след лемминга

But to compensate for your suffering, being old for your age enables you to see further into the brick wall of life than your peers do. I always paid attention in school and did my homework without complaint – yes, partly because I liked it and didn’t find it too taxing, but mostly because I could see the point of it. I could see that teachers weren’t trying to impart knowledge just for the fun of it. I could see that learning this stuff would pay off. At secondary school, it was easy to resist being caught up in the drive to experiment with sex, drugs and how many nights you could stay out without getting social services involved, not just because I didn’t have the big boobs or great hair that membership of such groups required, but because I could see that an array of GCSEs would serve me better in the long run than a plethora of STDs. It is an underacknowledged truth that the sooner you are able to understand the principle of deferred gratification, the better your life will be.

Against that, of course, you have to weigh the fact that your childhood will be, in many important senses, bloody miserable. You won’t ever fit in. Even if you buy the right clothes, have the right haircut, deploy the right slang in the right accent, your (putative/non) friends will sense that it’s an act. Real children, children who are good at being children, live in the present, not with one eye on the future. To have someone in the group who is running a constant cost-benefit analysis for every action – as good a definition of an adult as any – is both boring and profoundly unnatural.

Furthermore, if you are mature for your age (to quote every school report I ever received), you are likely to turn to books for solace. And although this, again, has unsought, largely academic, advantages, books age you, too. They render it even harder to live in the moment. It is difficult to surrender to an adolescent crush or a first love when you have already experienced a million of them secondhand.