Stuck In Neverland
We should leave our 'inner child' where it rightly belongs
Nowadays, we are bombarded with content urging us to reconnect with our ‘inner child’; breathless, soppy appeals to a long-forgotten age of innocence. Influencers and therapists alike encourage us to take back that charming spirit of adventure, honouring our innermost ‘needs’ and ‘wants’. Splattering ourselves in face paint and chomping down Haribos, we will crawl our way to Enlightenment.
Go ahead, call me a cynic! This delusional rhetoric is nothing more than meaningless therapy-talk; a cheap corruption of psychoanalysis, packaged for the age of Depop and UberEats. Through the rhetoric of self-care, genuine introspection has divulged into a soup of worthless platitudes. As Paglia argues, ‘Freud’s severe, conflict-based system has lost popularity to a casual, sentimental style of user-friendly psychological counselling that [is] typically Protestant’. Any pound-shop shrink will tell you that the so-called inner child is an animal narcissist — an amoral bundle of urges yet to be socialised into good behaviour. Whilst psychologists correctly stress this period’s significance, they understood that we should learn from it rather than revert to it.
Perhaps, it wouldn’t matter if this quasi-Victorian cult of the child was just psychobabble, confined to the liminal space of a therapist’s chaise longue. However, it is a symptom of the ongoing infantilization of the public square. Our society is regressing in the mode of Benjamin Button, crumbling into an embarrassing mush of tweenish fixation. One need only observe the proliferation of horrendous Disney-themed weddings to see what I’m driving at. Rather than encouraging us to flourish, modern culture promotes a swampy regression, legitimising a cowering return to the amniotic sac. Younger generations — millennials in particular — are afflicted by terminal immaturity. Like Peter Pan, they stagnate in a tedious adolescence never renouncing their youthful habits. We don’t need to embrace our inner children; we need to bid them farewell.
If this all sounds rather far-fetched, consider the hysterical reaction to Miriam Margolyes's recent comments regarding the Wizarding World. Reflecting on the prevalence of adult ‘Potterheads’, she wittily quipped “If your balls have dropped, then it’s time to forget about it. You know, go on to other things.” Miriam, herself a jolly testament to the fact that ageing need not correlate with self-seriousness, is obviously correct. There is something rather tragic about the spectacle of the thirty-something consultant who is also, inexplicably, a ‘Slytherin’. Despite their obvious truth, her remarks were met with outrage. Margolyes was branded ‘the worst kind of bully’, incapable of allowing people to enjoy themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, these books and films are wonderful, opening up a vast sandbox of playful imagination. However, they are explicitly tailored towards younger audiences. Children’s entertainment, whether it be books or films, should mark the first stage of a journey into the artistic wilderness. At their best, these inspiring stories form solid foundations for a lifetime of reflection. Whilst many of them are intensely moving, they are just the beginning. Margolyes’s tough-love approach is rooted in compassion: she wants these superfans to explore more rewarding genres.
Proponents of the inner child approach ask us to ‘be creative’ — as if the capacity to create magically evaporates on one’s eighteenth birthday. However, their compulsion to revisit safe and simple ground stifles personal growth like thick moss. It's all-teenage scribbles and fandoms. This consecration of the commonplace is comparable to the trope of the provincial British tourist in Paris. After one passable hotel meal, he camps out there every night, fearing the ominous spectacle of snails and foie gras. For all our generation’s supposed open-mindedness, our fixation on the past is dull and conservative.
This suffocating sacralisation of the simple precipitates a tiresome (and quintessentially American) attack on high culture. These days, genuine artistic engagement generates a sort of derisive snort — an inverted snobbery where interest in ‘good’ art is dismissed as an affected larp. Under the mask of galaxy-brain irony, shameful hang-ups are paraded around as fashionable status symbols. This is nothing more than a Spartan jab at the airy Athenian; a primal impulse to tear down the towering and unfamiliar. In this regard, the so-called Film Bros attract a lot of unfair criticism. Despite their inability to distinguish between the ‘most’ acting and the ‘best’ acting, their interest in media is laudable. Contrary to TikTok, it's perfectly normal for an adult not to cite Shrek 2 as their favourite film.
Of course, this goes deeper than hobbies. Our generation’s day-to-day habits are becoming more and more dysfunctional, characterised by doom-scrolling, burn-out, and girl dinners. Whilst those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, the ongoing drop-off in culinary skills is worrying. These regular manifestations of collective incompetence serve as alarming illuminations of generational rot, spelling trouble for the future. How will we run the electrical grid if we can’t even manage our own households?
From Whovians to sodden pesto pasta, ‘it’s the economy stupid’. This mysterious blob of invisible money goes a long way in explaining shared neuroses. Take Millennials — the first generation to be stunted by this perpetual juvenility. Whilst they are easy to mock, their journey to maturity was tough — punctured by a financial crisis that radically diminished their life prospects. For this cohort, the traditional markers of maturity became rapidly more expensive, attested to by eye-watering house prices and unfathomable childcare costs. Perhaps, there really is a grain of truth captured in that stomach-churning verb ‘adulting’.
In such a climate, the grasping appeal to simpler times is understandable. As older generations will tell you, rumination becomes a critical life raft in a swirling tide of change. Millennials shocked themselves on the electric wire of modernity, scurrying back into the safety of childhood. As they increasingly dominate our cultural spaces, we are lambasted with charmless reboots of their childhood fixations. Note the uninspired Mean Girls Musical or the upcoming Harry Potter TV Series. These people’s only cultural references are their old hobbies. With a few notable exceptions, this emerging cabal of coddled creatives endlessly reheat just-gone classics, ruining their special allure.
Let me be clear, I am not attempting to discredit the value of the past. Quite the opposite. I keenly understand the importance of nostalgia. To this day, the sugar-smoke smell of greasy doughnuts sends me reeling back to long summer evenings spent splashing about on Brighton Beach. Similarly, chance encounters with quirky personalities conjure up images of long-forgotten Roald Dahl characters. I relish these heartening surprises. However, they are only possible with perspective. When we remember, we look back into a time that no longer exists — subtly reinventing it in the process. These rare moments of wistful contemplation are impossible if one stays forever in springtime, clinging onto a fading youth like Blanche Du Bois.
During tough times, re-watching a much-loved childhood film is understandable. Endlessly picking it apart, however, is unhealthy. I for one have no interest in contemplating Dumbledore’s sexuality. Although the impulse to gravitate to the familiar is natural, it is an indulgence that must be resisted. In doing so, we butcher special memories in the bloody abattoir of adult perspective. Learning from the mistakes of millennials, our generation must be bolder, brazenly embracing new frontiers of knowledge. After all, an obsession with the past gets tiring pretty quickly. As the tenderhearted Tony Soprano reminds us, “Remember when is the lowest form of conversation.”
Illustration by: Lauren McAndrew