You're allowed to grow out of stuff. Lots of stuff. More stuff than the general "culture" and its coven of culture-machines can bear to admit. It's a simple reality that appears to be, for so many people and in so many respects, completely veiled or terrifying to contemplate.
You're allowed to continue maturing and changing. It is not a sign that "you just don't get it" or you're no longer "cutting edge" when things that really wowed you at 25 are wearisomely "bubble gum" to you at 50 or 60. It's called growing up.
Children play with building blocks at three years of age and it's completely appropriate. For some unfathomable reason (that's sarcasm there) they leave the blocks behind at some point between three and, say, twelve.
When was the last time you said to a twelve-year-old: "You've really grown stale and fuddy-duddy. Look at your little brother there with his blocks, having such a great time. You used to be like that but somewhere you lost touch. See how innovative he's being--oh, look, did you see that, who'd ever have dreamed of putting blocks together like that? But you just sit there in judgment on him, as if you think you're better or have more important things to do. The building blocks are where it's happening, it's what all the three-year-olds are into, and if you're not into it how can you possibly relate to them?"
Nobody says anything that idiotic to a twelve-year-old.
(For one thing, if all the twelve-year-old did was sit and play building blocks with his little brother all day, and let's throw the parents into the mix, too, spending all day doing the same, where would the three-year-old get the slightest notion from that life was ever going to be about more than that?)
The mysterious phenomenon is how, between the lines yet quite blaringly all the same, society seems to scream at us precisely the idiocies we'd never dream saying to a twelve-year-old. The subliminal scream is so deafening that most people think it's really their own brains talking to them. And so the Building-Block Culture reigns supreme.
And, as ever, the mongerers of that stuntedness rake in the cash. Which is always what it's really about. That's one thing that never gets younger or older: "the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil."
Yes, the subversive little secret is, you're allowed to keep growing up and growing out of things, and to love it. Embrace it and apologize to nobody for it. If you're the twelve-year-old, don't diss the three-year-old for his blocks, but don't for a moment tolerate being dissed for being twelve, either. It's no crime to grow out of building blocks. It's called being alive.
