You’re Not Really an “Adult” Until You Reach Your 30s

By StockSnap from Pixabay

Let me explain. You are in the process of constant physical and mental change up until your early 20s. How can you know the natural rhythms and cycles of the mind when you haven’t lived long enough in one state to notice them? Wisdom and self-awareness come from realising that external factors play only a small part in your experience.

Yuval Noah Harari, the renowned Israeli historian and author briefly touched on the matter in the early part of his best-selling novel Sapiens when he identified that the chemical levels in our brain are configured to our relative experience. He used the example that if you are used to a meagre living in a semi-nomadic tribe and you were to suddenly acquire a well-built hut then your chemical happiness level could theoretically rise to say a 9, temporarily, on a scale of 1–10. If you were that same person genetically but you were living in a wealthy developed country, and you suddenly acquired a solid, well-insulated house then your chemical happiness level would similarly be at a 9, temporarily. The reverse is also true, that if you were to lose a home in either setting your chemical happiness level could go down to say a 5, based on what you are accustomed to. We are rigged from the get-go. That doesn’t mean that all our chemical levels are the same and that some people are not predisposed to greater extremes on the…