All Grown Up

I've started watching The Kominsky Method, as I've currently exhausted Grace and Frankie and need to get my elderly kicks somewhere. In general, I like older people—there's often, oddly, less baggage, less insecurity, less bushwa. Who's got time for that anymore? 

I'm not far in, maybe the third episode, but a sentiment has come up more than once. A millennial ascribes their behavior to their childhood, and either Alan Arkin (87) or Michael Douglas (76) tiredly responds, "You're not a kid anymore."

When you're in your 70s and 80s, does childhood really matter anymore? Plenty of people think so. It does leave its mark. But so much more would have happened in the interim. 

I look to my childhood. Who doesn't? But heck, it was so long ago. Does it really matter anymore in terms who I am now and who I want to be in the future? Do I want to be the person crying on the therapist's couch that I can't move forward in my life because I didn't feel validated by authority figures when I was 10? 

When Arkin and Douglas say that line, it sort of highlights a tendency to whine in the current generation, an unhealthy focus on the imperfections of the past when such effort would be better applied trying to improve the future.