Are grownups just giant kids? | Hacker News Reader

Are grownups just giant kids?

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31 pointsthm90 comments

I think part of it comes down to how you define "grown up".

When I was 19, I felt like I was 19. I'm not entirely sure how to explain it, but that's just how I felt, I felt like I was the appropriate age. When I was 20, I still felt 19. When I was 21, 22, 23... etc, I still feel 19, and now I'm almost 34 and a small part of me is still kind of convinced that I'm 19 years old, despite my desk job, mortgage, and rapidly thinning hairline.

I didn't really feel like I got a lot of my shit together until I was about 25-26 though. I think a lot of things changed, but the most obvious thing from my perspective is that I got a lot better about managing my personal finances, saving money, and making sure things were paid on time.

I think drawing a firm dichotomy between "kid" and "adult" is a malformed premise.

When my mother was in her early 70s, she told me that she still felt 17 inside. She said you always do, you just learn to behave in a way that doesn't elicit negative commentary.

Aging is largely a role we learn to adopt. I'm not dismissing that we do gain some experience. But our emotions don't change that much.

Yeah, I have no idea how much of this is hormonal vs genetics vs environmental vs anything else, but I know that 19 is when I became a lot more empathetic [1], a trait I still keep up now.

I'm sure I've learned and developed my emotions since then but I think 19 year old me was the beginning of my "current" personality, if that makes sense.

I'm the same except my "feel" age is 23. That's the last year of college before I started working. Did you have a significant life change at 19, like starting work, join military, anything like that?

I started college at 19, so that might be it. I dropped out at 21 and started working desk jobs after that, so you'd think that that would be it, but no, I "feel" 19.

This happens for at different ages for different people, and for particular individual reasons. It is a kind of dissociation: a "part" of you becomes emotionally stuck in the past, either because of trauma, or not making peace with the past, or being unable to make continuous sense of your identity relative to your life. Something like that.

The modern world is full of 50+ year olds pretending to be teenagers because there are no other coherent scripts to identify with after that point.

I expect for a lot of people, the "break" happens when they have to join the workforce and give up on whatever ideals they formerly dreamed of.

Maybe, though I don't know that me feeling like I'm 19 is really "bad". I don't think I have any trauma associated with that age. I didn't really join the workforce until I was 21.

I don't have any kids, and I do think that that somewhat stunts your growth.

I wonder if any of this is related to how few rituals we have left in modern society that clearly mark a before and an after in our lives. Rituals where the whole society identifies, respects, adjusts it's expectations for.

> I wonder if any of this is related to how few rituals we have left in modern society that clearly mark a before and an after in our lives.

That's an interesting observation but are you thinking of rituals or ceremonies?

Yeah I was like this for a while - I still felt 19 until I was about 35, then something changed nearly overnight,

A calmness and matureness came over me, I don’t feel old, but I feel like I understand the world a lot better, my tastes changed and I get enjoyment from much different things. Overall I’m much happier, much more open minded, and seeing and appreciating much more beauty in the world.

Then I see people like my auntie, who is 65 and still acting like a spoilt-brat 14 year old. It’s sad to see someone waste their life and not grow as a human, and also very frustrating. Some adults are just big kids, it’s the ones who don’t grow.

> I still felt 19 until I was about 35, then something changed nearly overnight,

That doesn't seem to be my way. My changes typically take years->decades of work.

On the upside, people underguess my age by a decade or so.

Out of curiosity, I asked my dad about this just now, and he said he still feels about 18. He's 63 now, so I guess different strokes for different folks and all that fun stuff.

Yeah my dad is 74 and he says the same thing, in many ways he is still a child, I don’t mean that in a negative way for him, just that he hasn’t matured “on a spiritual level” for lack of a better term.

I’m 39 and I’m now the “head of the family” - I’m the one everyone comes to for wisdom and guidance etc,

> I think part of it comes down to how you define "grown up".

