QuoteProject
By turning our culture over to the spectacle of child stars and their growing pains, we simply wind up taking their childishness seriously and ensuring that they don't grow up at all. And neither do we.
Tom Junod
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote critiques society's obsession with child stars, suggesting it hinders their growth and reflects our own immaturity.

Tom Junod's quote highlights the potential dangers of idolizing child stars and the spectacle surrounding them. By placing undue focus on their lives and struggles, society risks not only stunting the development of these young celebrities but also reveals a reluctance to confront maturity and responsibility ourselves. It suggests that both the child stars and their audience are caught in a loop of childish behavior that fosters immaturity.

Themes

Child StarsImmaturitySocietySpectacleGrowth

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion about the impact of celebrity culture on youth, this quote can be used to emphasize the need for maturity.

More from Tom Junod

It is insufficient to say that my experience as a bully haunts me. Rather, my experience as a bully has been fundamental to the creation of my conscience, because it is what prevents me from making the basic human claim that I am a good person.
Tom JunodRead
Storytellers all, we humans might run out of time even as we triumph over the problem of running out of space. But we will never run out of stories.
Tom JunodRead
That's the first thing you learn when you busk in the New York City subways: you immediately join the ranks of the marginalized, the unhinged prophets, the Christian shouters, the Hare Krishnas, the Jehovah's witnesses, the father-and-daughter kitaro team, the violinists playing for their sickly wives.
Tom JunodRead
Cooking is, to me, the perfect fusion of generosity and selfishness, indeed the resolution of generosity and selfishness, the answer to my torn nature.
Tom JunodRead
I cook so that there is no absence. I cook so that I am always there, even when I'm gone, even when I die, and my cooking translates in my daughter's memory as, simply, this: time.
Tom JunodRead
The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale - the scale of sample size and of time - will truth emerge.
Tom JunodRead

Similar quotes

The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.
Sigmund FreudRead
I bold it impossible, that the great monarchies of Europe can subsist much longer; they all affect magnificence and splendor.
Jean-Jacques RousseauRead
Relativity applies to physics, not ethics.
Albert EinsteinRead
Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
Joseph CampbellRead
The language of science—and especially of a science of man—is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.
Thomas SzaszRead
Hanging out with politicians and corporations is very unhip work. But I think that the U2 audience have turned out to be incredibly subtle in their understanding.
BonoRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.