Immaturity Level Rising in Adults

Ant writes to tell us that a Discovery News article is exploring the old adage, "like a kid at heart", which may be closer to the truth than we would like to admit. New research is showing that grown-ups are more immature than ever. From the article: "Specifically, it seems a growing number of people are retaining the behaviors and attitudes associated with youth. As a consequence, many older people simply never achieve mental adulthood, according to a leading expert on evolutionary psychiatry."

To that I say...

[Aadain2001]

They are all just poopy-heads! Big, smelly, ugly, poopy-heads!

Myspace

[xoran99]

Case in point: How many "adults" have a myspace account? I'll admit it...

Re:Resignation.

[Aadain2001]

*Sniff* Man, you rock. You totally rock!

To being a kid again! /raises rootbeer float

Re:Resignation.

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to think M&Ms are better than money, because you can eat them.

Clearly you were unimaginative as a kid, and thus missed out on the special trip to the hospital.

I want to go back to the time when green was a flavour.

Worldwide?

[Bazman]

Some people have commented that this is only happening in developed nations. But if it happens all over teh globe, would that make it a Peter Pan-demic?

Their photo for illustration

[simdan]

They are using a photo of a traffic cop dancing in the street to illustrate their point. I could have sworn I've seen that cop on TV. He does these crazy moves and motions as he directs traffic. Pretty entertaining to see and a lot better then a cop with a chip on his shoulder. I have doubts that he is really all that immature. Just a guy having fun at his job.

This is great! Now I can

[Anonymous Coward]

feel perfectly comfortable telling people my own age to get the hell off my lawn!

Re:Resignation.

[Joebert]

Clearly you were unimaginative as a kid, and thus missed out on the special trip to the hospital.

Wow, you guys went to a hospital ?
We went to a place called "Enterprise Village", but I was sick on the day everyone picked jobs, & got stuck working a dead end job as a cashier at Eckerd Drugs instead of the radio station like I wanted.

Holy Shit ! I just realized that thoose special trips really do have an effect on the rest of your life !

Re:Myspace

[crazyjimmy]

Myspace? Bah.

How many of us post on /. ???

Re:The trouble is....

[ComradeSnarky]

My mom told me if I didn't save money that I would be the man who had to walk to work because he blew it on a game system instead of preparing for an accident from his car or saving for my retirement.


Your game system costs as much as a car plus your whole nest egg? I didn't know the PS3 was out already.

Re:Does this surprise anybody?

[highonlife]

always pointing at somebody else in the back of class that through the paper airplane.

Did it happen during english class when they were teaching the word "throw"?

Re:Does this surprise anybody?

[Bloke down the pub]

we're like a cuontry of 8 year olds, always pointing at somebody else in the back of class that through the paper airplane.

Eight year olds can spell "country" and "threw". Now write both of them 100 times, or I'll keep you in at recess.

Re:To that I say...

[Kierthos]

Well, um, you've got cooties!

Re:Not sure about this guy's definitions

[Bloke down the pub]

I don't see any reason one can't keep a child-like mind while still being financially responsible and dependable.

Greetings! My daddy used to be the nigerain minizter for candies and in my house I have a very enourmus jar of sweets. Unfortunatly this jar is guarded by my big brother, but if you give me ten bucks I will bribe him to open it for me ... er us and I will share them with you.

Re:Myspace

[Anonymous Coward]

Not me.
Oh damn...

Re:Who wants to be six again?

[hyfe]

Who yearns for a time when everything is out of your control and sailing sticks across a pond is fun because you've still to undeveloped mentally to enjoy a good game of Risk?

If you enjoy Risk I'd say you're still undeveloped mentally.

signed
a Tabletop Gamer

Re:Personal position

[Paradise Pete]

...a sense of wonder and discovery. The benefits are astonishing.That said, I didn't actually read the article

So much for your sense of wonder and discovery.

Re:Resignation.

[MooseByte]

"Now I just have to find somebody to clothe, feed, and house me while I indulge myself."

I'm sorry, my ex-wife already has that position filled.

Absolutely!

[why-is-it]

Growing old is mandatory but growing up is optional... and I opted out.

Absolutely! You are only young once, but you can be immature forever!

Argument between reserachers and adults...

[sgentry6]

Researchers: "Specifically, it seems a growing number of people are retaining the behaviors and attitudes associated with youth. As a consequence, many older people simply never achieve mental adulthood, according to a leading expert on evolutionary psychiatry."

Adults: "Are not!"

Researchers: "Clearly if you look at the results of the study there is a clear correlation between adult and child behavior."

Adults: "Is not!"

Researchers: "You are proving our point now."

Adults: "Are not!"