At 16, I defined an adult as someone too old to grow. After four decades as a grown up, my assessment is even more critical. I find adults to be direct cause of ~every human caused problem. That's how I see adults collectively.

Individually, we each start with immature psychological bits. We (hopefully) make expected progress on some of them before dying.

The upshot of that is we are 1) unbalanced and 2) that everyone (including youth) is better than us in some ways that matter.

"Just" is a weasel word. I can't ever trust it.

I think growing up isn't when you stop feeling like you're 19, it's the specific point in everybody's life when you realize that nobody else is "more grownup" than you. That you too could be a contributor to this world if only you'd try.

I feel like it was embarrassingly late in life when I stopped thinking that the people running things were smarter, more mature, and just generally better than me. It turns out there are dipshits and geniuses and crooks and saints all the way up and down the whole thing. They are not grownups, they are just the people without imposter syndrome.

I know what you mean.

When I first learned how to program, "web frameworks" like Ruby on Rails and Django and whatnot seemed like magic, and that those required a special kind of intelligence to do. Then I learned how those frameworks worked, built three of my own, and realized that while they're still kind of cool, they're not magic. I've repeated the same process with finance, formal mathematics, cooking, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Most things aren't actually that hard if you sit down and force yourself to learn them.

At this point, I start with the assumption "no one is smarter than me". This is very obviously not true, I'm not a hyper-genius or anything, but I think it's a good mentality to have when learning new stuff. If no one is smarter than me, then I should be able to grok most things if I spend enough time with them.

What made me realize I was definitely an adult was the first time I bought Brussels sprouts at a grocery store. I realized that was something child tzs would never have done.

Lol! That depends on the child education. One thing is you tell the child "buy whatever you want" and another is let the children in the market and say "buy food for the whole family". They will buy veggies in the second case.

Also it might be related to cooking skills!

I think the experience of getting older is becoming a superset of all of your past selves, not replacing them with newer versions.

I'm in my 40s, and I have thoughts and feelings that my in my 30s wouldn't relate to or understand. I have a sensation of time and patience that would be alienating to my younger self. Time feels frighteningly finite in ways it never did before.

But I also still fully remember what it was like to be in my 30s, that heady mixture of feeling like I'd blossomed into a certain level of competence and maturity while still feeling like I was in the full flush of health and with most of my life ahead of me. That 30-something me is still inside me, alive today.

And I'm still the 20-something me, excited to get out of the house and experience new things, reckless enough to want to do things to excess because I hadn't experienced that many consequences yet, still romanticizing romance itself.

And so on.

We never stop being our previous selves, we just invite more new selves into that growing collection.

Anyone with kids knows the immediate answer to this is no.

Depending on how jaded you are with the adults you interact with on a daily basis, you may think otherwise, but a fully developed pre-frontal cortex is a big differentiator.

Give a laser to a kid and to an adult and then measure the time between them receiving the laser, and them going blind. The delta between the two measurements is what a fully developed brain does for a person.

I hear this all the time, but I actually am a walking counterexample. I had a laser pointer when I was eight years old, my parents made it pretty clear not to point it into my eyes or anyone else's, and I managed to not blind anyone.

I was gifted a powerful blue laser pointer from a laser enthusiast friend of mine, when I was in my 40s. It was powerful enough to light things on fire. It was far too dangerous. If that thing reflected off anything and hit my eye, I'd be at least partially blind. I also lived near an airport, so if it got pointed towards the sky, I'd be asking for trouble. I gave the laser pointer back to my friend.

I kind of doubt the laser pointer you had was capable of blinding anyone, most laser pointers years ago were very low power. I just bought a couple hundred red diode lasers (around 5mw, or less) and they won't blind anyone. But today there are also extremely powerful laser pointers available to anyone that will blind someone in an instant.

Yeah, I have one of those things too, and they're terrifying. I wear special goggles when I use it to pop balloons or light matches.

That's fair enough, this was a pretty typical "office" laser pointer you could buy in the late 90s, not terribly bright.

