A desire to prolong the irresponsibility of your youth is a desire to remain dependent. To choose dependency over independence is to give up your Supreme Power. It’s you asking the world to treat you as a child. It’s wanting something for nothing, avoiding responsibility. When you look to get out of being an adult, you turn your freedom into currency. It becomes something you exchange for attention, love, and care.
A culture that bemoans adulthood with a term like “adulting” is infantile. To characterize such a potent phase of life as undesirable promotes helplessness. It fosters a culture of blind obedience to consumerism. A dependency that runs so deep people will give up their identities for it. A generation, shellacked in conformity, lip-syncs to the thoughts of others for likes.
To be too cool for adulthood isn’t rebellious individualism. Quite the opposite, it’s handing your soul over to the values of Amazon, Pfizer, and Twitter. Playing small and dependent makes you sick. Profiteers are happy to sell your antidotes 24 hours a day. Ads stream across innumerable channels to incomprehensible psychic depths. Your mind becomes an extension of the advertiser. You unconsciously regurgitate its message for free. You perform their scripts on social media for ever-growing corporate profit.
We used to rely on war to prop up our economy. Now, we rely on people being at war with themselves. Our economic health depends on your distrust of the individuality of your thoughts. The economy grows with high levels of consumer denial, and people ignore their instincts without resistance. You have to believe that causes are solutions, which means you have to be at least somewhat mentally ill. For example, 270 billion dollars in social media ads generate 650 billion dollars in beauty industry revenue annually. One creates the need for the other, resulting in mind-bending profit for both. You? Well, you lose all sense of reality.
Living in the service of corporate profit is not growing up. It’s giving up. Powerful people don’t want mental caretakers. They refuse to pretend. The fastest track to regaining freedom of identity is to grow up and take responsibility. Direct the currency of your attention toward what profits your heart and soul. Value spirit over material.
Don’t mistake your opportunity to be alive for a burden. Millions of people have died who would have given anything for the chance to stay in life and struggle. Don’t waste your chance to persevere. You exist to bear the weight of battle to build a life. To believe life becomes meaningful through easy dependence is to misunderstand it altogether. When you make yourself someone else’s responsibility, you rob yourself of your wins.
You’re a recipient, not a victim, of your adulthood. It’s a gift, not a curse. If darkness is holding your attention captive, it’s with your permission. You are free to manifest the infinite intelligence and the power of God inside you at any time. You are free to maintain hope and create solutions. You can learn to experience monotony without despair. Ease loneliness without video.
Taking responsibility for yourself honors your freedom to do so. It’s how you step into your God-given purpose. As an adult, you don’t have to live at the mercy of anyone. You can and should refuse to blame anyone for the quality of your relationships, career, or self. The problem is not your partner, kids, parents, employer, debts, real estate prices, interest rates, or online strangers. The problem is your dependence on them.
Someone will always be willing to take responsibility for you. It will always benefit them more than you. It can’t be any other way. You protect yourself by being responsible for yourself. Never give away your right to think and act for yourself. Maintain your freedom. It came at the expense of the lives of those who couldn’t.
Song Accompaniment: Tom Petty, I Won’t Back Down
Artwork: The Art of Seth