Does jordan peterson mean choose an occupation to specialize in? And also, what does he mean when he talks about the thirty year old infant? Does he mean the person that site at home and smokes dope and plays xbox all day?
Posted Jan 27, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC
I believe he means that there is a price to pay for everything. You can’t get out of sacrificing part of yourself when you want something to change. YOU have the choice to choose what comes with you and what gets burned off like deadwood. There’s a price to every choice and only you can pay it.
Taking on responsibility means sacrificing immediate gratification in order to create a better future for yourself and the world more generally. Part of that means 'growing up' and doing your part. He's pretty clear about this and it's not a difficult concept to understand unless you are some sort of resentful leftist who feels that the world owes you for some imagined systemic 'injustice'.
He mentions this in relation to doctors. You have to leave the multi plurality of child hood and become specialized. So you sacrifice the child in order to achieve further progress. You sacrifice your immediate gratification for future security and comfort. So gaming all day and screaming at your mom for tendies isn't going to work. You sacrifice time , money , energy and health to become a doctor but it is a long term investment which pays of. You gain respect , you gain plenty of knowledge and you have to ability to put soul in the game. You take others risks onto yourself. You become a much better person. No longer can you be a lazy child. Nor can you be an overtly tyrannical adult ( if done properly during the progress ) You live in a balance between two sides. There are more examples to this. Small sacrifices can work for small problems and large complex sacrifices can work for large complex problems.
YES that is what he means.
Peterson means deciding what you need to give up today in order that you can achieve your long term goals, one of which may be finding work that you love to do. Smoking dope and playing computer games are good examples of what you may have to give up. He talks about burning off "deadwood": those things that are preventing us from making our lives better than they are now.
As for the 30-year old infant, Peterson is referring to the Peter Pan archetype, also known as the puer aeternus (eternal child). Search his lectures for references to Peter Pan, or read The Problem of the Puer Aeternus by Marie-Louise Von Franz. He also talks about the puer aeternus in an interview with Russell Brand.