Please don’t tell me you went through stages. Please tell me you can’t look on your life and say, “Well, at the time I was going through my such-n-such phase.” Please tell me you haven’t categorized your life or identified a hierarchy within your past.
Please say, “I was the epitome of diversity.”
Arnold Lucius Gesell described developmental theories that characterize growth through stages by reducing them to four properties: 1) Predicting qualitative differences in behavior that result from experience, 2) Assuming invariance in the stages, 3) Assuming structural nature in a stage, and 4) Translating structures from one stage to another. Now, let’s look at you.
Is there any set of stages that consistently frame your life? Are you a product of pattern?
Patterns are undeniably infusive in human development, aren’t they? Patterns allow us to recognize individuals. Think of the last time you did something that did not involve a pattern. Dream, maybe. That’s probably why you awoke to say, “That made no sense.” So, when you look back on your life, you might favor imposing patterns. Interestingly, you didn’t see those patterns when you were supposedly in them, making them, following them. It’s only in retrospect that you or someone else can impose an order, and then, through analog, say that someone else is going through a stage. Not every two-year-old goes through the “terrible twos,” as you know. Not every teenager is rebellious.
Look at Gesell’s first property, predicting qualitative differences that result from experience. Some of us never grow up, right? Some of us pursue folly to an untimely end. Is such a life a single stage? Or do we need an indefinite number of stages in human life to characterize all the diversity of our species? Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s why we have so many psychological theories with so many identified stages.
Why, we even have an unpredictability stage that we can predict.
Some psychologists might be very upset with me now (They’re going through a predictable stage in this, so give them some room to vent). Their objection is as valid as it is invalid. In that there are seven billion people at the moment and in that there have been about 100 billion humans, logic suggests that some categorizing of human behavior and thought is inevitable. Plus, all those studies of development suggest stages. Why am I challenging the notion of stages?
I don’t want you to settle. I don’t want you locked in a pattern. I don’t want you isolated in place. When you review your life without the notion of stages, you find great diversity, less structure than others would impose, and more freedom than you initially remember. Even those who “plan” their lives seem to “wake” years later to say, “That made no sense.”
Reason has its uses. Categorization has its. Logic seems unshakeable. Maybe others can look at you generally and impose a pattern of stages and pinpoint some behavior or another that at some time places you in one of their predictable stages. But you, the real you, are what you are because, from the perspective of others imposing stages, you lived and are still living in a chaotic dream. It’s your life and no other’s.
Please say, “I was the epitome of diversity.”
Arnold Lucius Gesell described developmental theories that characterize growth through stages by reducing them to four properties: 1) Predicting qualitative differences in behavior that result from experience, 2) Assuming invariance in the stages, 3) Assuming structural nature in a stage, and 4) Translating structures from one stage to another. Now, let’s look at you.
Is there any set of stages that consistently frame your life? Are you a product of pattern?
Patterns are undeniably infusive in human development, aren’t they? Patterns allow us to recognize individuals. Think of the last time you did something that did not involve a pattern. Dream, maybe. That’s probably why you awoke to say, “That made no sense.” So, when you look back on your life, you might favor imposing patterns. Interestingly, you didn’t see those patterns when you were supposedly in them, making them, following them. It’s only in retrospect that you or someone else can impose an order, and then, through analog, say that someone else is going through a stage. Not every two-year-old goes through the “terrible twos,” as you know. Not every teenager is rebellious.
Look at Gesell’s first property, predicting qualitative differences that result from experience. Some of us never grow up, right? Some of us pursue folly to an untimely end. Is such a life a single stage? Or do we need an indefinite number of stages in human life to characterize all the diversity of our species? Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s why we have so many psychological theories with so many identified stages.
Why, we even have an unpredictability stage that we can predict.
Some psychologists might be very upset with me now (They’re going through a predictable stage in this, so give them some room to vent). Their objection is as valid as it is invalid. In that there are seven billion people at the moment and in that there have been about 100 billion humans, logic suggests that some categorizing of human behavior and thought is inevitable. Plus, all those studies of development suggest stages. Why am I challenging the notion of stages?
I don’t want you to settle. I don’t want you locked in a pattern. I don’t want you isolated in place. When you review your life without the notion of stages, you find great diversity, less structure than others would impose, and more freedom than you initially remember. Even those who “plan” their lives seem to “wake” years later to say, “That made no sense.”
Reason has its uses. Categorization has its. Logic seems unshakeable. Maybe others can look at you generally and impose a pattern of stages and pinpoint some behavior or another that at some time places you in one of their predictable stages. But you, the real you, are what you are because, from the perspective of others imposing stages, you lived and are still living in a chaotic dream. It’s your life and no other’s.
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