why do adults seem to be passionless and uncurious?

Parent Cafe
1

<p>Is it biological? Changes and/or fossilisation of brain structure? </p>

<p>OK, I’m trying to be as thoughtful with my words as possible… but I’m sure it’s an issue everyone has come across now and then. </p>

<p>Like take talking with your parents. For a while I couldn’t figure why I dreaded talking to my mother, who I haven’t seen in nearly a year (and why I preferred to talk about life to my sister) while I was eager to talk about life with my friends. And truth be told she calls incessantly, but only because we never talk about anything substantial, so it’s not like I need a “break”. Why would I favour talking with friends I’ve only known 1 year over mother who raised me for 10 years singlehandedly and through hardship, etc.? </p>

<p>I don’t know if it’s with the children, or with the parents, or if there’s some biological basis to the whole “you don’t understand me!” stage (shouldn’t I be just about out of adolescence right now?), but talking about life with my mother is so ceremonial. She never asks what I study or what route of coursework I’m considering – she just cares that I do well (and she’s fairly tolerant of hiccups). She wants an update, and there are so many things that I haven’t told her, but whenever she is at that “we need to talk” stage, talking is so labourious and tedious. She doesn’t really seem that interested that I’ve assembled an arsenal of cooking techniques and working recipes and that I’m bursting with experimental ideas that I’d love to discuss – but she is happy that I’ve learnt to cook, etc. You know what I mean? She doesn’t seem to share my passion about the process, just as long as there’s a successful end result … success in life, I suppose. </p>

<p>I don’t think I’m alone, as many of my friends sometimes talk about the same thing … one once complained to me that her mother didn’t really seem to care about the specifics about what happened during her day or her escapades into science … she was just asking for the sake of asking. And that’s why it’s so tiring! But maybe adults are like that because they’ve “been there, done that”?</p>

<p>I’m not having any real issues … just curious about a fact of life. I want to know to what extent is losing your passion/curiosity as you in age of life inevitable. I guess that’s why I became so disillusioned about Ivies, etc. last year – even those top scholars who go to Harvard and Yale and scored 2400s (or 1600s in their day) grow up, join Wall Street or get some prestigious position, eventually lose their extreme curiosity and passion they probably displayed in their youth.</p>

<p>I remember reading that article about how a woman (journalist? admissions office member? I forget) retook the SAT after decades, and her score was heavily skewed in favour of language, which is continually exercised through life and becomes sort of “fossilised”. Whereas her math scores suffered not only because of the time elapsed since she last used the material but also because (re)learning material becomes more difficult? (More difficult because of lack of passion?). My mother is very knowledgeable about her field (architecture / structural engineering), but she rarely discusses any of her projects with me. (And no, it’s not simply because some of the work involves classified material.) It’s just work, designing and inspecting US Navy destroyers, nothing exciting. And when she does teach, it’s in such an exasperated and didactic tone … <em>sigh</em></p>

2

<p>Um, your mom is in the field of structural engineering and designs U.S. Naval destroyers? And you say this is “nothing exciting”?
Hmmm…</p>

<p>If you went into a research-related field, you’d find yourself surrounded by curious people of all ages. </p>

<p>I do not think curiosity wanes with age. The people who I know who were curious when they were young are still curious.</p>

3

<p>galosien,</p>

<p>IMO, it is a combination of many parts. I have a child wildly curious as yourself, and another child more like your mom. I engage in some very mind stimulating conversations with my more curious outside the box thinker(more like myself personality wise, over analyze even the most mundane topics) than my less vocal, less global thinking child.
Some people are very surface thinkers, others will dissect every aspect of their existence. Not sure if age is the only reason for what you are describing, perhaps some of the “been there done that”, but more a personality trait/similar way of approaching life.
I have many friends who do not/can’t discuss anything beyond what the weather is like, and others that hours can pass by discussing any topic in depth. I have learned it is easier to conform the topics of conversation to the audience.</p>

4

<p>Yesterday we had a barbecue pool party for D1 and her friends. Our job was to provide food and drinks, and we tried to stay out of their way. As they came to the grill to get their food, polite kids they were, they felt obligated to chit chat with us. We started to talk about their summer internships and study abroad, before we knew it we had a whole group of them around us. I was curious about their perspective on what they were learning at their internships, and they were asking us about our experience when we first started out. The conversation drifted to music, partying… I personally am very interested in everything our kids are doing. I find it very invigorating to be around young people because of their love of life and new ideas they bring.</p>

5

<p>There is your mother as a person and your mother as your mother.</p>

<p>As your mother, she feels responsible for your success in life. She asks a certain series of questions to see if you are “on track” and to ascertain if she needs to take any corrective action to help you.</p>

