Everyone is Twelve Now
The only demographic in the United States that gets a pass on being a jerk is — or at least, should be — children. Their only job, after all, is to learn how to get along.
Children are (usually, hopefully) allowed to experiment, and make mistakes, especially social ones. The closer they get to adulthood, the less grace we give them to be assholes, but we can usually trust that as kids grow and learn the rules of society, they decide not to be assholes on their own.
Twelve-year-olds, specifically, stand at a threshold of maturity. I don't have kids, but from what I've observed in my kickboxing academy, there are two types of twelve-year-olds: those who choose peace, and the "late bloomers" choosing violence, menacing everyone around them.
Twelve-year-olds can do that. They're twelve.
What we probably shouldn't do is allow tween antics from the head of a household, or a tech mogul, or the president of the United fucking States.
And yet, here we are.
None of this is normal.
It is not normal for a sitting president's birthday party to include UFC fights on the White House lawn. Or for it to end with one of those fighters, ostensibly a grown man, lobbing playground insults at a former First Lady. It's all a bit embarrassing. We should be embarrassed, but we're not, apparently.
It is not normal for gaggles of other grown men to be running around recording women without their consent with the use of AI-powered perv glasses to post online for the approval of strangers, denigrating our right to privacy and further eroding trust in a social contract we've managed to abide by for centuries.
It's super not normal that so many people are so giddily adopting anti-intellectualism to the point where we're proudly offloading critical thinking to privately-owned AI chatbots and "second brain" PKMs:
I really hope these people are being facetious...
What is "Everyone is Twelve" Theory?
@veryimportant.lawyer on Bluesky observed that Americans in general are starting to behave as if our cognitive functions have regressed into 12-year-old territory.
It stuck. Manson and a handful of other creators noted that the result of our steadily-regressing ability to think critically or sit with uncertainty has produced the cognitive profile of a 12-year-old: status-obsessed, tribal, reactive, and incapable of pausing between feeling something and acting on it. It explains everything from internet culture wars to the way politicians and billionaires behave online.
It's also why we see the exact same nonsensical arguments on X/Bluesky/Threads every 3-5 months, such as "reading is elitist:"
The Male Hysteric
Behaviors of a grown 12-year-old
Have you seen whole-ass adults exhibiting these traits in real life lately?
- Impulsivity
- Inability to self-regulate
- Inability to be patient or experience boredom
- Black-and-white / oversimplified thinking
- Emotional reactivity
- Compulsive content consumption (aka doomscrolling)
- Inability to handle ambiguity or nuance
- Pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain as the primary decision-making framework
- Inability to delay gratification
- Viewing complex problems through absurdly simplistic solutions ("maybe if there's crime, we should just send the army")
How did we get here?
Most of what I've seen on "Everyone is Twelve" Theory is geared towards the chronically online, but we can plainly see such behaviors have broken containment, especially in American politics. When you take the gambling-adjacent nature of social media into account, it makes perfect sense why we're dealing with this today:
The TikTok model offloads prefrontal cortex functioning
The prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that allows us to focus, regulate our behavior, and make complex decisions — is taxing to use, so anytime the environment offers an off-ramp to not use it, we take it.
The algorithm removes your sense of taste.
Platforms outsource your opinions back to you via data — "they have the data on what you believe to be true, so why should you think about what you believe to be true?"
The feed preserves social/emotional brain while kneecapping executive function.
Status-seeking, tribal identity, ingroup/outgroup anxiety all stay fully active (and get amplified by the algorithm), but the regulatory hardware that would moderate those impulses gets atrophied. I'd say this is how 12-year-olds think, but I don't want to insult the more intellectually curious tweens in my life.
Culture now rewards 12-year-old behavior.
Impulsivity is called "authenticity." Not filtering is "keeping it real." Emotional outbursts are "passion." Dunking on strangers is "justice." Every adolescent impulse has been rebranded as a virtue, and every adult capacity is seen as boring, uptight, or "giving Boomer."
Here's the video that put me on to this theory in the first place:
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