this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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One of the reasons The Last Battle soured me on the series was the way in which they applied these increasingly unpleasant purity tests to the accumulated cast of characters.
One of the messages of "The Problem with Susan" was that pain is the source of maturity. You tend to see this in older people because they've experienced more of it.
Grown men who don't act particularly mature are ones who have led relatively charmed existences. But there are plenty who have a sobriety and seriousness about them. You'll inevitably find some kind of trauma behind each of these folks.
Parenthood also often does a lot to mature you. Not all parents by any means, but many of my friends with kids, and myself, found ourselves much harder to anger once we had kids and our empathic abilities increased substantially.
That all makes sense from an evolutionary perspective
Kids generate a lot of anxiety and no small amount of trauma (particularly for the person carrying the pregnancy to term). Even before the child arrives, there's also the real possibility of failed pregnancies. I have dozens of friends with kids, but I can count the number of women who have never experienced a miscarriage on one hand. Then there's the first six months of caring for a newborn, which is intense. There are childhood injuries and illnesses that you feel as fiercely as if they'd happened to you. And there's the general process of watching a child mature into an adult, and the emotional turbulence of that process.
There's also the experience of watching an elder loved one - a grandparent or parent or beloved aunt/uncle - grow infirm and die. It weighs on you, both directly as a caregiver and indirectly as a reminder of the mortality of younger loved ones.
Grief has a huge impact on personality.
We have 7 month old Twins. Intense is a good word, the last 7 months have been the hardest of my life so far, and I am hitting on 40. That said, it's far from trauma, as far as I understand the term.
Also, my father and by brother died 10 and 5 years ago, both before they were old aged. I am well aware of the concept of moratility, even of my wife's and children's mortality. It doesn't weigh on me personally, honestly. It's just a reality that one has to accept, as there is nothing that can be done about it.