The Psychology of a Manchild
man-child
noun
/ˈmænˌtʃaɪld/
- an adult man who does not behave in the calm, serious, or sensible way that you would expect from someone of his age.
Notes on the excerpts from : The Psychology of The Man Child - Sisyphus 55
The Eternal Child
After hitting snooze three times, you wake up later than you’d like. You scroll on your phone, sickened by the state of the world by influencers, celebrities. You’re smarter, more creative, more beautiful than these false digital idols. Eventually, you emerge from your bed to greet the day with a coffee and a cigarette. You mean to do some work, but youthful longing carries you through a carousel of procrastination: video games, texting your friends, a phone call, and a well-deserved nap.
The evening light trickles in, and you are once again struck by the total inadequacy of your life. What have you done? Look at all those people who have accomplished so much. And you? You’re an artist without art, a talent waiting to be found. There is nothing in your life that feels purposeful. Everything from your relationships, your job, your beliefs are acceptable but never compelling. Thirst traps and doom-scrolling are your anesthesia.
You drift to sleep and live the same day again and again and again, waiting for the moment when you’ll finally grow up.
The Archetype of the Eternal Child
Puer Aeternus 1, or the child god, is one of Carl Jung’s better-known archetypes 2. Also known as “Peter Pan Syndrome”, the man-child, or the eternal child, the puer (or puella) is someone who simply will not commit to anything for fear of surrendering to the realities of human existence, responsibility, failure, disappointment, and mortality.
Instead, they live or rather exist with each day passing in a disassociative blur leading to nothing in particular. As Jung writes, they live a provisional life they do not truly exist. They are only spectators. Any experience is ghostlike, abstract, without a trace of realization.
This sort of individual deliberately avoids any aim or target, fearing failure or the impermanence of all things. They evade stable work, stable housing, education, or relationships even when such opportunities are directly available. To participate in the “daily rat race” is both overwhelming and beneath them. It’s better to die with potential than risk discovering what that potential truly is.
The Allure of Youthful Longing
Why? For one, there is a powerful nostalgia. Teenage love, the archetype of the gifted child, the thrill of possibility. The appeal of youth lies in the blossoming of things, in the first kiss, in discovering who you are. Like Sylvia Plath’s fig tree, the world offers our younger selves an abundance of choice: lovers, friends, careers, countries. And we often find ourselves seduced by the shade. Why pick one thing? That means growing old, that means disappointment, that means surrendering to contingency.
M : Part of it might also come from the nature of the world we live in now. We’re surrounded by constant noise social media, news, opinions, curated images of how life should look. There’s always something new to want, someone more interesting to watch, something more beautiful to admire. The mind gets used to chasing the next thing, always looking for a slightly better version of life. It becomes harder to sit with what’s real, to tell the difference between what matters and what’s just noise. Maybe the only thing we’re sure of is that we don’t want to feel stuck.
Our Cultural Worship of the Almost
This nostalgia is culturally reinforced. Popular songs romanticize beginnings: the chase, the first date, the uncertainty. Rarely do we hear lyrics about the long haul of loving someone through the mundane. Simply put, the idea of love is more exciting than the experience of it. And what about careers? The Bildungsroman 3 is an entire literary genre dedicated to wandering protagonists soul-searching through youth. There’s an endless library of books and films that depict the longing for existential clarity. Will you go to Alaska like McCandless? Will you wander like Kerouac?
These stories rarely show us what comes after. They end when the character finds clarity. But the living of that clarity the actual life? That’s left out.
The Romance of Not Choosing
In a world of economic uncertainty and dwindling opportunities, it’s understandable why many choose to dwell in the realm of “what could be” rather than “what is.” There’s a sincerity even a heroism in not choosing. A generation of twenty-something (soon to be thirty) living on hope and potential alone.
To be fair, this caricature doesn’t capture the whole truth. Many puer aeterni are creative, imaginative, and highly intelligent. They were the gifted kids the best at art, articulate, fast learners, praised and encouraged from a young age. This is the tragedy of the pueris 4: it’s not that they can’t, it’s that they won’t.
The talents that carried them through adolescence eventually come up short. They are faced with a choice: confront discomfort, failure, and challenge by learning something new or retreat into the fantasy of what they could have been.
“I could have been a great artist. A great writer.” In doing so, they avoid both insignificance and inadequacy.
M : Meaningful challenges whether in career, relationships, or personal growth often demand sustained effort, emotional risk, and a willingness to sit with uncertainty. They ask us to go deep, to invest time and energy without the guarantee of success. And when faced with that, the allure of an easier path the metaphorical red pill becomes hard to resist. It promises clarity, simplicity, even a kind of freedom, but often at the cost of depth. In a world saturated with dopamine driven distractions and constant stimuli, it becomes easier to choose the path of least resistance a lifestyle of passive comfort, low commitment, and no clear future.
Neverland and the Numbing of Becoming
This is Neverland. Drugs, sex, alcohol, and adrenaline dull the call to become something more. If lucky, they form a merry band of fellow misfits, adult children who validate each other’s inertia. After all, if we’re stuck, it must be the system that’s broken.
These individuals often appear ambitious: music, art, startups, poetry. They seduce others with their dreams the same ones they’ve told themselves for years. But reality always catches up. Nobody is ever quite right. She snores. He lives too far away. Excuses bloom in the presence of intimacy. Too many days in a row, and suddenly this might be real. And that’s terrifying.
So they float back into the realm of possibility. Dating apps ensure that loneliness is short-lived, another could be waiting, another possibility.
M : When the tribe isn’t found, the child retreats inward. Disconnected from the world but tethered to it through a screen, they watch others drift through curated lives. And so they begin to drift too not through experience, but through observation. A passive existence shaped by longing, comparison, and the illusion of connection.
Growing Up Isn’t Giving Up
But here’s the turning point: growing up doesn’t mean giving up vitality, creativity, or potential. Jung argued for integration the merging of responsibility with imagination. Commitment, routine, and stability can actually protect your dreams, not destroy them.
This requires courage, the courage to be normal. Not a Netflix protagonist, not the next Van Gogh, just a person who rides the bus, takes night classes, and works retail. This isn’t failure, it’s recognizing that there are things greater than you. The ego shrinks, and the real work begins.
Emails from your annoyed boss, the noise of traffic, the boring class. All of it chips away at the protective shell of the pueris.
But this is the only way forward. It Must Be Self Initiated
- Latin for “eternal boy”
- a Jungian archetype of someone who resists growing up
- (noun) A typical example of a person or concept
- (psychoanalysis) in Carl Jung’s psychology, a universal symbol or pattern.
- (noun) A literary genre focused on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood
- Plural form of puer (Latin); refers to eternal children in general