– How childhood refusal, teenage rebellion, and adult tiredness all emerge from the same climate of resistance.
Life is overflowing with friction. Resistance from the world when the self tries to move. We see this throughout our lives. A counsellor friend once told me that the first word many children learn to say is “no.” And parents, already fluent in the grammar of the system, respond with “they’re acting out.” They think they’re describing psychology. They’re actually describing the child’s first encounters with the practico‑inert: the inherited grammar of legitimacy, scarcity, and expectation that shapes how we become legible to others, and to ourselves.
This resistance is what I call perpetual arbitration – the continual negotiation between the self’s movement and the practico‑inert grammar of the world. It is not a psychological process but a structural one: the world places conditions on how we become legible, and we learn to adjust ourselves within those limits. Perpetual arbitration is not something we choose to engage in; it is the climate in which we learn to move, speak, refuse, and recognise ourselves.
By the time we reach our teenage years, this negotiation becomes visible as rebellion. Teenagers push back not because they are irrational or volatile, but because they are encountering the practico‑inert more consciously. They feel the inherited grammar pressing in on them – the expectations of school, family, community, and the narrowing of possible futures – and they resist. What adults call “the teenage years” is simply the second emergence of the authentic self meeting the limits of legibility. It is the same friction as childhood, but now the self is strong enough to feel the pressure directly.
A few years ago, on a warm summer evening in Peel on the Isle of Man, I sat with a friend in the town square. Nearby, a small group of teenagers – fourteen, maybe sixteen – were chatting. At first it sounded like Irish. But it wasn’t. They were speaking Manx: a language that had supposedly died with its last native speaker, now revived and spoken fluently by teenagers who treated it as their own.
My friend, always alert to the behaviour of his own teenage daughters, listened closely. When we spoke to the group, they told us, almost casually, “Well, it’s our language – none of the adults know what we’re saying.”
The contrast with Ireland was immediate. In our own coastal town, Irish was something pushed through the practico‑inert institutions of school – resisted, resented, treated as an obligation. Teenagers there didn’t cling to Irish; they fled from it. It was a grammar imposed, not chosen.
But in Peel, Manx had become an alternate grammar: a way for teenagers to mitigate the worst experience of perpetual arbitration, to create a space where the inherited grammar could not reach them. And, interestingly, they did this collectively.
The language wasn’t simply a means of communication. It was a structural adjustment – a way of loosening the grip of the practico‑inert, even briefly. A way of speaking that didn’t immediately route them back into the inherited grammar of legitimacy and expectation. A way of being together that softened the climate.
In Ireland, the same language – almost identical in sound – had become a site of pressure. In Peel, it had become a site of relief. The difference wasn’t linguistic. It was climatic.
And somewhere in all this, that collective impulse – the shared attempt to ease the pressure – is caught and captured by the practico‑inert. What begins as a collective mitigation becomes another site of arbitration. The right jeans, the right watch, the right phone, the right label: each becomes another exhausting chain of negotiation, even within rebellion. The practico‑inert absorbs the gesture and returns it as expectation. Even rebellion becomes something you have to get right.
As we move from the teenage years into adulthood, the evidence of our desire to escape perpetual arbitration becomes even clearer. Affluence helps, and so does technology, even though the very mechanisms that ease the pressure also reveal the contradictions of the practico‑inert. Disposable income among the affluent worker means more rooms in the house, ensuite bathrooms, televisions in multiple rooms. You no longer have to negotiate what you want to do in the shared space. Affluence reduces the immediate impact of scarcity by letting each person withdraw into their own room, their own screen, their own controlled environment.
Technology facilitates this drift. The Walkman, the mobile phone, the noise‑cancelling headphone – each one removes a layer of negotiation. No more chatting at the bus stop. No more “can we change the radio station?” No more “can we talk about something else?” We simply don’t talk at all. The practico‑inert no longer needs to enforce silence; the devices do it for us.
Increased affluence facilitates the decay of family relationships, not because people care less, but because the self is constantly seeking relief from perpetual arbitration. The more resources we have, the more we use them to carve out spaces where we do not have to negotiate our movements with others. The more technology we have, the more we use it to insulate ourselves from the climate of legibility. What looks like comfort is often the self’s attempt to flee the constant negotiation that adulthood demands. This is the destructive impact of the climate of perpetual arbitration: it surrounds us, shapes us, and quietly erodes the relations we once relied on to make life bearable.
What we call tiredness, rebellion, withdrawal, or even comfort is often just the self trying to find relief from perpetual arbitration. The practico‑inert shapes the climate of our lives long before we can name it, and we spend much of adulthood trying to soften its pressure – through affluence, through technology, through silence, through distance. But the friction never disappears. It simply changes form. To recognise this is not to despair; it is to see the climate as climate. And once the climate becomes perceptible, the movements of the self become legible again – not as failure, but as the ordinary struggle to live in a world that is always negotiating our existence.
Skerries
May 2026