Adults are Obsolete Children
blog.headlinr.com
blog.headlinr.com
When I was a (young) child, "adult" was just a stand-in for "those people who ran the world". Now I realize that we're all big children, and it's really just glue and momentum that keeps the world turning.
There are plenty of dull poets out there too that are uninspired and passionless.
"Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician," he responded.
This quote from the article is just plain insulting and ignorant, “Then there are the others. They have no passion and have deep love for money. The most common example of this is a lawyer or banker.”
There are a multitude of lawyers that are passionate about many things and offer their services pro bono to support their cause, whatever it may be.
Bankers can advise people to help them prepare for retirement, create budgets, make sure they are not over paying on taxes, grow the economy and create jobs by lending to early stage businesses started by people that don’t already have a silver spoon in their mouth.
At the end of the day people are just people. Some are good, some are bad; I would like to believe more good than bad. Some are passionate, some are not; if they are without passion we can not change them.
Why?
I feel like "maturity" is such a nebulous thing. Like "professionalism", it seems to function as a proxy for anything that serves the point that the user is trying to make.
Shallow.
In fact, being rich is the single best way to help people.
Being rich expands your reach as an individual. It allows you to fund initiatives that revitalize entire communities: building homes, providing medicine, contributing to science, technology, arts and culture. Bill Gates has fundamentally changed more people's lives than a million middle-class volunteers combined.
If your goal is to help people on a large scale and in a concrete, measurable way, getting rich should be one of your first priorities in life.
Having empathy is key. Being rich alone doesn't help anyone.
In the capitalist state that we live in perhaps you are right, but if there wasn't such an economic divide in the world, that may not stick. In order to get rich in the capitalist state you essentially have to displace capital from others, who could be the very people that you end up helping in the end.
But, then again, the fact that we live in a world that has rich people (wealth disparity) is a fundamental part of why so many people need the help those rich people are often better able to provide in the first place. In that light, the solution is, in fact, a consequence of the problem it's supposed to be solving.
Or... you could also get a job at a non-profit / NGO / etc. Or you could work on trying to improve government programs so that the social safety net is more efficient and more effective.
Getting rich and doing philanthropy is certainly one way to raise money, but there are other ways to improve the world that don't involve immense personal gain as a first step.
Data?
I once read that Americans over-estimate children and under-estimate age (and expertise in general). This shows so well.
Can children enjoy food? Music? Play music properly? Pursuit passions? Spending days glued to a book? Of course, make it a series of books. Obviously, I just listed the obvious activities. Can children feel the full depth of betrayal? Full happiness of unexpected return? Full hopelessness in face of impossible? Full excitement when attaining things once thought impossible?
Children are stupid, shallow, short-sighted, undeveloped. They know nothing save the most primitive urges. They do nothing save screaming for help. They are, in short, very young humans who need growth. They are neither angels nor saints, but CHILDREN.
Wake up, please, from your disrespect and overly-spoiling of children.
I don't like the "my little Timmy is a one-of-a-kind snowflake genius!" trend either, but that idea is easily less harmful than the idea that children are mindless cattle driven purely by their id. If you treat children like animals, using only external motivation to guide them, don't be surprised when they act like them. If you actually talk to kids and try to get at their real interests and motivations, I bet you'd be surprised at what you find.
You could say this about almost any profession. There are bankers who want to give people a chance to succeed, and there are inventors and artists driven solely by profit. To say whether or not a person can "contribute to better the condition of humanity" on the basis of their job is very short-sighted. If the only job someone can get is a dull, 9-5 office job, does that suddenly make them an insignificant person incapable of making a difference?
But there's something more than a little puerile in a society that only values that particular sense of wonder. A five year old might indeed be more valuable than me today but I suspect that come because he's far more easily directed by the candy and the fluffy bunnies.
On my Facebook feed, the cleverest quips generally come from those old and jaundiced enough to have an ample supply of double entendre and know how to use them. You can see lots of playfulness from the less-than-spritely and smooth-skinned then.
Hard work and iteration is what led to the creation you speak of: the Automobile, Electricity, Artificial Light.
Children's creativity is, for the most part, aimless and inconsistent. None of the men you mention were by any stretch of the imagination, childlike, though Edison could have been following "the light."
Also, including Ford in your theory, for example, someone who used thugs to break unions with baseball bats, also does not speak to lightness.
Being childlike is great if you aren't interested in making money and want to spend your life giving your ideas away, but you'll need a lawyer if you want to make and keep the money from work you've done to make your ideas a reality.
A very nice childhood so many of us have had, but certainly not the reality for a large chunk of children who grow up hearing exactly the opposite.
General statements like this point out to me how priviledged many of our childhoods have been.
You need both. Wonder with no experience = Axe Cop. Experience with no wonder = Enron, etc.
That's what I used to think, but it's wrong.
> Then there are the others. They have no passion and have deep love for money. The most common example of this is a lawyer or banker. They craft nothing. They care not about who they offer their service to but instead care about how much money they will make. Their light is no where to be found.
This part, however, is very much true.
Second, creative "light" vs. fear is a false dichotomy.
Game of Thrones quote time:
Bran: Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?
Ned Stark: That is the only time a man can be brave.
I felt like this was worth highlighting.
Archie Gates: You're scared, right?
Conrad Vig: Maybe.
Archie Gates: The way it works is, you do the thing you're scared shitless of,
and you get the courage AFTER you do it, not before you do it.
Conrad Vig: That's a dumbass way to work. It should be the other way around.
Archie Gates: I know. That's the way it works.