Passivity

After years of conformity, regimentation and passivity the child becomes an adult, at least in body. If the term 'adult' means an autonomous responsible being, then few modern people reach adulthood.
Childhood is an age in which we allow the person to be self indulgent, though in autonomous societies the child soon learns to accept certain responsibilities.
Only in modern totalitarian societies are the children given an anti-education, and experience an anti-childhood.
Instead of being allowed to roam and explore they are cooped up and supervised. Their training is in passivity and obedience.
So when the children reach maturity they are not expected to step out into the world of work and responsibility, they are not expected to learn independence, nor to seek a mate and set up their own home.
Instead they are expected to stay at school, on and on, acquiring ever more debt till eventually they take their place in the service economy with a low paid, low grade job.
Somehow, the adults know that this is not how things should be.
Deep inside they know that there is a world outside the battery cage.
In their hearts they want love, family, children, as people have ever done.
But now they are pointed back to themselves. They are to blame, they are told.
Perhaps the fault lies in their body shape.
Perhaps it is because they are bipolar, depressed or something like that.
Through the years of waiting and inertia in school, the regimentation and repetitiveness of the hierarchical workplace, they have forgotten how to be pro active.
So they grab a beer, pop a pill, smoke some dope, and switch on the screen which tells them that they live in the best of all possible worlds, a Democracy, and that if they are not shiny happy people, then it must be their fault, that they must not sit, eat, drink, smoke, poke.
It is they who are sick, they are told, not the world they live in, the world of the self.
Above us only sky, within us only hell.