Our parents were wrong, and right

When we're kids we see our parents as gods and think they know everything and can do nothing wrong. Then when we get into our teens and early adulthood we start to see their flaws and the myth is crushed. The one thing we could always count on - our own parents - are sometimes, maybe even often, wrong. Instead of looking up to someone older to get the answers, we start to find the answers ourselves. Now we're in our early 20s and we get over-confident in our own knowledge, led by a sense that everyone we thought was right actually turned out to be wrong. We're still so young that we can only use the little experience we have, and it tells us that we are right and our parents were wrong, and not enough time has passed yet to give us the signs of our own flaws...

At 25 we start to see the flaws in our old ideas and get humble and look back at our overconfident early 20s and see how naive we were. If everyone else were wrong, as we stood there shouting out loudly, why not we too? We can now see further back into our past, which gives us more perspective and data to imagine a further future as well, and we can understand the journey our parents went through. We also start to see increasingly many signs of us becoming like our parents in every way - looks, manners, ideas, jokes, the way we move our hands. Maybe they were onto something when they said that thing ten years ago. Maybe they said something a 15 year old would be uncomfortable to hear because they knew what a 30, 40 and 50 year old would have use of in the future? Or if they were wrong about something, so what? It seems like we're of the same kind anyway. We now know that we change opinions every other year, almost every one of them, so we can't be overconfident in our views anymore. We have no other choice than to be open for the fact that we could be wrong, whatever we do, because we have been wrong so many many times by now.

And here I am at 30, feeling it would be ridiculous to tell you how this rollercoaster of confidence in our opinions will continue further down the road. But the latest thing I've realized is that while I see more and more of my ideas and theories change over a longer and longer period, making me not wanting to put myself over other people in anything, no matter how much I feel like I "know better" and have "the right opinion" compared to someone else - while my confidence about most ideas in general decrease, the few ideas that seem to stick with me I grow more and more confident about. When so much time have passed, and I've changed my opinion so many times, if some tiny idea stands tall after all of this and passes the test of time it has to mean something?

It's ridiculous to claim to have all the answers, but it's just as ridiculous to claim to have no answers at all. Now let's see if I'll regret this confidence in 10 years.

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