<p>As a person, she may or may not be the kind of person who takes an interest in the things you are doing. I say this as an adult whose parents do not appear capable of taking much interest in what I am doing…</p>

6

<p>I don’t think curiosity wanes with age either. On the other hand, dull at twenty …</p>

7

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<p>I was being sarcastic … she’s clearly doing exciting stuff … but she doesn’t share any of that with me. It’s just work for her – that’s the vibe I get. Nothing exciting, nothing to passionately talk about.</p>

<p>edit: actually when she does talk – it’s about office politics and the incompetence of managers (think Dilbert in a defence contractor setting), and the cities she occasionally travels to for work – but nothing regarding the work (or the science concepts) in itself. She’s very thoughtful and kind – a very people person – but to her science is just a job tool. (Or housecleaning tool.)</p>

8

<p>Well, why don’t you work on your conversational skills to ask her about what she’s doing?</p>

<p>I also think you don’t get what it’s like for an adult who has financial responsibilities and household management responsibilities that you simply don’t have. </p>

<p>And honestly, I don’t see why she should be all that interested in your cooking other than you’ve learned how to cook. I found a lot of those cooking threads incredibly tedious and overworking – stick some chicken in an oven already and call it a day. If cooking doesn’t interest her, so what?</p>

9

<p>One person’s “passion and curiosity” is another person’s tedium. Galoisien, you’re a smart young man from your posts, but you tend to intellectualize and analyze and dissect everything to the nth degree. There’s only so much of that a person can take. Sometimes it’s ok just to talk about the weather or the latest movie or whatever at a light, superficial level.</p>

10

<p><a href=“shouldn’t%20I%20be%20just%20about%20out%20of%20adolescence%20right%20now?”>quote=“galoisien”</a>

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Jonrie, I’ve read a few of your other threads… based on these and on the common lore about adolescent brain development, I imagine you have a ways to go. This is not intended as criticism; you are in development, as we all are. But as far as understanding one another, I can tell you from personal experience that you won’t really understand her until you’ve gone through more than just a few extra years of life. When you have a job, a child, a mortgage, bills that you must pay in order to continue having food, water, and shelter for the young child who can’t eat unless you feed him… your mother will look and sound quite different to you.</p>

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:rolleyes: Is it any wonder she doesn’t spend a lot of time discussing her work with you? </p>

<p>A lot of things that seem new and fascinating to us at 19 seem trite and maybe foolish when we look back on them at 40. That’s just part of growing up – just as you might have difficulty now indulging a 5-year-old in endless drawn-out conversations about, say, the battle statistics of various Pokemon monsters. During your childhood, she probably spent a lot of her time indulging you in such conversations. Maybe she’s looking for the Reader’s Digest Condensed Versions when she chats with you on the phone.</p>

<p>If you want to connect more deeply with your mother about the things that interest you, I would suggest writing letters. Email is ok, but letters are better; we tend to treasure tangible communications from the people we love. Holding a letter, she can tell right away how long it’s going to take to read it. So she can sit down with a letter over her dinner or morning tea and read all about your adventures with MSG when she has the time… and she can (and probably will) re-read it several times. You might mention what’s going on in your head – your worries about jobs and the future, or whatever is important to you – and ask her some open-ended questions about how she handled such things when she was younger. See if you don’t get a letter back from her, with things she’d never have told you over the phone. It could be the start of a really nice custom between the two of you.</p>

11

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<p>:) </p>

<p>I used to do that, but it’s not very joyful talking to someone who doesn’t seem that interested in telling you about the topic. (Unlike talking to your friends for example.)</p>

12

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<p>Errr … her work is indeed exciting, as I said above. </p>

<p>She doesn’t share that excitement with me.</p>

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<p>I wouldn’t have too much difficulty really… it would be kind of fun. I wouldn’t really be that mentally invested in the pokemon, but to hear him talk about what tactics or sequence of moves to use would be interesting, and I’d want to know what got him interested (as opposed to all that other stuff out there). Isn’t child and personality development interesting? </p>

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<p>Actually it’s me who usually gives the summaries, because I don’t usually go into details because whenever I do I’ve come to realise she doesn’t <em>really</em> appreciate them. But when I make my summary too short, she gets annoyed, because she wants a conversation, even if it is a very ceremonial one. She does ask what I’m cooking, so my responses are usually very curt like, “oh, chicken”. She seems to ask for the sake of asking.</p>

13

<p>“I also think you don’t get what it’s like for an adult who has financial responsibilities and household management responsibilities that you simply don’t have.”</p>

