Being "baby" is not anti-capitalist
Political movements require responsible agents who can handle tough challenges.
Everyone is in need of protection. Everyone is soft, everyone is fragile. "Baby", even. In a world that has historically told us to suck it up, buttercup, pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, that only the strong survive and that those who are left in the dust simply deserve what they get for being inferior specimen, there is now a cultural turn towards encouraging the more vulnerable and delicate qualities inherent to each and every one of us. While it is not necessarily bad to recognise and accept that nobody can or should be on the grind at all times, that caring human connection and mutual consideration have a positive effect on our well-being, and that occasional rest in the form of "rotting" as the cool kids now refer to it is necessary to recharge rather than an expression of deplorable laziness, it does have its perils when the entire concept of adulthood is rejected in favour of taking on the identity of a child.
As young people are embracing their eternal adolescence, their environment is adapting to this new disposition in a self-perpetuating feedback loop. It’s a chicken-vs-egg challenge to pinpoint what came first and why, but it is without question that infantilisation is all around us in ways that it hasn’t been, let’s say, 10 years ago. Offices have slides and ball pits and Lego workshops. We have educational think-pieces and mandatory inclusion seminars spoon-feeding us specific instructions on how to talk and not talk to various groups of people in order to protect their micro-sensibilities, sensitivity readers and content warnings preventing us from being faced with any sort of emotional discomfort, because we are smol beans who should not ever have to feel anxious or upset.
It makes sense that when traditional markers of adulthood become unattainable to more and more people, there would be a growing desire to let go of having to “grow up” entirely, and with many rational reasons to be pessimistic about the future, a growing need to simply hide in a cocoon forever. If I cannot meet the expectations people have of what an adult should be, then why not remain a child? Traditional markers of adulthood include financial security, being a homeowner or at least not living with flatmates until way into one's 30s, and having a family. Some of these are no longer as desired as they used to be, but more than anything, they're increasingly unaffordable to those who did originally see them as part of their future.
“As the wide range of ‘I’m Baby’ memes suggest, deep down, we’re just dumb-dumb babies, flailing. Or, if we aren’t truly as hopeless as we want to believe, we would like to be: simply because being treated like a baby rules. Babies have no jobs, no taxes, no responsibilities. They are cuddled, and spoon-fed, and get to watch TV all day. They don’t even have to get dressed! They get endless, unconditional love and attention at no cost! Sounds pretty good, given that our generation is both extremely online, extremely depressed, and extremely priced out of all the things boomers and Gen X enjoyed before us like stable income, cultural mobility, and housing.” (1)
So what is wrong with grown humans wanting to retreat into unchallenging, comfortable cuddle spaces in which nobody ever has to do something hard or talk about things that make them feel uneasy? Isn't embracing "being baby" over "being Sigma" subversive and radical in our dark age of capitalism? Isn’t resisting adult responsibilities revolutionary in an economy that demands of us to go above and beyond at all times just to fund our employer’s second yacht?
As much as I will admit that some aspects of smol bean culture make me personally cringe a little, it isn't an aesthetic sensibility that is being triggered in me when I think about infantilisation culture and how it changes the way we perceive and interact with the world. There is much to be said about its potential adverse effects on independent thought, declining self-confidence in the face of a society that teaches us that we cannot cope with the challenges inherent to everyday life and need to be protected at all costs, and increasing anxiety resulting from the perspective that every moment is rife with opportunities for trauma, but what I want to focus on today is the death of the subject that is brought on by the death of the (young) adult, and the way this can prevent the political change we want and need.
Adults are children, and children aren't people
Arguably the biggest problem with cultural infantilisation is that adults are agents, and in our current society, children are not. Personally, I consider our treatment of children a problem of its own - small humans are much more intelligent and capable than we give them credit for and could absolutely do with more responsibility and less baby-talking and dumbing down of basic concepts and ideas. Children should be more commonly viewed through the lens of their slowly emerging adulthood instead of their chronological proximity to "baby". This is, however, not the most popular point of view these days, so we are for the purpose of this text working with the status quo assumption that children are kind of dumb, incredibly fragile, and need to be shown where to go and what to do at all times.
Similarly to children, older teenagers and young adults are being taught that in order to avoid the very real avalanches of risk and harm waiting for them at every turn, they must stride carefully, never too far from the safe house, and report anything that causes discomfort to an authority, so that the DEI department can help them punish the offenders of microaggressions, the university can take a book with a disturbing passage off the reading list, and your boss can prescribe five minutes in the patchouli-scented office meditation booth.
By allowing ourselves to be babied, we are making ourselves into non-agents in yet another expression of doomerism and depressive hedonia. What does a baby do? From an adult's point of view, at least, babies are entirely passive. They are fed and washed by others, or sleeping, or being fascinated by the mobile hanging over their little beds, or laughing at their sibling making odd faces, or screaming to have others serve their needs. In that sense, they are objects. And if we are baby, we, too, are objects. We are giving up and letting the world happen to us. It should be fairly apparent why being an object is the opposite of aspirational.
Objects can be manipulated, placed wherever the subject needs them to be, shaped and reconstructed according to the subject's needs. Whenever there is an object, there is a subject that can act upon it, so a call for being baby necessarily includes the call for a parent. And who the subjects are is pretty clear - it's everyone who isn't baby. The depressive hedonia of self-infantilisation is the majority of people (the working class) submitting to the system and making itself smaller, tiny even, when it should be recognising its size and its potential power. Would a person in political office ever tweet, or even think, that they are "baby"? Is your landlord "baby"? Is your employer "baby"? Never in their capital-owning lives would they frame themselves in that way. By viewing themselves as "baby", people resign to their own lack of influence, which allows capitalists and institutions of power to swoop in and take responsibility, with much of the authority that real parents have over their children.
