Aging & Wisdom Quote by Logan P. Smith

Mocking a young person for being performative is a cheap way to pretend adulthood is something you earn by never having been awkward. Logan P. Smith’s line flips the usual suspicion of “affectation” on its head: what looks like fakery is actually fieldwork. The youth isn’t lying; he’s rehearsing. The metaphor of “trying on” faces makes identity less like a buried treasure and more like a wardrobe assembled over time, with plenty of bad fits along the way.

The intent is quietly corrective, aimed at the older observer whose laughter doubles as policing. Ridicule functions here as a social tool: it punishes deviation, enforces taste, and demands a stable self before a self can even be built. Smith refuses that cruelty by reframing affectation as experimentation. The subtext is generous but unsentimental: authenticity is not a natural state you discover by refusing influence; it’s a practice you develop by moving through influences.

Context matters. Smith wrote in a culture where “character” carried moral and class weight, and affectation often read as social climbing or decadence. His defense of youthful posing is, in that light, a small liberal insurgency: permission to be unfinished. Read now, it lands even harder in an era of social media, where adolescence happens under surveillance and every “phase” is archived and judged in real time. The line works because it recognizes what many adults forget: a coherent face is not the starting point of growing up, it’s the product.