Researchers: "Are too!"

Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

Let's Try a Few

[Bob9113]

I'm telling Congress on you.

My lawyer could beat up your lawyer.

Boy: I never said I knew where the WMDs were.
Father: We saw you do it, son.
Boy: No, no, no, no, no.

Boy 1: That idea is mine!
Boy 2: No, you gotta share!
Boy 1: It's mine! (punches boy 2)

Boy 1: Wanna play Kerberos?
Boy 2: Yeah! Only you gotta show me how.
[They play]
Boy 2: No, you can't use MD5.
Boy 1: Yes I can, we always used MD5.
Boy 2: It's my house, we play by my rules.

Yup, sounds about right.

Re:Resignation.

[An Onerous Coward]

Gentle Reader,

As a fellow curmudgeon, I have to say that you're not doing it properly. You have to do something to hide it, or you won't get invited to peoples' birthday parties. When you attempt to paint yourself as "a carefree guy with a sense of humor," don't follow it up immediately with the humorless excoriation of a popular comedian. That undermines your message and makes your curmugeonosity obvious. Instead, try following it up by complimenting some piece of popular culture.

WRONG: I have a sense of humor, and am usually a pretty carefree guy. Jeff Foxworthy is stupid, and is betraying his fellow southerners to make money.

RIGHT: I have a sense of humor, and am usually a pretty carefree guy. For example, this morning's Family Circus had me chuckling all day. Billy wandered the entire neighborhood looking for a spatula. Why did he expect to find one down by the river? Nobody knows.

In the case of the WRONG example, people see that you've become so adept in your curmudgeoning that you can't even think on the subject of humor without going on a rant about the parts that piss you off. In the RIGHT example, you are shown to share your audience's taste for shallow, hackneyed popular culture. This will get you invited to social gatherings.

If, on the other hand, you're like me and have embraced your inner misanthrope, then there is no reason to describe yourself as either funny or carefree in the first place. I find it to be a refreshing way to live.

I'm AOC, and I hate pretty much everything! C'mon, now you give it a try. It will be like a weight lifted off your shoulders.

Re:Indulgence?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your Right! Its not like we spend 20 of those hours browsing slashdot anyway.

Re:Explaination

[hey!]

If you are sufficently self centered and poor/uninterested in reading social cues, you'll never realize that you are pathetic middle aged man sponging off his parents and frittering away all his time on their broadband connection.

In a way if you are sufficiently far from realizing you are pathetic, it is indistinguishable from not being pathetic. It's like being so far away from being a normal human being that you approach a semblence of it, as it were, coming from the other direction.

Re:Resignation.

[Associate]

Maybe he had a lisp.

Subject

[Legion303]

As a senior citizen, I feel it's my duty to point this out: LOL! PWNT! W00t

Re:Resignation.

[frank_adrian314159]

Being young, wee and full of vim is certainly a fun thing to be...

Excuse me? I thought the phrase would be "full of emacs...".

Re:Explaination

[hey!]

How _OLD_ are you exactly? Frittering?

Well, depends on how you measure age:

(1) Old enough to remember a 300 baud modem as an upgrade.

(2) Old enough to have used TIPs to access the ArpaNet.

(3) Old enough to remember bang notation on email addresses.

(4) Old enough to remember V7 Unix and have worked on Multics.

(5) Old enough to remmeber how sdb was big improvement on adb, but still using adb sometimes because it was easier to patch object code with it if you knew machine language.

(6) Old enough to remmber CPU clock speeds measured in KHz.

(7) Old enough to have worked on a system with a 5MB hard disk.

(8) Old enough to have seen punched cards, drum memory and CRT memory in the flesh, albeit as surplus hulks in the basement and not working machines.

(9) Old enough to have bootstrapped a computer via its front panel switches.

(10) Old enough to remember when "core" memory was actually made out of cores -- magnetic beads.

(11) Old enough that when I started in the business, I had older colleagues who would say things like, "I remember getting 4K of RAM on our 1401; we thought we had the world by the balls. That was a stored program jobbie, you know". Sometimes, as we sat around on the cracker barrels whittling new dot matrix print heads, a few would admit to being old enough to have worked on Whirlwind (which was programmbed by plug boards).

(12) Old enough to have a five digit /. user id.

Re:Absolutely!

[indifferent children]

Do you mean "immature" or "childlike"?

Which term would describe a 40 year-old living in his mother's basement, watching 7 hours of Adult Swim every night as an alternative to being employed?

Re:Explaination

[turnipsatemybaby]

Luxury!

I had to catch a bird and press it's beak against a revolving stone slab!

Re:Absolutely!

[qwerty asdf]

That would be "loser"