And I’m not counting things like what you do or get when you grow up like having a bank account or getting a real job. Nor am I accepting the whole ‘I just grew up’.
My sign of my childhood ending or accepting that it has ended is when all of the nu-metal bands I was introduced to and listened to a lot of us just ended up fractured. They all didn’t endure the passage of time and it was really just a matter of you had to be there to know how popular they were or the scene was.
The bands I used to have listened to have gone the way of Classic Rock on the radio. Spammed tracks from some bands because that’s all the DJ knows or that’s all they’re allowed to play.
My childhood ended when I could finally understand the Hobbes’ quote “Homo homini lupus est”, when I could finally understand the existence of these shadows inside humans (including myself), when I could finally see those shadows right away. My childhood ended when I realized what humanity and society are, when I realized how simpler would it be if humans had stuck being hominins. My childhood ended when this thing, called “sentience”, powered itself on inside my brain, condemning me to understand things that I wished I couldn’t understand. My childhood ended, the kid inside myself is long dead, and now I’m a zombie, a Mortuus-vivens.