Heirs to the Wreckage

I’ve been thinking a lot about the phenomenon of childhood recently. I was comfortable in many respects shedding the skin of a child, or at least trying to. I even went so far as to inflate my intellectual side to brush aside the parts of me that are still very much juvenile and inexperienced with the world. A concentrated effort, a personal PR campaign with those at home, to say: look at the new Lucas, look at how he has matured. Once again, the deliberateness of the effort reveals the truth via negation: it is not so much that I desire to be seen as intelligent, but rather that my ignorance makes me insecure, it reminds me that I am still intertwined with coming-of-age. Childhood from an adult perspective is strange. Every so often I’ve asked somebody my own age whether they still view themselves as a natural evolution of their juvenile self, or if they renounced that persona. Much in the vein of Jon Snow, who is told to “kill the boy…kill the boy and let the man be born” by Maester Aemon, which Jon promptly does through his experiences with the Wildlings in A Storm of Swords. 

My childhood still remains with me in many ways. Songs from my past continue to visit me indiscriminately: a set of Spanish nativity songs, alt rock, beautiful flamenco from god knows which musician. When you’re a kid you’re just a passenger unable to know context, and I’ve invested lots of time poring over the internet for references to the fragments of my memories. I recently tracked down a classical music piece that I’ve had playing in my head for 15 years, I unmasked it as Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3 in G-Major, K. 216: I. Allegro. With a name like that, finding it was akin to sifting through sand. Classical Music insists on a certain rigid organization, and paradoxically this makes it much harder to track a certain piece down. But it’s nice when you stumble across something like that, something that fixes a harmony between you and your past, your history, reminding you that despite all the turbulence of life and the change in the world, there is still something unchangeable and unique to you at the center of time’s passage. When I listen to this piece, I don’t experience a mere nostalgia: I am reminded by all the memories of myself that I still carry with me, the memories of me that still I exist in unity with. I am reminded that I am still intertwined with coming-of-age and childhood, except this time I welcome that sensation. Music is perhaps the place where I have felt most myself, not alienated from my past, but unified with it.

I’ve long resisted the urge to consider adulthood a draining of childhood fancies, or to cede all childlike elements of myself to adult life. Even though I’m still relatively young, such an attitude makes me gaze across the weathered temporality of what would be the rest of my life, and realize death would approach far quicker than I expect as time’s passage accelerates. But that is the meticulous planning-culture of our society, everything is prophylactic, everything is fixated on the one zero point that is annihilation. All to keep the future at bay, astronomical insurance premiums for the approaching calamity that looms large. Everybody mellows out to be sure, it’s a necessary part of life, but so are childlike elements such as play. Play is absolutely essential to life- Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens makes this clear. Play is a spontaneous and naturally occurring element in animals and humans, occurring without instruction and without prediction. Crucially, play also provides social order, for players voluntarily enter contract with a set of rules; and if the behavior of animals is any indication those rules may not even need to be formally specified. It is something rejected by the blue-collar adult world, even though a stakeholder negotiation is as much of a game (in its own way) as a cultural dance. For a class titled Games and Culture, our classwork was to play Catan, but critically examine the player dynamics in our group. A set of rules to determine our actions, light environmental storytelling to give form to our world, and I watched as a mini society was formed through play. Crucially, I observed that I bonded far more with my peers as a Catan player than I would as a normal student. 

Imagine if we sponsored a society that was more encouraging of play in adult lives. Imagine if we quite literally had public parks with adult playgrounds. One Gym Membership in the US costs around $60 per month, and typically it is not only the cost that turns people off to the gym but the very public scrutiny we place on the concept of exercise. Adult playgrounds, maintained by a percentage of our tax dollars, would accomplish most fitness goals of the average gym member at a fraction of the mental effort. At least, that is my personal theory, and I admit it does sound a little ridiculous: a herd of salespeople with disheveled collars, untucked shirts, discarded handbags, whooping and monkeying about on slides and whatnot. The gym is its own kind of game, where the score is marked by your PR (personal record)- or the maximum weight you can lift. The point I’m trying to make is that there is much value in our childlike elements, many of which should not be discarded for the mores of adulthood. Many recur again and again in our adult lives even if we distance ourselves from them, play most of all. The reason Game Theory is considered so accredited is the perpetual presence of play in our lives. 

In conversation with one of my Ringle Students, I had to coax out of them that they enjoy gaming, and we discussed the Switch 2 and the commercial sins of Nintendo. I took some time trying to signal to them that, yes, despite the professional nature of our meeting it would be appropriate to discuss games, and yes we could do so while mixing passion and sophistication. Obviously there are limits, parents of the emerging Gen Alpha are right to police their children’s overuse of technology, and no game should wield so much power over a person’s behavior that it becomes a fetish- or an escape from other facets of life. But even so, why shame yourself over enjoying the pleasure of gaming? As I have tried to emphasize over and over again it is in fact natural and even necessary.

One Piece is not my favorite manga, but it’s certainly up there, for a reason that Oda summarized quite well when asked why his manga has achieved such titanic success. He said, “Entering society often means losing freedom. Luffy has a child’s heart, so he does whatever he wants. That aspect is probably what adults already toiling in society, and children about to enter society, find so appealing.” Indeed, what makes Luffy so attractive as a character are his themes of freedom and pursuing his own desires as a pirate. The central tension is made explicitly political by the overarching presence of the authoritarian World Government, for whom Luffy embodies everything that they seek to suppress (the label pirate is morally ambiguous, and merely refers to anyone in defiance of the World Government). Granted, he’s helped by his supernatural abilities and his status of being a main character in a manga; but isn’t the resonance of this theme illustrated by the, not one, but 5 different political movements in 5 different countries all flying the One Piece flag? Isn’t the political potential of holding onto one’s childhood, not capitulating to society and its rejection of ones dreams, proudly and promisingly displayed here? My point is not that we should all remain children and reject all notion of adulthood, but perhaps becoming a good adult means preserving and honoring the child within.