Point is (pertaining to the article) that 8-year old me would have kept that thing and I would be blind in at least one eye by now, but 40 year old me made a reasoned decision and gave it back.

Meh, I'm not actually sure I agree.

My laser pointer wasn't too lethal, but I did have a basic woodworking kit as well, I even had some a hand-me-down circular saw from my grandfather. My parents forced me to wear safety goggles, and I managed to avoid chopping off any of my fingers.

Circular saws and lasers are vastly different in terms of safety. You don't have to worry about the reflection of a table saw in a mirror chopping your finger off, you just need to worry about the actual physical spinning blade, which makes a lot of noise and seems very dangerous - it makes you more cautious just by its nature. A high-power laser pointer (that is available today, not when you were a kid) is very dangerous, in that it operates silently, it's so compact it fits in your shirt pocket, and if it reflects off a surface and hits someone in the eye - which is easy to do - it can cause irreparable damage and the damage may not even be immediately realized. In the worst cases blindness is instant. There's no re-attaching a fingertip, there's no stopping the bleeding. Your eye is just forever damaged.

Somehow I manage not to blind myself or my cats with a laser pointer.

Maybe you don't realize not all laser pointers are the same? Some can light things on fire, and you definitely don't want your cats to be playing with one of those. Some laser pointers won't blind you even if you point it directly at your eye, and that's likely the kind that you have.

laser pointers are supposed to be low power such that they cannot blind anyone. Maybe yours was one of those. Though plenty exist that are too powerful and can blind people so be careful.

I would argue "jaded" is saying (and believing) such dogmatic answers.

That human brains develop and change as you age? Wouldn't that be a medical fact?

I was never arguing that, but I think you are correct about it

"Dogmatic":

A fully developed pre-frontal cortex is not a question of "dogma". It's something that can be clearly seen from an MRI scan of a living brain. Observations of large groups of humans of various ages have shown that the vast majority of humans under 18 don't have it and that the vast majority of humans over 25 do have it.

For most, having kids crystalizes the transformation.

Except I know plenty of adults who don’t have kids and they seemed to make the transition without difficulty.

I have kids and I agree to an extent, but also believe the inverse as well.

I can see that my life has led to me maturing sufficiently to care for kids. I have the experiences, self awareness, instinctual impetus, and so on required in order to keep my kids alive (so far).

And yet I have arguments with my wife that make no sense. We disagree about things, and although we like to believe we're relatively competent, reasonable, well-meaning people, we are sometimes the opposite. We're not as much unlike our kids as social norms want to imply we should be. We grow through these things as well, it gets better, we learn some lessons, but these mishaps continue to occur. We forget to start dinner early enough, the kids get to sleep a bit late. I forget to charge my watch, miss its alarm, and wake late so the morning is rushed. All these little mistakes, and all you'd generally expect from a child (and possibly even reprimand them for).

At times my status as "mature adult" seems tenuous. I might tell my kids not to eat to many Christmas treats, then find myself eating several as I do the dishes. Whoops? I have to be careful that I don't convince myself I'm all that different from them, frankly. Yeah I've managed to keep things going so far (with the help of my wife), but some days it is a bit of a marvel that it all works. Not to be too self-deprecating, and I am joking slightly.

I'm also increasingly aware that the state of being anything at all—what it's like to be me—is eerily similar to how it felt decades ago. I have more resources to draw upon, which is very useful, but the mode of being hasn't shifted much in longer than I can remember (literally). I can only imagine that my kids are the same. The way they exist, how they feel moment to moment, the way they perceive the world, is not at all unlike it was for me and still is today.

I'm also constantly impressed with how intelligent my kids are, from early on. It isn't that they're super kids or anything. Given the right opportunities and resources though, kids are smart. They get stuff. They're constantly crunching through information and synthesizing things and making sense of the world. They're incapable of some decision-making and reasoning, without a doubt, but they deserve a lot of credit.

