A Bizarre Exam Where the Majority Fails
If there were an exam where 90% of the entire student body failed, would it be because the students didn’t study, or because the exam questions were completely flawed? The answer is obvious: it is an examination error.
The deception currently being practiced by the academic community of developmental psychology is exactly like this. When we take the rulers of Erikson and Piaget—crafted a century ago based on the average Western European life—and apply them to humanity in 2026, the vast majority of modern people (beyond infancy) turn into "failures" and "exceptions" who have veered off the normal track of development.
A single person in their 30s expanding their own universe without getting married, or a senior in their 60s refusing retirement to plunge into a new entrepreneurial frontier—on the markings of that stale formula, they are merely "immature mutants" who failed to adapt to the developmental stages. For whose benefit is this bizarre, inverted phenomenon sustained, where a standard that the majority never reaches is still called "normal," while the raw, living existence of the masses is branded an "exception"?
The Real Standard Required to Discuss Exceptions
If you want to detect an "exception" or an "error" in any dataset, it is only proper to use "the current standard" shared by the majority of that group as your baseline. This is the very foundation of science and common sense. Discussing current exceptions based on past data is no different from bringing out the component standards of a 1920s rotary phone to inspect the defect rate of a modern smartphone.
It is cowardly for academia to stubbornly cling to the classics under the pretext that they are a useful "baseline for comparison." If they truly wished to address the developmental exceptions and psychological trajectories of modern people, they should have established a new baseline—one that sets the average value around the life of the "here and now," where remaining unmarried, digital environments, and a super-aged society have become the default.
Yet, they refused the troublesome and risky task of redrawing the map based on the present. Even while witnessing the undeniable fact that the majority of modern people do not pass through those classical stages, they chose to pass the buck to the public instead of changing the standard, claiming, "It’s because the current generation is too complex and peculiar."
You Don’t Need to Quote the Classics to Prove Who You Are
In the end, this scathing counterargument declares a monumental sense of liberation: we no longer need to quote dead scholars or ask for their permission to validate our own lives.
Just because you haven’t started a family past the age of thirty, or because you are still wandering and dreaming of infinite extensibility in your forties, it does not mean your development is lagging. You are simply walking the steps of a "perfectly normal modern human being," evolving in the most standard fashion while rewriting the rules of survival and reproduction within this massive jungle of 2026 civilization.
To those arrogant individuals who dare to measure your magnificent universe with a broken ruler, let this essay serve as your proud outcry: That stale standard you speak of has already become a historical exception and vanished into a museum. I am not climbing up those rusty stairs you trapped me in; I am developing more perfectly than anyone on my own dazzling path—one that I differentiate and integrate myself.
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