<p>After you’ve been kicked around for 40 or 50 years, its understandable that curiosity and passion takes a hit.</p>

14

<p>And I do ask her to write emails, but she doesn’t take interest in my facebook page, my blog, or anything that I write. (You know, despite the fact that they’re readily accessible to her.) She didn’t care about what I wrote for my college essays, as long as they would satisfy an adcom. Whenever I wrote a piece that was tough for me to write because it came from the heart and it was really genuine, she seemed more concerned about how I was unnecessarily talking about delicate subjects than the ideas I was trying to convey. Your essay got you X local scholarship? Oh yay. $2000/yr award? Yay. No questions about the stuff I actually wrote. During my younger teenage years when I took a sudden interest in the different versions of the Internationale she was screaming her head off about the socialist workers’ song being demonic and anti-Christian than any of the ideas I was taking interest in then – you know, ideas that she could shape. </p>

<p>I remember as a child she’d love to lecture me on Chinese proverbs and Chinese history and she’d watch Chinese historical drama with me, but later when I took an interest in linguistics, the makeup of the Han ethnicity and new ideas in the study of Chinese history – all that passion suddenly disappeared. Except of course, when she wants to invoke a random Chinese proverb to lecture me.</p>

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<p>I shared all of that anxiety. She actually tried to hide it, because the family court policy was to keep the children in a state of ignorant bliss and she would be in legal trouble if the law knew my sister and I knew more than what were supposed to know. (It’s a stupid law really that insults children …) During the last 9 years I have been in constant worry about the expenses, our self-sufficiency, income flows and whatnot, and me and my sister ate frugally and asked little. In fact we often tried to prevent our mother from making purchases we didn’t need more than the other way round.</p>

15

<p>Not a parent, but my take on this is that the things that are exciting to you at age 18 aren’t exciting ten years later, let alone 30 yrs later. To you, it’s a big deal that you’ve learned to cook and certainly you have exciting plans and maybe some worries about your future that you want to discuss. But to an adult, sometimes cooking is something to get through to have dinner on the table and the concerns about the future aren’t so much about whether work is exciting or fulfilling but rather about holding onto a job, dealing with day to day office issues, making the mortgage, or figuring out what to do if the 401k is sinking. It’s not that she doesn’t care about the things that excite you, it’s that she no longer has the idealism that you have as a high school or college student so it’s hard for her to share excitement on a daily basis about a new recipe, an interesting book etc. It’s the same way that I loved a particular sport as a child and knew everything about it; I still enjoy following that sport but am not particularly interested in having a child recite to me every stat, every player etc. – I have less time on my hands now and I have other concerns, whether I voice them or not.</p>

<p>That being said, you can have those deeper conversations with your parents or with other adults, but it’s about picking your moments. It’s hard to force those discussions on a daily basis, but next time you’re both sitting around over a long dinner – ask questions; example – ask her what it was like starting out in her career, and then share with her your concerns. Some (most) people cannot give advice in list format; it’s easier to listen to their experiences and learn from them.</p>

16

<p>Do you think she could just be plain tired? Honestly, when I get home from work, even though I enjoy it, I don’t want to talk about it. And it is real hard to talk about work to people not employed where I am. It’s like talking about a book that the other person hasn’t read and doesn’t know the characters. I like to know what my kids are doing but there are many times I just want the condensed version. I have bills to pay, a yard that needs mowing and grocery shopping to do. Love you dearly but chop, chop!</p>

17

<p>When I saw the title of the thread, the first thing that came to mind was Mark Twain’s great quote: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned.”</p>

<p>Sorry OP, I just couldn’t resist!</p>

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<p>^^^ Perfect!!!</p>

19

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<p>Galoisien. Your blog is chock full of excruciating detail on esoteric subjects. It’s great that you’re enthused about those subjects, but it’s unfair to expect everyone else to be interested in them. Very few people are interested in linguistics, for example. It’s OK, really. Doesn’t make them “passionless” - it just means they’re not interested in linguistics. That’s all. You jump into everything you do with such enthusiasm and you expect your mother, who WORKS for a living, who’s probably tired at the end of her day, to jump into those discussions, too. That’s not fair to her.</p>

20

<p>Galoisien, here’s an example of what I mean:</p>

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<p>Good lord, I wouldn’t care about that level of detail for my own two children. Why would I care what the class average was? And median? And how it differed from last year? Why do you expect your mother to be in rapt attention to this kind of thing?</p>

<p>And you’re not a very humble individual, per the comments on your other thread where you called community college professors “nobodies.” Talking to people who have an inflated sense of self-importance isn’t rewarding for anybody.</p>