Perhaps the bottom line is: don't take being an adult too seriously. We aren't entirely different from our kids. We are still the kids we were, too. Just hardened by a bit of experience, shaped by countless mistakes, and well-rehearsed in making stuff up as we go.

If the kids are happy and healthy, all is well.

And many with their older parents around will tell you that the answer isn't nearly as clear cut? I swear, having our parents over is basically just another form of child in the house. Lack of impulse control when paired with older age is tough to deal with.

I mean, child no, they try to kill themselves constantly.

But a teenager? The answer is not clearcut.

Also as you do things as an adult, you can infer how your behavior came to be based on some experience as a child

Yes, except that they’ve mostly learned to not act drunk except when they are in fact drunk.

Otherwise, yes.

I just figured realizing that (and, not unrelatedly, that at least 95% of people in prestigious and powerful positions, in society, business, or politics, are a lot less remarkably-capable than one might expect… or hope… and are surprisingly often outright idiots) was a common experience for those who’ve been “adults” for a while. The whole thing, top to bottom, is mostly large kids doing dumb shit with things they present as understanding but super don’t.

It’s a big fuckin’ game of play-pretend that actually kills people pretty often.

A lot of things make much more sense (with some accompanying loss of hope) when you realize that humanity is about as dumb as it’s possible for a species to be and still develop a sophisticated technological civilization. We’re right on the ragged edge of what our species’ biology allows.

This follows from the simple fact that evolution happens on much longer timelines than human history. We’re pretty much the same animals as we were before the invention of agriculture. Once we had enough brain, we almost instantly went from flint arrowheads to inventing computers and hydrogen bombs and mortgage-backed securities. Of course we’re just barely mentally hanging on trying to handle all of it.

I think this is where you get a lot of stuff about how actually some dumb shit a rich or powerful person keeps doing must be part of some master plan, or working toward some purpose we don't know about. [EDIT] Where you get people coming up with this is their resistance to accepting that the folks with all the power mostly aren't terribly exceptional in the ways one might expect or hope, I mean. "Surely that's not how the world works... right? There has to be another explanation."

Maybe, but most of the time they're just a hell of a lot dumber than one might suppose. And maybe a bit mentally ill. And, even odds, have a drug problem ("Winners don't do drugs" and "cheaters never prosper"—grand lies of our childhoods, both are hilariously false)

> Seeing people this way can be condescending, but also gentle: it nods to the basic psychological needs that often drive our behavior.

I think the author is on to something. We are far less willing to ascribe psychological motivations to other adults than we are to children. People are happy to say that a child is "shy" or "jealous" or "grumpy because they are hungry."

It's possible that the construction of adult identity means hiding one's psychological motivations from others, and we learn this from the shame of having adults reduce our needs and desires to something other than our own self-narrative.

This is understandable, but maybe we should be learning the opposite lesson. Every human is a psychological being, and it's actually easier to be empathetic when you're aware of your own motivators and look from them in others.

This.

I’ve learned that being brutally honest with myself and others regarding what I’m feeling and why has been super helpful.

It _does_ run the risk of sounding childish, but thus far I’ve found the open vulnerability more rewarding than punishing.

Identifying when I’m irritable, I’ll say “I’m grumpy, I’m gonna suck to be around, sorry”. Or when the real reason why I don’t want to do something is just because “I’m feeling shy”, etc.

Its hard to break the whole “men should be stoic” expectation but I’ve found people are remarkably understanding when you’re honest about why you’re feeling what you’re feeling.

It is very telling that the only vocabulary that many people (especially men) have to talk about their feelings is childish. As children, parents or other caregivers demand that we express ourselves but they also set the constraints for what valid expression is. Those constraints might be something as simple yet ultimately toxic as, "I care about how you feel, unless it makes my life more complicated, in which case shut up." Or my favorite (for personal reasons), "Tell me how you feel but if you say anything other than that you're content I'll panic and start flailing."

