It’s hard to judge whether this book is a really good book or something that messed up my head. But to borrow from the author’s own premise, growing up also invokes better judgement in our parts that should influence us in making better decisions for ourselves. And as such, I, as a human being should be able to decide for myself whether this book is good or not just like what Kant’s premise says that part of growing up is being able to think for ourselves. We cannot deny that the environment and circumstances when we grow up influenced us in so many ways, that some of them seem to be irrevocable. But if we are being asked the question of whether we want to relive, let’s say, the last 10 years of our life, most of us would be inclined to say no. So what does growing up really mean?

Growing up in most conventional sense would be to renounce all desires and hopes for an ideal world to finally accepting the world as it is. David Hume says that it is to recognize the gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought to’, without giving up the desire to reach the ‘ought to’. And there are many versions of growing up in many cultures and parts of the world as much anthropological research suggests. But since this is about growing up in the sense of a modern society in which we live, Susan Neiman turns to the aid of philosophers of the Enlightenment era, where most of our problems of growing up began.

Enlightenment-era was claimed by the author as the age when structural infantilization takes its peak with the rise of industrialization and education as the gap between infant age and adolescence. Most children in Medieval Europe would soon turn into labour as soon as their bodies were able to do so, following the steps that their fathers before them had taken for countless generations before. It was in the Enlightenment era that we began to see the unshakable nature of religions and the political systems backed by religions started to crumble, that suddenly people got bewildered by many choices presented to them. For the first time, children could choose to do different things than what their fathers did. Coming to terms with thinking for ourselves is not something that’s easy to do for most of us, depending on our cultures and circumstances of us growing up.

So why grow up? The author provides a short answer that “because it’s harder than you think, so hard that it can amount to resistance — even rebellion.” Some of us might have our own personal heroes, like let’s say the kinds of idols who serve as our biggest inspirations to turn to in face of crisis. As Kant has said, it’s less comfortable to think for ourselves in face of adversities. This book points out many ways of how our modern society, our government, our education, our digital technology and even our caring parents might be responsible to shape this society in which growing up is not encouraged. But again, growing up is a continuous permanent revolution. Who wants to encourage that?