The All-Pretend World of Adulthood

I was thinking about something I heard about a year ago about the nature of maturity. We aren't really all that mature, but we think we are when we emulate people we percive to be mature. So this whole Adulthood and age of maturity thing is a self-referencing system that twists and turns upon itsself. There doesn't seem to be a definite base, it's just that we know somebody that seems to have everything together on a financial, mental, and social level and we decide that they must be a mature adult. Little may we know that this same person is going down to Tunica (for those who don't know about Tunica, it's a really poor county in Mississippi that has gotten a leg up from the riverboat gambling industry) every weekend and completely blows his paycheck. His finances are in complete shambles as a result and he's had to put a mortgage on his house 5 times already to get himself out of gambling debt. These are things you'd never suspect about an upstanding citizen, but you may expect from a bum on the street. What if that bum has had a series of bad luck deals in which he was screwed out of every penny to his name? I know, it's unlikely, but then again, so is Mr. Perfect's situation.

I don't think I could live in a perfect world. I'm not a pessimist (quite the opposite, actually), but I don't know if I could live in a world where there wasn't a problem to solve or a puzzle to figure out. I think that inquisitive nature of humanity is what keeps us striving to find out more about our world and ourselves. I also think that's why a lot of scientists and philosophers have a problem with extreme fundementalist religions. In these strictly absolute contexts all of the problems have been solved, so all you have to do is look in a rule book for an answer and then apply the answer to the given situation. That doesn't sell very well with a nuclear physiscist who's trying to understand the nature of the universe. Then again, on the opposite end of the spectrum, it doesn't satisfy the scientist to say the universe simply started with the Big Bang. People have been postulating and philosophising about this for quite sometime, often with very messy and bloody results. Ironic, isn't it, that we have to kill eachother to understand the nature of our creation.

The wheel keeps turning...