Our culture is obsessed with youth-and why not? What’s the appeal of growing old, of gaining responsibilities and giving up on dreams, of steadily trading probability for experience?

The philosopher Susan Neiman argues how the absence of appealing types of maturity is not a major accident: by explaining life like a downhill process, we prepare teenagers to expect-and demand-very little from it. In Why Grow Up? she issues our lifestyle of long term adolescence, embracing thinkers including about Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age group Kant, Rousseau, and Arendt to find a style of maturity that is not a matter of resignation. In growing up, we move from your boundless trust of child years to the peculiar mixture of disappointment and exhilaration that comes with adolescence. Maturity, nevertheless, means finding the courage to reside in an environment of painful uncertainty without offering directly into dogma or despair. A grown-up, Neiman creates, helps to move the globe nearer to what it ought to be while under no circumstances losing view of what it really is.

Why Grow Up? is certainly a witty and concise discussion for the worthiness of maturity as a subversive ideal: a goal rarely achieved entirely, and even more value striving for.