I’m not one to pontificate — and certainly not about maturity — but I feel very safe in making this statement very strongly —
A key component of emotional maturity is the ability to acknowledge, not flee from, and work through negative emotions.
I dare venture a step further and say that a large number of problems Westerners typically experience come from running from negative emotions. We’ve become so rich and developed such wonderful technologies and products that it’s almost always possible to find something to dissipate short-term negative emotions.
If your work is hard or confusing, there’s always a steady stream of entertainment around.
If you’re feeling low, there’s foods that are — quite literally — chemically engineered to ensure they have no fiber and an immensely pleasurable burst of sugars, salts, and fats to rapidly change that short term mood.
Likewise, if you’re lonely or isolated, there’s plenty of marketers that are happy to sell you something that will shift you away from these feelings.
Feeling powerless? They’ve got you covered there too.
The problem with these types of short-term interventions is that the negative feelings aren’t your enemy — they’re usually a potential friend trying to warn you something is wrong.
In other words, feeling lonely or isolated usually isn’t the problem — it’s a very good and valid warning sign that you need to broaden and expand the people you associate with. That might be hard. You might need to make significant changes to how you run your life to do that. You might need to develop skills you don’t have. You might need to become more like the type of person who high-character people want to associate with.
All this takes time, whereas retail therapy or distractions or slamming a Coca-Cola does not take time. “Get it… now… you deserve it…”
Confusion is certainly a deep blessing; it indicates that there’s an area where gradually reasoning through it could produce gains. It’s a flag that you need to think harder. Re-read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Sherlock Holmes often unravels things by just following his confusion and going through it slowly — though he, too, would be frustrated in the process.
Yeah, frustration isn’t pleasant. But banishing the frustration means you never fix the underlying problem; you never solve the crime.
So I’m not one to preach or pontificate, and especially not on this topic, but I’ll say it again —
A key component of emotional maturity is the ability to acknowledge, not flee from, and work through negative emotions.