THE INFANTILISATION OF ADULTS: WHY MATURITY IS VANISHING WORLDWIDE

Consider relationships. Adults today demand the emotional care that children demand from parents. They require constant reassurance, immediate validation, and unending comfort.

- ACHARYA PRASHANT

In 2023, a major psychological survey found that adults now spend seven hours a day on screens outside of work, not for learning or creating, but for consuming entertainment or entertainment disguised as seriousness.

The machines have grown intelligent, but the users have quietly regressed. The question today is simple: are we surrounded by adults, or by children wearing adult bodies?

Walk through a mall, scroll through a feed, or sit in a meeting. The faces are adult, the reactions are juvenile, and the inner world is till governed by impulse. The passport claims thirty or fifty, yet the being within rarely crosses the mental age of five. The mismatch between biological age and psychological age has never been wider. The calendar keeps turning, but consciousness refuses to grow.

This is not a cultural trend. It is the collapse of the second birth, the inner birth that alone makes one human. The first birth is from the mother. The second comes from understanding, from self-observation, from the steady dissolution of the inner pretender. The Mundaka Upanishad speaks of the lower knowledge that multiplies information and the higher knowledge that frees one from illusion. Without that second birth, one remains driven by instinct and fear, draped in office clothes but inwardly no different from an anxious child.

The world today does not promote this inner birth. It rather obstructs it. It surrounds you with stimulation so that silence never arrives. It glorifies emotional indulgence and declares it authenticity. It rewards quick gratification and punishes the slow discipline required for clarity. Modern economies prosper when people remain needy and impulsive, and modern politics thrives when people remain afraid. A population of adults is difficult to manipulate. A population of children elects whoever promises sweets.

THE DIGITAL PACIFIER