John Lennon Said He Always Wanted to Be Immature, but He Was Sick of Not Growing Up
John Lennon died at the age of 40, after nearly two decades of unprecedented success as a musician. He’d been a creative person all his life and was able to make a career out of it. He said that, in many ways, he was using his creative career as a way to avoid maturing. Lennon didn’t want to age, but he was exhausting himself with his ways of preventing aging. By the time he was in his mid-thirties, Lennon decided that his method of maintaining immaturity was not working for him.
John Lennon said he had always been trying to avoid ‘the age thing’
Lennon achieved his lifelong dream of becoming a successful musician in his early 20s. All throughout his adulthood, he said he wanted to avoid aging.
“At one time I thought, well, I’m avoidin’ that thing called the Age Thing, whether it hits you at 21 when you take your first job — I always keep referrin’ to that because it has nothing to do, virtually, with your physical age,” he told Rolling Stone in 1975. “I mean, we all know the guys who took the jobs when we left school, the straight jobs, they all look like old guys within six weeks. You’d meet them and they’d all be lookin’ like Well, I’ve Settled Down Now. So I never want to settle down, in that respect. I always want to be immature in that respect.”
His solution to avoid aging was to continuously place himself in out-of-the-ordinary situations.
“I felt that if I keep bangin’ my head on the wall it’ll stop me from gettin’ that kind of age in the head,” he said. “By keeping creating, consciously or unconsciously, extraordinary situations which in the end you’d write about.”
John Lennon didn’t want to age, but he was tired of the way he’d been avoiding it
By his mid-thirties, however, Lennon realized this wasn’t working for him.
“I don’t want to grow up but I’m sick of not growing up — that way,” he said. “I’ll find a different way of not growing up. There’s a better way of doing it than torturing your body. And then your mind. The guilt! It’s just so dumb. And it makes me furious to be dumb because I don’t like dumb people. And there I am, doing the dumbest things … I seem to do the things that I despise the most, almost. All of that to — what? — avoid being normal.”
He wanted to avoid normalcy, but he realized he had to find a different way to maintain his youth.
“I’m sick of avoiding it with violence, you know? I’ve gotta do it some other way,” he said. “I think I will. I think just the fact that I’ve realized it is a good step forward. Alive in ’75 is my new motto. I’ve just made it up. That’s the one. I’ve decided I want to live. I’d decided I wanted to live before, but I didn’t know what it meant, really. It’s taken however many years and I want to have a go at it.”
He always thought he would be a creative person
Regardless of how Lennon wanted to maintain youthfulness, he knew that he would always be a creative person.
“I never see meself as not an artist,” he said. “I never let meself believe that an artist can ‘run dry.’”
He said that he could see himself shifting to writing children’s books. Regardless of the medium, Lennon wanted to use creativity to keep a bit of immaturity in his life.
