I started systematically thinking about the idea of maturity in the summer of 2018 as in the preceeding few months, I had witnessed a profound change in my internal machinery and external behavior that I did not have a better word to associate with.
It’s an elusive word, maturity; it has such a strong connotation with age and time. “He’s mature for his age” or “she’s extremely immature like a child” are phrases often said and heard. The way I have come to think about this notion, however, has very little to do with age. In my school of thinking, many will live through adulthood, and many will die before ever reaching maturity, which suggests it need be a concept that stands distinct from age.
My thinking on maturity builds on a few other mental models of humans that I have:
- You are just an information processing machine
- You perceive your environment, reason about how to react, and use levers available to you to actualize those changes
- The way that you perceive, reason about and act on the world is somewhat conscious but also largely driven by low-level processes outside the purview of your awareness
In this world, I see a person as mature if she consistently attempts to drive herself and her immediate environment to a state of long-term stabilization.*
Externally, this means a mature person will perceive and react to the world in ways that stabalize herself and her immediate environment and internally, she will pay explicit attention to her physical and mental states, detecting and mitigating instabilities as soon as they occur.
These days, it is common to talk about mental health as though it is an auxiliary, foreign characteristic that we must constantly be worried about. I think of mental health exactly as I think of physical health, which is a point central to this essay.
A Detour on Mental Health
You are an extremely intricate system, with millions of subsystems that work well only in certain configurations and under certain conditions. Every once in a while (or for some, very often for extended periods of time), these certain conditions and configurations do not hold true - we call this being unhealthy. Regardless of which conditions have diverged from their optimal/normal state, as the conductor of the orchestra, you have one job: figure out the most optimal path to a healthy state and take it.
The difference between physical and mental health is in the level of visibility into the system and level of understanding we have of the path for any given unhealthy state.
For example, let’s suppose you sprain your ankle. First, your body has an extremely quick and direct feedback mechanism to tell you that something is wrong, letting you infer how and why this problem occured; furthermore, it prohibits you from doing anything to exacerbate it by sending clear signals of pain that you can assign to actions you have taken (ex: stretching it in the wrong direction). From basic biology class, you have a somewhat clear picture of what has gone wrong (a tendon being stretched or bone that is fractured), which allows you to form a reasonable mental model for what is going on. You then go to a doctor who takes an x-ray and shows you the exact problem and treats you with a procedure that has a 99.999…% success rate. While not all physical issues are this easy to detect, diagnose and mitigate, I believe this illustrates the point.
But let’s say you have felt “depressed” for some time. First, your detection of this source of imbalance in some configuration or condition may trail the actual imbalance by months, since our only real detection mechanism is our mood, which is an extremely nosiey signal due to inherent daily or hourly fluctuations. In addition, we have very little understanding of what has gone wrong (why this has happened) or what not to do to exacerbate the condition. This makes it had to learn from these episodes in the macro scale and makes it extremely difficult to address the root cause in the micro scale. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that the feedback that we do get from our brain is ones that drive us to do what is the opposite of what is needed to improve our state. We shun others when we need them the most and develop an apetite for risk when we are most vulnerable.
Seeking treatment is also a different story. There are many different types of credentials that permit one to treat others for issues relating to mental health, which makes choosing the right professional difficult. To make matters worse, at present, therapists/psychiatrists/etc. are perhaps the only in the medical community that treat patients without having any first-hand measurement or analysis of the organ they aim to treat. Imagine a physycian recommending you for a knee surgery without ever looking at an x-ray of your knee.
Of course, this is because the human brain is far more complex than other organs, but I believe this is one area in which we will see significant improvement in the coming years as technology and tooling get more sophisticated and cheaper, and the performance of professionals who use them noticeably diverges from those who don’t.
Back to Maturity
As briefly described in the first section, I believe most of the behavior that we associate with being mature is actually in behavior that is rooted in asking a single question: “How do I ensure the stabilization of system X?”
Often, this system is one’s self: How do I stabilize myself mentally and physically? This requires careful deliberation: sometimes we don’t feel stable and happy because we feel too stagnant and the correct course of action is to motivate ourselves to do more, achieve more impressive things and push ourselves harder. Sometimes, we feel unstable because we have lost too many battles in a row, oversubscribed ourselves or are out of steam. In these cases, we must increase our risk aversion, kick things off our plate, focus on more fundamental aspects of our physical and mental health to get back to a state where we do feel stable.
After we have developed a sophisticated enough machinery to provide stability internally, we can consider how mature we are w.r.t our environment. Driving one’s environment to stability is a strictly more difficult task as it often requires direct trade-off with one’s own internal stability.
Maybe we have to choose how we perceive other people’s actions (choosing to see things as miscommunication and honest mistakes rather than malice or bad intentions), or maybe understanding that although we may be frustrated, revealing our feelings will do more harm than good to the stability of the system (group of friends, family, etc.) and thus choose to act in a way that will nudge the system towards stability.
In a multi-person system conflict, a mature person would act as a sponge, obsorbing as much of the instability as she can to push the overall system in the right direction. However, note the limit: a mature person knows the point at which she has to stop providing this cushion to avoid an implosion of her own. The exact arithmetic may be worked out at runtime, but a mature person has a mechanism that allows her to know this threshold and understands how to disengage from the situation in order to minimize the negative impact on the external system, while she exits the conflict to nurse herself back to internal stability, at which point she may be of value to the larger system again (may be an entirely different episode by this time). In contrast, an immature person would allow her feelings to be surfaced, choosing instant internal stability (releasing frustration boosts internal stability) over medium-term system-wide stability.
I’ve found this way of thinking about maturity to greatly help me both become more mature (under this definition) and notice ways in which I can classify other people’s misbehavior as cases of immaturity - which helps me avoid such behavior since having a label for an event makes it easier for me to remember.
*Note: I am presenting maturity as a dichatomy, rather than a specturm, to ease communication. As with all such concepts, it can be more accurately modeled as a n-dimensional space (I don’t think a single-dimensional ‘maturity’ spectrum will suffice as there are likely many independent axes conflated) but I will present it as a binary property to make the process of writing it down easier.