Feeling like your young is an awesome feeling.

I grew up in post WWII austerity in the north of England. My birthplace that I am not ashamed of comprised just over 100000 people. They catered and provided holiday entertainment for 20 million visitors every year during a season, only curtailed by weather, running from about March through to November. Frequently some or nearly all of those months were not conducive to holidaying because of cold or wet.

Accordingly from an early age most people knew the value of being open and friendly to the visitors. There was no homophobia, no xenophobia, no open religious, political or racial profiling and discrimination. We were all one group trying to make a livelihood, provide value for service and peacefully cohabit with our neighbours. My teen to adult years were spent with Plymouth Brethren neighbours who started singing the praises of Jesus at 6 am. each morning on the other side of my bedroom wall. The neighbouring wife of the minister took ten years to say good morning if we met at our respective front doors separated by a two foot six inch high brick wall. Her husband never spoke.

. In some respects we grew up quickly and had no childhoods. In others we were branded for life with the understanding that all, apart from some ego battered southerners and the 1% "upper class", were people like us and that we would give them welcome.

Sadly I now live in an area largely of ego battered god botherers who have, ghetto like, lived in their divisive enclaves practising persecution and discrimination against strangers (determined as anyone born beyond the town cemetery less than 5 kilometres from the post office), political opponents, differing religion's members, differing national origins if of migrant parents but born between the cemetery and the post office and good luck if you are a black First Nation's Australian or have not had family living here for more than three generations!

Three generations in my family takes me back to the birth of my grandpa in about 1860. Here photos often appear in the local paper of five generations of living women grouped without a man in sight. ... I often wonder " did they kill them off keeping them and their children in lifestyles they aspired to or simply divorced them after getting their sperm?"

I have an acquaintance of German origin who freely admits that after living in a street full of Italians, in Sydney until age 8 or 9, the trauma of being dragged to Germany until she could escape back to Australia when 18 has left her permanently traumatised. She is now in her fifties. I must say that I can envy that warm Italian style of childhood.

Unsure of the exact definition of "grown up", appears to have something to do with the loss of dreaming and ironically the lack of growth.

Growing up is overrated.

I have never seen the point of growing up. Grown ups are not fun.

I have never seen the point of growing up.

Don't. It's overrated.

Why bother?

Well if you do let the rest of us know!

Yeah, I can see that you have a problem.