Kids learn soon enough what the real boundaries of their emotional life are. As a little boy, I was told that it was weak to cry if I lost a Karate match but as long as I lied and said it was because I got punched really hard, it was OK. I'm not sure what the ultimate goal is of this kind of socially engineered lack of self-awareness, but it doesn't seem to be working. At least not for me.

>I was told that it was weak to cry if I lost a Karate match but as long as I lied and said it was because I got punched really hard, it was OK. I'm not sure what the ultimate goal is of this kind of socially engineered lack of self-awareness

Learning contains much failure, and being able to better control your own emotional state in the presence of these many every-day failures makes further progress faster, easier, and more pleasant for everyone?

I think learning not to cry after every failure is an important life lesson... if crying were an impediment to success. There are many great athletes that are criers. I don't think the lesson they had to learn was not to feel bad when they lost.

Meanwhile, what did I do? I learned to stop crying by quitting Karate. I didn't actually learn to process my feelings. I just learned how to either repress them, avoid them, or lie about them.

That's not control, because all of that was accomplished subconsciously. Control relies on self-awareness. And repression isn't pleasant, certainly not in the long run.

I'm not trying to get all touchy-feely here. I think self-awareness about one's emotional state is a vital survival strategy.

What it the main difference between controlling, regulating, and processing emotions?

I don't know, I'm not a psychologist. I just know that, from my own experience, there's a spectrum of coping mechanisms I've got when it comes to negative emotions and the ones that work the best tend to be more holistic, including physiological stuff like deep breathing, talking with a close friend, etc.

That isn't to say that some negative emotions are better ignored, but I have a pretty strong inclination to avoidance over confrontation, and it's hard to know if I'm ignoring something that isn't worth my time or unable to confront something that's going to fester.

I think it's ultimately all about efficacy. I've interacted with a lot of people who believe themselves to be totally regulated and are actually seething with resentment. Some of those people are in my family. I know I don't want to live like that. I'd like to think I've got a better model, but only time will tell.

I guess I just find the whole human emotional landscape to be extremely complex and nuanced, and most of the people who I meet who believe that all negative emotions can be regulated away are just pathologically unselfaware. If the alternative is navel gazing, I'll take it.

I'm a mature woman, older than most of my colleagues. And I do this. I have reached an age where I don't care if it sounds childish. If I'm grumpy, I say so. It has nothing to do (usually) with my colleagues, and I like them to know that if I seem snippy, it's me, not them. Sure we can all try to not be mean or rude or whatever, but everyone is human. My teammates are encouraged to also just be real people - if you're grumpy or tired or whatever, just say so.

I have to say that our team is amazing and all get on well together, so likely this vulnerability is easier on us because of that. The men on my team are just as quick to share their feelings too. It's really quite nice.

If you define being a kid as "the ability to express emotions and enjoy playing", then yes.

I feel like that's a terrible definition, though.

I think the important point that isn't yet well accepted in our culture is that maturity doesn't happen automatically with age. There are extremely competent, mature, and smart 14 year olds, and there are 29 year olds who haven't emotionally matured yet.

Education is slowly shifting towards "mastery learning" (instead of just taking a test and moving on, you keep practicing a thing until you get better). This is clearly the superior approach and how people learn things anyway (this is how people pick up skills on the job). We will hopefully see a similar shift in maturity, and accept that someone people get very far in life without necessary skills, remove the shame, and help people level up

Mastery learning works great for some subjects but not as well for subjects best learned in groups. If you put 14 year olds and 29 year olds together in the same class then that's likely to be problematic. We can't really state that any one pedagogical is "superior"; the data doesn't support that.

I think there's enough evidence that psychologically our personality becomes tied to a certain age, for some it might be the peak of your time in highschool, others college, and we stick with it despite the cognitive dissonance from aging. It wouldn't necessarily be a stagnation of maturity, but simply how we perceive ourselves as lessons learned in adulthood merge and compound with your idealized younger self.

