QUARTER-LIFE CRISIS
Why it takes so long for humans to grow up? When a deer, giraffe or a goat is born, it starts to walk in matter of hours. The moment they open their eyes to the world, they stand up. Many animals in nature fully grow in matter of a couple years. They already know what to do, how to hunt, how to run away from predators, how to stick with the pack, what to eat and what not to eat in very early stages of their lives.
When you open your eyes to the world as a baby human, you are clueless. You are totally dysfunctional. It takes months if not years to learn how to walk. It takes many years to fully learn how to communicate. You put whatever you grab into your mouth as a baby. You do all sorts of stupid things that can end your life. You need parental guidance 24/7. You need someone to tell you what to do, what to eat, even how to take a shit. It takes 18 years to fully grow and become a part of society. Even after 18 many aren't ready, some of them stay as a manchild forever.
Why is that? Science has answers I bet. "Because our heads are too big for pelvic bones so we born highly underdeveloped" or something like that. But the problem is bigger. Even long after you develop a fully functioning brain, you are not ready for life. The moment you step into your early adult life, you feel like a fish on land. You were a tadpole swimming in a small pond your entire life and now you need to learn how to be a frog all by yourself. You need to leave your cozy little pond and throw yourself out into wilderness. You need to grow yourself a pair of legs and learn how to jump and learn how to catch flies.
You waste your most valuable years in school. They feed you up with a lot of bullshit. They are trying to teach you a plethora of information full of unnecessary details but they fail to teach the very basics. You end up filling your head with useless details but you don't know shit about how things work. You memorize the periodic table but don't know how chemicals react with each other. They teach you the mechanics of ATP synthesis in human cells but you don't even know where the liver is located in human body. They teach you differential equations but you don't know what to do with that. You memorize all the ancient civilizations and their law but don't even know how your government works. They don't teach you where money comes from, how capitalism works, what are some of the most popular political ideologies and all other very necessary information to understand what the crap is going on in the world. They outright lie to you time to time. Purposefully designed lies. All that hassle is to shape you into a conformist little sheep. All in all you're just another brick in the wall.
And if your family, friends or society doesn't educate you on very basics of socializing, how to behave, how to get a job, how to pay your bills, how to do paperwork, you are totally screwed. You are on your own. You don't know how to live a healthy life even. And when school or family doesn't guide young people, internet does. This is why we see all sorts of degeneracy and stupidity among younger Gen Z.
If you ask kids what they want to become in the future, the answer changes in every period of their lives. Younger they are, stupider the answer gets. A 6 yo would say "I want to become a superhero" or "an astronaut", "a president", "a cowboy", "I want to become Chuck Norris". Once they become teenagers the answer changes. It becomes something a little more sensible but still more often than not it is a big, fancy dream. They might say "I want to become a CEO" or "a successful surgeon", "next Bill Gates". Later in their teenage years they just want a job where they can make a lot of money with only a little effort. After they graduate from high school or college they waste a lot of time searching for their dream jobs and eventually settle down for being burger flippers. Very few aim for realistic goals and score those goals. Those are the lucky few on earth born in the right place, at the right time and with a lot of guidance. For rest of us, we end up being one-line actors in a script written by someone else.