Life lessons can come from many places: from your parents when they teach you about respecting your elders, from your religious leaders when they tell you about being a reflection of kindness, or from avant-garde books and movies that tell you to take life one step at a time. However, shows that are geared towards children are not necessarily cited as a common place where one gets life altering advice.
When you get into your teen years and older, cartoons stop feeling socially acceptable to be watching, and thus you start to go to what is more popular with your demographic such as influencers, Youtube, teen drama shows, etc. Granted, those are fun to watch, but sometimes you need a bit of guidance when you don’t have something or someone to help you, and a life lesson from those childhood shows can break down an issue easier than a 500-page philosophy book.
For me, that came when I hit a quarter-life crisis in my early 20s. I couldn’t find a job, had no friends, and was stuck comparing my life to peers I admired. I was falling into a pit of self-wallowing despair created by spiraling thoughts that I was a failure. Many say your 20s are meant to be a confusing period, but I didn’t realize how awful the feeling truly was. That sense of stagnation, the ever-growing fear of approaching 30 without any notable success, the lack of social and financial stability. All of it is magnified within this decade and feels like everyone is pushing down their expectations on my chest so heavily I was unable to breathe. And when attempting to pull in some fresh air, my lungs would be met by toxic fumes made of the crippling anxiety. This anxiety being the inability to comprehend that I am paradoxically in the most physically advantageous years of my life, yet withering from the lack of opportunities and ability to move forward.
I searched for movies, shows, self-help advice, truly anything that would provide me with a sense of comfort and groundedness, but each thing said: “It is meant to feel that way!” The issue was that I didn’t want to feel that way. Trenching through these “it’s okays” regurgitated from all those supposedly helpful sources didn’t help me to feel as though the destination would be any more comforting. Being so overwhelmed by the concept of needing to fall into the maturity and career level that was expected of me, I found comfort from old shows that used to play on my static-filled TV when I was sick at home from school.
I was comforted when I remembered the feeling of the hair on my arms sticking up when getting too close to the screen as it was turning on, and how those shows would always have a sense of homeliness from the fact that each frame was hand-drawn and moved in a rigidity way when the characters would talk. One show in particular that I found immense comfort in, was Adventure Time. The entire series follows the protagonist’s journey into young adulthood, and as I was going through my own journey (albeit a quarter-life crisis one), I found immense comfort in the philosophical talking points throughout the show, particularly:
“Even if we’re not changing on the outside, we’re changing on the inside constantly…As long as I know the shape of my soul, I’ll be alright”
Through the landfills of “It’s okay, it’s supposed to be confusing” I trenched through, this particular quote struck me. It reminded me that when struggling through personal change and growth, even ones forced upon you, they can still be navigated through having security in yourself as a person. This didn’t say plainly like the others that “It’s okay just deal with it,” it told me that “it will be okay, because there is something that can ground you if you get lost.”
Sometimes grand lessons don’t need to be extrapolated by complex literature or films that only cinephiles can hardly grasp themselves. Sometimes it can be as minute as a quote from a children’s show about a talking dog and a kid.
