When we're young, our dream is to grow up. We want to feel the freedom, the power of adulthood. But then, once we get there, our views change. We no longer want to be an adult. Instead, we want to go back to childhood because we then realize things were much easier. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, she tries to explain through diction that when the soldiers were growing up, what they really wanted was to just go back to when they were young.
At first the idea of being an adult was mesmerizing; they wanted to grow up so fast. But once the adulthood came, they all wanted to crawl back into their childhood state where life was much simpler. The text explained a situation where, "The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom" (n/a). They wanted the authority, the feeling of being an adult, but once the feeling came, they no longer wanted to be an adult. The idea of becoming an adult is so exciting at first but once the time comes, they long for what they had before. In the end, they're never satisfied. All they really wanted was to be happy, but they then realized that happiness was what they wanted, not what they actually had.
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