We can see our objectivity playing out in a number of ways. On the other side of self-proclaimed babies, young people regularly have roadblocks thrown their way for trying to exercise their adulthood, their subjectivity. Young protestors and politicians struggle to be taken seriously because in the eyes of boomer Brady "they don't know anything about life yet, I don’t have to listen to what kids have to say". Just recently, I saw an interview sharepic of a woman, age 25, who was having trouble finding a doctor to sterilise her. One thing that motivated me to write this post in the first place were the comments I found. Multiple people proclaiming in all seriousness that it is right not to let her make a permanent, life-altering choice, because, and get this, not only is she too young, but "people are not yet adults at 25". Not adults, which implies a drawn-out adolescence, with all of its limitations.
These are only a few examples for how being seen as immature and child-like at increasingly higher ages negatively affects not only those who willingly take on the identity of a soft, fragile being that needs to be protected from scary adult life. It prevents all young people, people who should be building the future, from making any meaningful change.
If we want to be inspired by babies and children, we might want to look at the qualities they have that the “I’m baby” meme does not consider. Babies are constantly learning. Their little brains are taking on information and processing more rapidly than at any other point in their lives. Children are curious and have no boundaries when it comes to pursuing knowledge, asking the questions they need answered in order to understand how our strange and complex world works, deconstructing everything they see to wrap their head around all the moving parts. We should be doing the same.
Primarily, though, instead of being “baby” in any sort of way, what we really need is to redefine adulthood for ourselves. While acknowledging that yes, we are allowed to have feelings, and yes, nobody can be on the grind at all times, and yes, traditional expectations for what one should have accomplished by a certain age are arbitrary and deserve to be done away with, we should find and emphasize those aspects of being a grown-ass human being that are actually worth preserving.
Instead of running from responsibility, we should embrace it. Not in the sense of being responsible for offspring or for our employer’s profits, but responsible for what happens to this pale blue dot, responsible for making the tiny blip of time that we spend alive count. We should work on our tolerance for discomfort, become the resilient beings we know we can be, if we want to change anything in this world. We need to learn that we can get through hard situations, that bad feelings are sure to pass, that we can solve our own conflicts on a micro-level without adult supervision, if we want to tackle the greater conflicts of our time and create a better future. Resisting capitalism is not accomplished by doing nothing, it requires active resistance. Political change is a tough process, and a bunch of babies probably could not enforce it, but that is what makes us different from them - we could absolutely handle it.
I am not baby. I am adult, I am agent, I am subject - and so are you, so let's get back to shaping the world according to our needs, instead of allowing ourselves to be acted upon by others, perpetuating the downward spiral of late capitalism.
Recommended Reading:
Prologue to an Anti-Therapeutic, Anti-Affirmation Movement by Freddie DeBoer
The Illusion of a Frictionless Existence by Kat Rosenfield
I always felt like »I'm baby« and Bimbofication and other similar concepts are just theoryless versions of the accelerationist phantasy (or delusion) but viewing them as depressive hedonism is much more accurate!
These adult babies have often been babied their entire lives. They are the ones raised by progressive liberal parents who protected them from everything, who made sure they never had to feel the pain of not being as good as someone else - something my ex-partner and I used to snark about re his son's softball team, as everyone got a trophy. Yeah, it's a cliche but it's also the symbol of what went wrong with Gens Y & Z - and of course, us X'ers are the ones who raised them. They're the ones who were never permitted to fail, with 'helicopter parents' hovering nearby to make sure Junior got through school despite being functionally illiterate and less present in class than Donald Trump was in the Oval Office. Their parents weren't willing to ever tell them no, to respect their 'personhood' even though children are NOT little adults, and can NOT make all their own decisions, and this is how so many of them got so f'ed up with this transgender nonsense - transgenderism looking more and more like an inappropriate and more importantly *irrelevant* expression of existing psychological and emotional problems having nothing to do with a nebulous 'gender dysphoria'.
As for others not approving for someone wanting, at 25, to get sterilized, I went through this myself, and the naysayers were right to challenge me, although not for the reason given ("25 is too young"). Yes, that's a prime example of how infantalized we've seen young adults become, but the *real* reason why one doesn't want to get sterilized at 25, *especially for women*, is because women who think they don't want children often do change their minds, and the magic age is pushing-30. Sometimes they even change their minds at 40.
I decided at 18 I didn't want kids and wouldn't it be great if I could just be sterilized. Everyone said, "Oh, you're too young to know that, you'll change your mind when you're older." I didn't think I would but then I read a magazine article on how women who didn't want children in their 20s changed their mind at 28 and 29. Something about pushing 30, eh? So I thought, "Maybe they're right." Well, 30 came and went and I began thinking it was time to revisit this again. (I had seriously considered in in my twenties when Robert Bork was up for the Supreme Court). People kept saying, "You're going to change your mind, wait til 35!" The goalpost moved! So I waited til 35 and was just as aversive to children as ever, and finally at 39 I pulled the trigger and got my trip to the vet. Have never regretted it since. So yeah, you *can* know what you want at 18, but the desire for kids seems to hit women *after* 25, which is why doctors are so reluctant to do it.
OTOH, if you want a too-young sterilization without a lot of lip from doctors, just tell them you're 'trans'. They'll sterilize you immediately with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
Just don't change your mind at 29.