It takes a long time to become young.

Unlearning takes a lifetime

When Picasso said this, he wasn't talking about age or wrinkles. He meant something harder: that genuine youthfulness—the kind where you see the world with wonder, take creative risks, and aren't crushed by other people's expectations—actually requires decades of living and unlearning.

Kids aren't automatically young in this sense. They're often constrained by fear, conformity, or the need to survive their circumstances. Real youthfulness comes later, after you've spent years learning the rules well enough to know which ones don't matter. It's what happens when you've failed enough times that failure stops feeling like a prophecy. You become willing to look foolish because you've already survived looking foolish.

This matters now because we're surrounded by pressure to stay "young"—the cosmetic kind—while rarely creating space to actually become young in the way Picasso meant. The irony is that the people who seem most alive, most creative, most genuinely engaged with life aren't usually the ones chasing youth. They're often older people who've done the patient work of shedding what doesn't belong to them. Becoming young, real young, is something you earn through time, not something you fight to keep.