This is the Peter Pan story
Peter Pan is this magical boy, Pan is the God of everything, roughly speaking
It's not an accident that he has the name Pan, and he's the boy that won't grow up and he's magical
Well that's because children are magical, they can be anything; they're nothing but potential
Peter Pan doesn't want to give that up, why?
Well he's got some adults around him but the main adult is Captain Hook
Who the hell wants to grow up to be Captain Hook?
First of all you've got a hook, second you're a tyrant
And third you're chased by the dragon of chaos with a clock in it's stomach
The crocodile, it's already got a piece of you
Well that's what happens when you get older
Time has already got a piece of you and eventually it's got a taste for you
And eventually it's going to eat you
Hook is so traumatised by that that he can't help but be a tyrant
And then Peter Pan looks at traumatised Hook and says well no
I'm not sacrificing my childhood for that and he ends up king of lost boys
Sacrifice
You get to pick your damn sacrifice, that's all
Sacrifice
You don't get to not make one
You're sacrificial whether you want to be or not
And who the hell wants to be king of the lost boys?
And he also sacrifices the possibility that he'll have a real relationship with a woman, that's Wendy
She wants to grow up and have a life, she accepts her mortality, she accepts her maturity
Peter Pan has to content himself with Tinker-bell
She doesn't even exist, she's like, she's like the fairy of porn, she doesn't exist
She's the substitute for the real thing
There's a sacrificial element to maturation
You have to sacrifice the pluripotentiality of childhood for the actuality of a frame
Well why would you do that?
One reason is it happens to you whether you do it or not
You can either chose your damn limitation
Or you can let it take you unaware when you're 30, or even worse when you're 40
That is not a happy day
Sacrifice
You get to pick your damn sacrifice, that's all
Sacrifice
You don't get to not make one
You're sacrificial whether you want to be or not
When you're 25 you can be an idiot, it's no problem
Ok well now you're the same person at 30
It's like people aren't so thrilled about you at that point
It's like what the hell have you been doing for the last 10 years?
Well I'm just as clueless as I was when I was 22
Yeah but you're not 22
You're an old infant and that's an ugly thing
You chose your damn sacrifice because the sacrifice is inevitable but at least you get to choose it
The problem with being a child is that all you are is potential
And it's really low resolution; you could be anything but you're not anything
So then you go and you adopt an apprenticeship
At least you become something
And when you're something that makes the world open up to you again
If you're a really good plumber then you end up being far more than a plumber
You end up being a good employer, you run a business, you train some other people
You enlarge their lives you, you're kind of a pillar of the community, you have your family
Once you pass through that narrow training period which narrows you
And constricts you, and develops you at the same time
Then you can come out the other end with a bunch of new possibility at hand
And Jung talked about that, he thought that part of the proper path of development
In the last half of life was to rediscover the child that you left behind as you were apprenticing
And so then you get to be something and regain that potential at the same time
Sacrifice
You get to pick your damn sacrifice, that's all
Sacrifice
You don't get to not make one
You're sacrificial whether you want to be or not
Sacrifice
You get to pick your damn sacrifice, that's all
Sacrifice
You don't get to not make one
You're sacrificial whether you want to be or not
---
Sacrifice - Akira the Don and Jordan Peterson