Yes.. and no? There's a few distinguishing characteristics. One is the dating-mating process, which will resolve one way or another. Besides (or because of) that we have responsibilities that we take on and spend less time doing what we may otherwise like. I know that I consciously plan periods of time for hobbies, side-projects, or just 'wasting time' on video games etc--but it's not even my available free time (as there's no free energy/mental capacity at times).

There was (a TED talk or something) I watched that was basically said that if we treat adults as we do children, but at the same time treat them with respect, we'll all just learn to understand and work/play together better. (I think it had some sort of simple color stick-graphics depicting people and their motivations.)

Most adults die without achieving individuation

I should think so. I forget the source but I seem to have once heard (to my satisfaction) that all global diplomatic maneuvers can essentially be explained in terms of kids playing in a playground.

Conversely, all kids playing in a playground can be seen as rehearsals for later global diplomatic maneuvers.

Having kids certainly helps one to mature and grow into a new perspective

There's the old saying that everyone is, at most, a toddler inside. But the older ones have fancier filters (between their impulses and actions) and usually better language skills.

> It's possible to adopt “adults are just giant kids” as a lens through which to see other people. A work colleague is unreasonably angry at being left off an e-mail chain—but don’t playmates always hate being left out? An elderly relative refuses assistance—but doesn’t every child insist, “I can do it myself”? Seeing people this way can be condescending, but also gentle: it nods to the basic psychological needs that often drive our behavior.

It's interesting that we're more willing to be understanding of adult misbehavior if we start by infantilizing them. Yes, we're predisposed to expect behavior issues with kids without blame, and perhaps to attribute behavior to circumstantial causes (he's cranky because he's tired) rather than stable traits (he's a jerk). But ordinarily we also think of empathy as stemming from relating others mental states to our own experiences. Shouldn't we as adults have a better ability to empathize with adults as adults whose mental lives are more like our own, than by imagining them as kids?

If you want to know the answer, read "The Disappearance of Childhood" by Neal Postman.

"This body is built on the ruins of all the people I have ever been." - The Simplest Words by The Narcissist Cookbook.

Grownups aren't just big kids, but we're standing on the rubble of who we were back then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgUWdougUF8

I'd argue that adulthood was fundamentally altered by the time of the baby boomers. A sizable proportion of grownups became giant kids, not because adulthood has always been like that, but that a portion of baby boomers (and the generations that came afterwards) refused to implement what has historically been considered to be the hallmarks of what it meant to be an adult.

David Hoffman's "Making Sense of the Sixties"^1 does a great job at elucidating the implicit rules that existed:

>1. Respect authority figures: Children were taught to respect authority figures such as parents, teachers, and law enforcement officers.

>2. Practice good manners: Kids were expected to say "please" and "thank you," hold doors open for others, and wait their turn to speak.

>3. Dress appropriately: Children were expected to dress neatly and modestly, and to follow specific dress codes in certain situations such as church or school.

>4. Behave appropriately: Kids were expected to behave appropriately in public and avoid drawing attention to themselves, especially in formal settings such as weddings or funerals.

>5. Uphold traditional gender roles: Boys were expected to be tough, independent, and interested in sports, while girls were expected to be nurturing, feminine, and interested in domestic activities such as cooking and cleaning.

>6. Be polite to elders: Children were taught to address adults as "sir" or "ma'am" and to show respect for their elders.

>7. Value hard work: Children were taught the value of hard work and perseverance, and to take pride in a job well done.

>8. Respect privacy: Kids were taught to respect others' privacy and personal space, and to keep their own belongings and personal information private.

Regardless of how people think about the usefulness or malignity of this rule set, they're meant to create adults in the traditional sense. The falling away from them I don't think was so much of a personal or intentional choice, but an unconscious consequence from the destabilization that resulted from many factors but primarily the development of mass youth culture as distinct and orthogonal to traditional culture. "You can't trust anyone over 30" was really a canary in the coal mine for adulthood in retrospect.

