What Do We Learn Later in Life?

First, age is no guarantee of wisdom. The passage of time does not insure growing awareness or insight.

Second, what does “grown up” mean? Clearly, it’s not chronologically determined. In my view, a person becomes a mature adult when and IF they reach a point where they are willing and able to review their semi-conscious Values, Assumptions, Beliefs and Expectations about the way the world is or should be (VABEs for short). Many, probably most never get there. (See The Evolving Self by M. Csikszentmihalyi) Between the ages of 0 and 10, humans are defenseless, vulnerable beings who are imbued by their parents and surrounding environment with a host of assumptions about how the world works including who is good and who is bad. If one never examines these VABEs once one has gained a stage of maturity, then one simply becomes a vessel perpetuating the past into the future.

Not that everything we were taught as youths was bad; we need to decide when we are conscious, sentient, data-based thinkers what to keep, what to lose and what to add to one’s worldview.
Third, what does it mean to be a self-reliant person and citizen?

How does one learn to become self-reliant and a responsible citizen? I believe this includes the ideas that:

1. No one owes me anything. Mother Nature grants no “rights” only governments do. Work for what you want.
2. People should be judged by their behavior and not their appearance.
3. Unless we as the Scouts said, “leave our campsites cleaner than we found them” the world will fill up with garbage and trash.
4. People who take more than they give sow the seeds of revolt and war. History is full of military and economic examples of the “have’s” taking as much as possible resulted in revolt by the “have not’s.” Therefore, it’s better to be a net contributor rather than a net extractor and to seek “sustainable profits” that include the cost of contributing to air, water, soil, and human health.
5. No matter how much people have, they will want more—and this leads to destruction of the “commons,” the world that we all share. (See Driven by Lawrence and Nohria) Unregulated, greed destroys us all. Conquerors of all sorts—religious, political, business, economic—exemplify this greed for “more.” Life on the earth is naturally in a delicate balance and over-fishing, over-hunting, over-cutting, over-planting destroys this balance and causes mayhem.
6. Short-term palliatives and feel-goods for dealing with the difficulties in life like alcohol, drugs, and promiscuity, don’t really solve the issues, they just cover them up.
7. Many children, far too many, are abused by their parents in various physical, emotional, sexual and social ways. While we regulate parenting variously from country to country, child bearing and rearing seems to continue without much oversight. How many people continue to have children that they cannot and do not care for?
8. A variety of birth anomalies are persistent and statistically a part of evolved life over millions and billions of years.
9. History shows us what previous generations have learned; ignore history at our own peril.
10. People somehow want to identify with one group or another that distinguishes them from other people—and this leads to much we/they conflict.
11. People will lie to you — easily