Grief, growth, universal love
I've been suffering from grief. Here are some thoughts on the matter.
When, as adults, we curse our fate, this has the same basic format as being sad and angry when we’re children.
We expect things to go our way, and believe they ought to. We cry out at the heavens when we suffer a serious loss. We believe that the world owes us certain material arrangements, and that it is unfair when it denies us these things. This extends not only to the trivial annoyances of everyday life, but also to our deepest desires, such as our desire to live, our attachment to loved ones, the desire for social and economic success, our aversion to ageing and decay, and so on.
Not only does our bewailing such things merely resemble a child crying, it really is the same essential phenomenon. When I say this also applies to our attachment to loved ones, this probably comes across as ruthless and insensitive at first, but I will morally clarify this later in the essay. In fact, I will show that love is actually enhanced under the correct view of things.
For now, I just want to highlight the essential continuity between maturing out of childhood and the pursuit of wisdom in general. It is the same exact blueprint, even late in life. Adults generally get complacent about their own maturation and intellectual growth, and so their journey hits at a plateau at some point. They reach a kind of social equilibrium—a democratic consensus—regarding how far one can be expected go on this journey.