---

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljihhFggHTI

In the words of Martin Gore, people are people.

...or maybe get the balance right.

No, young kids are sociopaths. they do not yet have well developed faculties of empathy. They will kick you in the head one second and ask for a sandwich the next.

and then insist they never asked for the sandwich, and then say they're hungry.

I've certainly experienced that, but I've also seen a fair bit of kindness from very young children as well.

For example, a few years ago, one of my nieces, when she was four, got a bunch of candy for some reason, and desperately tried to give everyone a few pieces. She wasn't asked to share, she just decided that she'd give everyone a bit of candy, and as far as I can tell it was purely just to be nice.

That said, kids are often sociopaths, I was definitely a little shit when I was a kid.

Have you seen most adults? I thought it was generally held that empathy is a learned facility. Not just the ability to feel empathy, but who and what you feel empathy towards.

no, it's hardware. this is why sociopaths exist, they lack it

I thought that was psychopath?

Regardless on terms, the thought for them was that they were unable to learn empathy. That does not mean that others get it automatically. You only need to look at how we treat animals to see examples of learning empathy.

I've been an engineering manager, I'm not sure that argument is as strong as you want it to be.

> They will kick you in the head one second and ask for a sandwich the next.

As long as this example is taken figuratively, I think it makes a better case for “yes” for many/most people.

I pretty regularly see people shit on others and then expect favors —especially in work contexts, but also in social contexts.

I mean it literally. 3 year olds literally do not have the brain development required for empathy and will literally kick you in the head one moment and ask you for a sandwich the next

Sounds like a lot of the adults in my world lol, although there is more subtlety in the ways that they will kick you in the head and ask for a sandwich.

move somewhere else

Adults do comparable things to each other all the time.

I think many (probably most) adults miss the life experiences needed to really grow up, become self aware, open approach to learn, etc.

I do that as an adult.

Have you thought about not doing that?

I am certainly not an expert in this area so this is just observational anecdotes but I suspect environment and parental input is a big factor. When I was in California in bigger cities I would agree with what you said for the vast majority of kids/teens I have interacted with. When I moved to Wyoming in a very rural area my opinion changed significantly. The kids for the most part that were born and raised here have empathy and are very polite especially to adults. Just as one example a large group of teens blocked each other from ordering from the deli and made me go in front of them. I had never seen anything like that before and that was just one example, there are many more.

3 year olds literally do not have the brain development for it

My experience is the opposite - kids have a natural sense of fairness, which is of course heavily bent by self interest. Assuming you yourself are not transparently full of sh_t, you can usually get them to appreciate your position if you can explain it to them on their level.

Adults, having the advantage of decades to cultivate our twisted bonsai tree neuroses, can be literally impossible.

Some of this can last into adulthood—a common problem for small business owners and contractors is charging too little, because they know their costs and time and what a fair price seems like it should be.

They have to have that innate child’s sense of fairness trained out of them. The notion that “what the market will bear” is fair rather than (often) screwing people over is something that has to be taught, more often than not, from what I’ve observed.

it's just biological fact, it takes time for the brain to build the areas of empathy

Adults behave this way all the time.

Adults commit assault all the time? I've never had anyone kick me in the head.

No, they generally outsource inflicting suffering to a third party.

One of my inlaws, for instance, sees no issue in themselves using a bathroom inappropriate for their gender, and also in having trans people imprisoned for doing the same.

Many people feel that rules do not bind them, but are a great weapon for beating other people with. It's a core pillar of their political philosophy.

A sociopath might hurt some one and not care. A child(well, until a certain age) hasn't made the connection that flinging their leg around and hitting someone can hurt them and thats bad.

So, it's different. It would probably be more correct to say children are more akin to mentally retarded adults than sociopaths.

There's something richly ironic about calling your former self a sociopath. It's like a line you'd hear in a Mel Brooks movie.

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