Why Grow Up?

This may be the most challenging period of your life. For the first time, your own choices take center stage.You bear immense pressure to make the right decisions: this major, this job, this relationship-all will shape your future destiny. Only a decade later will you realize that no mistake is irreparable.Within the tradition of Enlightenment thought, renowned philosopher Susan Neiman explores growth and responsibility, conformity and individual freedom. She asks whether philosophy can help us find a state of maturity that transcends mere submission and compromise. She examines how our understanding of the world-both as it is and as it should be-is shaped, deepened, or obstructed by diverse experiences.Growth itself is a grand ideal-one that is difficult to fully achieve but absolutely worth striving for. Philosophy will neither comfort you nor lessen your pain; for reality is unreasonable, and reason's task is to ensure we never forget this. It demands we recognize the gap between what is and what ought to be. Maintaining a long-term yet fragile equilibrium-observing the world as it should be while confronting it as it is-requires us to face the reality that we will never attain the world we desire, while refusing to abandon the world we envision in our hearts.