhere land in which they have enough freedom, power, maturity, mobility and intelligence to make choices but not the developed judgment always to make wise or rational decisions. Recent research on teen brains shows this, although clearly advertisers have been aware of it for decades.

I don’t mean to slander young people. Adolescence is a wonderful thing. Teens are insightful and idealistic. They are innovative, eager, and open-minded. They promote change, are drawn to new ideas. They have little tolerance for the disingenuous. They have a powerful sense for what is fair, if not always reasonable.

An image of adolescence is not simply an image of teenagers, by the way. It is an image of the United States. As a nation we are hypocritical and dangerous, and callow, naïve and unconsciously selfish consumers. But we are also fair, idealistic, open-minded, and innovative. Maybe if we understand ourselves as an adolescent culture we can understand how the world can see us in two very different ways at the same time.

I don’t mean to slander advertisers, either. Their efforts are successful because we allow them to be. And, through our increasing sophistication, we force them into ever-more self-referential, ironic stances, but these work on us, too. No matter how savvy or critical you are, let me ask you: don’t you believe, maybe secretly, that the products you use are the best? Maybe your teeth won’t be the whitest, you’ve seen through that scam, but then maybe your teeth will be happier in a progressive mouth, coddled by baking soda, organic sea-salt and sage. Is your choice of car or clothes the absolutely most rational? Or, like the rest of us, do you just have a rationale?

Also, who are these advertisers, these conniving image merchants? Nike, McDonalds, Coke and GM? Wal-mart or K-mart? They are certainly not separate from you and me; they are you and me. They are local and worldwide employers, they drive globalization, they transcend national governments. On average and by default, they represent us. And they are exquisitely sensitive to us and to our desires.

Advertisers have a technical term for our emotional attachment to their products—they call it “salience,” and it’s reflected in your blood pressure, your sweat glands, your respiration rate, and the dilation of your pupils. You can decide not to patronize a company, say, Nike, with your mind, but your body still wants it. What you see isn’t only what you get, it’s also who you are.

Even if you shun certain products, buy locally and responsibly (but where did your jeans come from? Your car?) you are complicit in and responsible for the world that advertisers, in part, have created. Sorry, there’s nowhere else to go. Our world is a reflection of who we are collectively. What we truly don’t tolerate doesn’t last long.

Things will change. This fear drives corporations and advertisers harder, pushing you harder to get hooked on their products earlier, be less conscious of your affinity for their image. Here’s how they will change, not tomorrow, but eventually. It’s what the Germans used to call an “immanent critique.” It may look like a fair fight, but it’s not. Moral imagination and idealism are poles to which we are inevitably drawn. Advertisers play on just these qualities—pleasure, the good things in life, great ideas, human values—in whatever twisted fashion.

We will wake from the voracious dream of more and better things, of remaining young and unformed, and, when we do, we will enjoy a better life. We will decide to protect our children from the world that we have made, a world that doesn’t yet belong to them. We will allow them grow up as we could not, quietly maturing into the adults we wish we could be. In doing this, in giving our children’s childhoods back to them, we ourselves will shed our adolescence. We will finally grow up.