I don't know if you felt it at some point till date, but I have: that your do's and don'ts are somehow computed by your age. At an early age, you are likely to overlook many things, as you have this sense that something exists at a particular point in the future. By this age, I would have this, and I should do this. It's like following scripts of some sort.

And this script that we generate or compute is the lens of interpretation of the world around us.

At some age, we were fine playing around mindlessly, going here and there, not caring how your clothes looked or what snacks and meals you had. But strange things start happening when you begin to transition into adulthood, university, and beyond.

Till university, you have a bit of a carefree mindset. You have no idea or computed sense of what your responsibilities are going to be after you graduate, what burden you are supposed to undertake. And then another thing enters the game: the comparison metric suddenly becomes apparent. You are likely to map yourself out in relation to those around you, what they could do and what you could not do henceforth, limited by your gravity problems. That's something like a universal constant for you to deal with.

And at this place, you have two ways to take your life forward.

One would be to embrace and acknowledge the history and the limitations it has, and to find the stepping stones and focus on the real truth. The thing is that figuring out is the hard part, and you might have to change the world model that you have shaped till date, which is based on your own version of interpretation and might also include your own superstitions or rigid beliefs. You have to evaluate your belief system into a new, matured version that is free from delusional interpretation of the world. And most importantly, you have to act according to the truth that sets you free from your delusional world.

The other way would be to keep following the script you have perceived and let it be the compass for your life. But this might imply a limited life.

Victimhood is another thing that gets into your psyche when you move up and you run the comparison metric. You have introduced a way to put yourself on the spectrum so that your being could be justified, and it’s somehow others' fault for your being. You idealize as if the world would be better if everyone had the same ground reality or this sense of being equal.

This mindset could be something that helps you cope, or you may become resentful and become an activist to justify your being and how unjust others and the world are. But this will be the bottleneck if you want to transcend. The first thing you need to give up is the idealization of victimhood if you want to grow past your supposed limitations.

When you give up this notion of victimhood, the possibilities will start to show themselves. You can now see steps, or the actual path, that you could take to make the most out of yourself. And at this point, you will realize that the real bottleneck is your competence. All the luxury lifestyle and materialism are byproducts here, and you get the option of how you operate as per your rule book.

You might wonder how you become competent, and if you are feeling that you are behind or that you do not have the base skill proficiency you admire in others, or your deep wish is that you could be like someone. What you have is the taste for what you want. And at this point, you are supposed to figure out the actual way competence can be achieved.

This is where you are likely to fall prey to pretension. The world around you today rewards and glamorizes appearance, so you are likely to behave in a fake way. You are likely to idealize and act to get validation. You are likely to run after certifications so that you can post them on LinkedIn. And this is more evident in university students, we have this pretentious assumption of what is likely to be valuable or will help us down the road.

You need to give up your pretentious behavior and your approach to build real competence.

And to overwrite your existing world model and transcend into a new model and orient yourself in a way that is actually beneficial to you, you need to give up the old worldview and build a new foundation that is based on a truthful assessment, and not something that originates from a place of victimhood.

At that point, adulthood stops being about age or circumstance and becomes about taking responsibility for seeing the world clearly and acting accordingly.