Toys R' Us ... Adults?
Toys R' Us ... Adults?
Is that all Western culture invites us to be?
I don’t wanna grow up - I’m a Toys R’ Us kid - They’ve got a million toys at Toys R’ Us that I can play with
…
I don’t wanna grow up - Cause baby if I did - I couldn’t be a Toys R’ Us kid
If you’re a Gen-Xer like me, odds are you know at least those two parts of the popular jingle well. For those who aren’t familiar, here’s the ad in all its 80’s glory.
The ad came to mind as I reflected on last week’s posts blindspots, inequity, and gaslighting, I couldn’t help but think that these are all symptoms of a much bigger problem, one that stems back to our glitchy operating system. Namely, Western culture doesn’t invite us (any of us, not just men) to grow up.
If you are new here, welcome to Manhood Reimagined. I’m glad something caught your eye. If you want to make sense of this project as a whole, I’d suggest you start here. This page is continually updating and gives an overview of the project as a whole and how individual posts fit into a much bigger picture. If you want a bit more about me and why I write here, check this out.
“Have Your Shit Together”
While I’m not on the dating apps these days, it hasn’t been that long since I scrolled or swiped my way through profiles that all looked the same. In Denver, that means mild variations on the lines:
The biggest risk I’ve taken was quitting my job and moving to Denver.
A declaration of whether you are ICON, EPIC, or both1
I work hard so I can travel and drink wine.
Have your shit together.
Some went a bit further by defining the “shit together” essentials … a job, house, car, and enough money to join her for wine and travel.
If you pause for a moment and think about it, those are all markers of someone who’s found a new version of Toy R’ Us. It’s no longer a fluorescently illuminated mass of aisles filled with molded plastic. Rather, the toy store is
the local REI Flagship where you can get everything you need for outdoor adventure, or
a cute wine bar in LoHi or RiNo or the Highlands or some other trendy urban neighborhood, or
the friendly skies easily made accessible by the second largest and third busiest airport in the world.
And of course, because her ideal guy has his shit together, he also gets his toy fix at Home Depot and Autozone. If he has all that and doesn’t have a picture holding a fish, it’s love at first site.
In other words, not much has changed since she rushed into the toy store looking for the latest Barbie (it was the 80s after all and gender-neutral toys weren’t a thing yet).
Into this online dating world, I’d drop the line,
People who say, “Have your shit together.” haven’t even begun to figure out what their actual shit is.
Yes, it’s amazing I ever got a match.
Let’s Talk About Your Actual Shit
I’m going to guess that unless you’re into psychology, it’s been a while since you thought about human development. So let me attempt to trigger your memory with an image that might have shown up in your high school or college psychology textbook, one that you never really wanted to see again and might even have blocked from your memory:
We weren’t known for captivating graphics back in the day, were we? That said, I don’t think it’s purely for stylistic reasons that you never wanted to see this chart again.
I mean, if we were to pop into a similar class for my 17-year-old high school Junior, the image (assuming it was an image rather than a video) that would pop up on the Chromebook would look something more like this:
But in the end, that one isn’t much better, even if it is visually more appealing.
Why don’t we want to see them? No matter how the content is displayed, in those images, psychologist Erik Erikson offers us a comprehensive psychoanalytic theory of the tasks a human must complete to move from childhood to adulthood, with each stage impacting the next, and for the vast majority of us, they make us feel, well, childish.
Erikson’s Path to Growing Up
Let me explain how it works. If you make it through the first 18 months of life with more trust than mistrust, you will have acquired the virtue of hope and be ready to take on the task of autonomy vs. shame and doubt. However, if you end those first 18 months with more mistrust, you will still move on to the next task, but you will lack hope and, at some point, trust vs. mistrust will keep coming back up as something to work on until it is resolved.
This process continues through all of the stages. So here’s where things get uncomfortable. Ask yourself the following questions and answer them, not from your ego, but from the pit of your stomach:
Can I trust the world?
Is it okay to be me?
Is it okay for me to do, move, and act?
Can I make it in the world of people and things?
Who am I? Who can I be?
According to Erikson, those are the questions we need to be able to affirmatively answer by the time we are 21 years old to be healthy young adults.
I seriously wonder if any of us could have answered those first five questions in just over two decades of life. I know I still struggle with some of them days after I started my 50th trip around the sun.
Things get even more complex when most of us are caught up in the questions that come after we hit adulthood, ones like:
Can I unite myself with another person?
Can I make my life count?
Is it okay to have been me?
But if we don’t have those earlier questions answered, it is going to make affirmatively answering today’s questions that much more challenging.
In other words, the vast majority of us are Toys R’ Us Adults who aren’t even aware of what our shit is … which makes us perfect pawns for those gaslighting elites.
As those in economically marginalized communities struggle for survival and don’t have the margin to focus on their shit, those of us with some means are too distracted by our toy stores to recognize let alone work on our shit.
In this society, that makes healing your psyche and doing the work of growing up one of the most challenging obstacles you can overcome.
I’ll start breaking down how in the next post.
For my non-Denver audience, ICON and EPIC are the two main ski/snowboarding passes … because if you can’t hit the mountains together, is a connection even possible?