Your parents fucked you up, even if they did their best not to.

Who you were was stifled in a very fundamental way as a child. The complaint is something like:

“If mom hadn’t taken my teddy bear when I was 8, maybe I’d be happy and self actualized today!”

A thread 1/12

Ultra-progressive parents recognize this and vow not to do the same to their kids. They fail to set boundaries and let their kids run feral. 2/12

If you’ve seen the results of this, you know that it’s not pretty. These kids can grow up to be pretty nasty adults – adults who were never told “no” as children. 3/12

That approach is tempting, because it recognizes a truth: we need to uproot the shame and inhibition that we learn as kids in order to flourish as adults.

But the hippie parenting approach fails BECAUSE we can’t do that until we have learned to perform our social identity4/12

Repressing our egoistic, childish impulses is a necessary part of this. We have to learn to wear a mask.

Much of the first half of our life is spent learning to perform expected social roles – student, spouse, worker. This does great damage to our ability to be ourselves 5/12

As we enter adulthood, we learn to master these roles, and we may start to have successes – making money, finding love, starting a family. And then all of a sudden we feel hollow – these things aren’t us, they’re just empty roles we’re playing! Who even is behind the mask?6/12

At this point, stripping off the mask becomes imperative. If we can navigate this process successfully, we become more ourselves – and not merely the roles that we have been moulded into. 7/12

But crucially, the person who has put the mask on and taken it off is qualitatively different from the child who never put it on, *even if they share important characteristics.* It’s what separates the socially competent adult from the child who throws a tantrum at nap time 8/12

You have probably seen some variation of this meme:

Make no mistake, Carl is fundamentally different than Grunk even if he agrees with him. The key here is to see the curve as not simply representing a spread of distribution *but as an actual hill you must climb to get to the other side of* 10/12

The midwit is not merely a type of guy, but a developmental phase. And from his perspective, Grunk and Carl look the same. The difference between Grunk’s instincts and Carl’s instincts is the work that was done in the middle. Once you see this pattern, it is everywhere.
11/12

The key to take away from this is: you were never going to get out of childhood unscathed, one way or another. To become a fully developed adult, you have to be *alienated from yourself and then return to yourself* 12/12