Homo ludens is the characterization of a human as the one who plays, a “playing man” – meaning we are at our most human self when we are freely at play. This state is necessary to recharge, restart and be able to rearrange ourselves without the heavy burdens of worry, anxiety or expectation, released from which even for just a few moments we get a chance to be creative again. After all, creativity is the mind playing freely, manipulating the known to produce the unknown by what the mind has learnt and conceptualized so far, going to the farthest reaches of what is possible to imagine – which is in fact infinite. This si why you love playing with your kids or a dog. There is no worry there, it’s just pure being and adjacent to flow states where time and space collapse on themselves and you’re fully immersed. Playing well into old age is good, useful and necessary, but neotenization by the culture is not.

Neoteny means retaining juvenile features well into adulthood. Why would a (popular/mainstream/generic/common) culture do such a thing to its members on purpose? Because children are naive, they are easily entertained and distractible, they crave guidance and to be watched over, believing somehow there is “an adult” who knows better as they are running to hide behind their care givers when the world becomes too much. If you systematically through generations as a culture treat the adult members of said culture as if they were children, they will start to believe it and adopt childlike behaviours. A long repeated lie becomes the truth due to being the only thing the one being lied to is exposed, losing all capacity to even imagine a different state of affairs in the process.

You will be infantilized by how you are treated – carrying the rights of adults yet reluctant or unable to take the personal responsibility that comes with it. If you treat your grownups as children you’ll make the laws governing their lives so complicated and convince them they can’t figure it out by themselves so it’s better to just let go of the wheel and let the “grownups” of institutions and the government handle it for them, while “the children”are comfortably entertained by some silliness with no value or consequence in the real world issues. You make them malleable and susceptible, offer them shiny glittery things to occupy them while the “grownups” do their work and enter a sort of a helicopter parenting in which every single part of your culture’s “children “is meticulously monitored and institutionalized. No real matters are discussed in any arena that has a true effect and if they are informed they are passively informed of the actions through the couch impotence channels . They are included in everything preceding the actions themselves in a sort of pro forma way, as a kid would get a trophy for participating in a game, commended for just merely showing up. Neotenous features in a woman become the most prevalent commodity while the wisdom of old age is surgically removed from what is served, not to scare the “child” you’ve installed in front of your preprocessed and regurgitated flow of “information” If you show them they are mortal and that all things get old, they might start thinking about the future and making decisions… but you can always stay (or at least look – which is close enough) 30 with this new Q10 cream. You give them reality shows hoarding people with nothing to say in a remote house and turning on the cameras 24/7 to take their mind of the world you’ve just scared them with by the collage of “news” regularly bringing chaos, destruction, crime, falling governments and horrors around them. Now you offer them health/home/car insurance, because “bad things happen in the real world”. Watch this sitcom coming up next… it’ll make you feel better after the news.

When the next commercial begins close your eyes – don’t watch, just listen to the tone. You are being addressed as child needing entertainment. Depending on the target group you are addressed in a dog/baby voice (because you’re already passive and bored and may become cranky and have a temper tantrum that makes you, God forbid, change the channel if you’re not entertained soon), sexy half whisper (because Schweppes is the most sexy drink ever invented, transferring its magnetism to you if you drink it) or with a calm guidance of a know-it-all professional (here to first scare you by inventing a problem you don’t have and then offering the solution in this bottle). The TV program, the dialogues, themes, language and concept complexity is made for an average preteen, but if it is delivered by a guy in a suit you can peddle it to grownups. Grown women are incentivized to dress, act and speak as high school girls exiled out of core womanhood, they are fed tutorial after tutorial how to look and act more neotenous while men are held in perpetual purgatory of boyhood incentivized into basic competition impulses convinced that being a man means following sports, speaking loudly and making enough money so that they can achieve the alfa status and get a neotenous wife.

The mainstream culture of the West is deeply infantilizing, naive and designed to serve the “average” which is continuously being lowered. Average is not necessarily a bad thing, it may mean unified quality and reliability, but it can mean emptiness and meaninglessness for all who are not average – which is pretty much everyone pretending to be to fit in. At some point a tacit consensus was made where this is acceptable and, although the majority feels the mainstream culture is broken, it persists because we’re inclined towards the simple, easy and low due to the brain’s prime directive not to waste energy and to only keep you alive. Breaking through the bubble is energetically and emotionally consuming, running against the grain will strain you as the brain rearranges itself through plasticity and depletes its reserves through the inevitable emergence of cognitive dissonances while you’re learning something new, exploring or unlearning and relearning. It will disengage you from the average and this can be lonely work, but to advance from the imposed cultural neotenization, and respect yourself as an adult within the society treating you as a child to be entertained and manipulated, it is necessary.

Turn of the TV, stop following empty people doing empty thing to entertain you and start searching for meaning. Meaning is the only thing worth taking responsibility for, and if you feel no responsibility there is no effort, and without effort the chance you’ve been given here is void. All bubbles are breakable, and so is this one. The world only changes when you change – there is no other way.