Looking at emotional maturity through an epidemiological lens may unravel the endemic status of emotional immaturity in postmodern humanity. Is its epidemic proportion a new-age phenomenon? Has its endemicity been innate since the dawn of humanity? Does it extend beyond humanity into the nonhuman systems that humans devise? Humans have long invented historical myths and fictional entities in order to organize nonhumans and to prevail over them by tradition. Are those myths and entities as emotionally immature as the humans who procreate and propagate them? Would futuristic nonhuman systems evolve an endemic emotional immaturity of their own, inherited from their human origins, even once humans cease to have any involvement in systems that have become independent of them? Could it matter to humans? Would it matter to humans? Should it matter to humans? Perhaps the most relevant point to recognize, appreciate, and address, adapt to, or accept is that emotional maturity may always have been harder to achieve and to sustain than to talk about, and that it may always remain so. Perhaps, unbeknownst to humanity, emotional immaturity has ironically served some greater purpose in the larger picture, one that would justify its chronic endemicity and its recurring epidemic proportions across the evolutionary process.
Simplistically, does personal life experience automatically bestow emotional maturity as a person ages out of childhood and adolescence? Counterintuitively, does that assumed autopiloted acquisition of emotional maturity succeed with flying colors in bearing down the aftermath of advanced aging, or does it devolve into emotional immaturity at the dusk of life? Interestingly, emotions as we know them may be unique to humans, and so emotional maturity as we expect it may be unique to humans as well. This does not mean banishing the emotions of nonhumans, and with them the emotional maturity of nonhumans. However, despite the best intentions to understand the emotions, and therefore the emotional maturity, of nonhumans, humans who existentially perceive only the human matrix may realistically never understand emotions, or emotional maturity, beyond the human kind.
Philosophically, an understanding of random motion in particles may be a modern phenomenon, while an understanding of the randomness inherent to nothingness may be an ancient one. That older understanding may be truly prehistoric, reaching back to a moment when nothingness may have randomly created everything, and truly futuristic, reaching forward to a moment when everything may randomly return to nothingness. Thus, just like everything else, the relevance of emotional maturity in humans may truly be random. Humans may still try to envisage emotional maturity in natural nonhumans, and try to inculcate emotional maturity in artificial nonhumans, in order to meet the humane needs of humans. That effort proceeds regardless of whether natural nonhumans or artificial nonhumans need emotional maturity at all to survive and flourish in the nonhuman matrix, a matrix devoid of any and all positive and constructive, negative and destructive, or neutral and oblivious interactions with humans.
Anyhow, even though it is easier said than done, the hardships of existence in the matrix may still require emotional maturity in humans. That maturity is what allows humans, as perceptually conscious beings, to remain sane and at peace with their own perceptive consciousness for as long as that existence lasts.
Deepak Gupta is an anesthesiologist.
