Children Are Nihilists

Only when one grows up do they begin to care

I remember, as a child, being astonished by how little adults seemed to get us children. They seemed to simultaneously believe that we were innocent little angels with a passionate hunger for learning and that we were wholly irrational—not responding to reasons or incentives or even capable of grasping things adults were talking about. This is an easy mistake to make—we’re evolutionarily hard-wired to think that children are very cute and we haven’t been children in so long that it’s easy to forget what nefarious things children got up to and how Machiavellian children are—how responsive to incentives they are.

The thing that adults seem not to realize is that children are nihilists. They do not care about the long-term. They generally regard valuing anything as being indicative of a deficiency in some way. They actively abhor love (no really—think about how much people make fun of those having crushes).

Children are often regarded to be very earnest. This is true when they are very young. But, in Hegellian fashion, they become the antithesis of their earlier self and when they near elementary school, they abhor little more than earnestness. Among children, it’s cool not to care—to be irreverent and unfeeling, the way it is among teenagers.

I remember when I was in fifth grade, there was a girl named Katie. I found her on the whole rather admirable, yet many regarded her as odd. This was because she was genuinely earnest and cared about things! She cared about nature and the environment, she bristled at the use of offensive language. I remember her once unironically declaring, when someone used the word hate, “hate is a very mean word.” The more popular children were far less earnest, making a point of caring about nothing very much.

Children do not really have values in the traditional sense. There are not ideals that they care about. They tend to abhor learning not because they anticipate it not being useful in the long term but just because they don’t think in terms of long-term value.

These claims might seem striking. But adults only regard them as striking because they do not remember what it was like to be a child. As a much more newly minted adult, let me assure you that they are true. Children are wonderful and adorable and creative and brilliant in certain ways, but they are often quite vicious, irreverent, and nihilistic. The reason they find crushes gross and embarrassing, hate learning, and do not care about politics or morality much is not a unique feature of them—it’s because they value not caring about things.