Too many people never got the message that sooner or later, you have to become an adult. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:
It wasn’t very hard to see, as the 1970s passed into the ‘80s and ‘90s, that adults were abandoning their roles in the world. They resigned, en masse, and were replaced with youth-friendly types. Youth culture had become a great sales tool, after all, due largely to overly-indulgent parents.
By now, the cultures of the West have been very widely “youth-enized.” (Pun unintended but sadly applicable.) As just a small example, you can hardly find a museum these days that hasn’t sold out to bright colors and dumbed-down exhibits.
It’s not the young who are culpable for this, of course: youth is a necessary stage that we all go through. It’s the adults who are at fault, for abdicating their natural roles.
Adulthood is a much longer stage than youth, and a far more important one… one that ought not be abandoned: A world depleted of adults and adult characteristics is a world geared for foolishness.
