Personally, I usually like the values of five-year-olds better than the values of adults. The five-year-olds haven’t had the ambition beaten out of them yet, they at least still have their sights aimed high. They want to be astronauts or whatever. You talk to the average adult over thirty, and their life goals amount to “impress friends/family, raise the kids well, prep for retirement, have some fun”.
Side note: I remember lying in bed worrying about this back in sixth grade. I promised myself I wouldn’t abandon my ambitions when I got older. Turns out I broke that promise; I decided my childhood ambitions weren’t ambitious enough. It just never occurred to me until high school that “don’t die at all” could be on the table.
By and large 5 years old don’t have such lofty values (well lofty for you at least). And they are incredibly cruel—maybe you weren’t but then you were an outlier. I suspect you were probably less kind and more selfish than you are now, even though you didn’t probably didn’t realize it at the time (and probably couldn’t, and that’s precisely why children tend to be like this, it’s incredibly hard for them to course correct without outside intervention).
Personally, I usually like the values of five-year-olds better than the values of adults. The five-year-olds haven’t had the ambition beaten out of them yet, they at least still have their sights aimed high. They want to be astronauts or whatever. You talk to the average adult over thirty, and their life goals amount to “impress friends/family, raise the kids well, prep for retirement, have some fun”.
Side note: I remember lying in bed worrying about this back in sixth grade. I promised myself I wouldn’t abandon my ambitions when I got older. Turns out I broke that promise; I decided my childhood ambitions weren’t ambitious enough. It just never occurred to me until high school that “don’t die at all” could be on the table.
By and large 5 years old don’t have such lofty values (well lofty for you at least). And they are incredibly cruel—maybe you weren’t but then you were an outlier. I suspect you were probably less kind and more selfish than you are now, even though you didn’t probably didn’t realize it at the time (and probably couldn’t, and that’s precisely why children tend to be like this, it’s incredibly hard for them to course correct without outside intervention).