will my future life be to my present aspirations like my coming of age[reaching 18] w

Childhood is a time of learning. Children are full of hopes, ideals, and good intentions, but they don't have enough knowledge of the world to understand which things are worth doing and which are not; which can be done, which are merely difficult and which are impossible. They also don't have enough knowledge of themselves to know what their strengths and weaknesses, interests and indifferences, talents and incompetences will be when they become fully adult.

Sure, but did you have any detailed idea of how you (or anyone) would go about actually accomplishing those things? It's absurdly easy to set a goal. The hard part is planning how to achieve it, then making the necessary preparations, and finally doing the work. That invariably involves compromise and conflict.

The size of your body has nothing to do with it. It's the fact that your brain and your endocrine system (the infrastructure of your emotions) are still growing. Children don't have the intelligence, patience, stability or wisdom (i.e., maturity) to do most of the things adults do and even if they do, they don't have the knowledge and skills to do it. (Yes I understand that some adults haven't distinguished themselves with their competence either, but this merely illustrates how difficult it all is.) This is why we don't allow children to vote, sign contracts, drive, marry, have children of their own, choose which drugs to use, decide whether to go to school, or make other major decisions about their future, much less about our future. Homo sapiens is a unique species: it takes our young two decades to grow into fully mature adults. Parenting is a commitment that takes a significant portion of the lifetime energy and attention of two adults, and in fact it requires the entire community to pitch in and do their part as well. It's unreasonable, in fact it's just silly, to assume that a child can do things that are still really hard for grownups, whether it's having the discipline to practice deferred gratification, or setting a goal for the future.

I'm sure you realize now that although you may have had the motivation, you weren't nearly as well prepared as you thought you were.

I've got news for you. No matter how old you are, there are still things that you're not quite ready to do. I don't know what country you live in, but in mine you have to be thirty-five to run for President. There are many other activities and responsibilities for which there is no actual legal restriction, but you simply won't be allowed to do them until you're older.

Besides, eighteen is nothing! You haven't even got your university degree yet. Sure, you can now drive, vote, live by yourself, join the Army, get a credit card, drink whiskey, and even get married (although I wish the age limit for that were about ten years higher), but you're not going to make any important scientific discoveries, cure hunger, abolish poverty, or just do something more prosaic like solve the traffic problems in the center of your city. You need education and experience to be able to do those things. Just as importantly, you need to know how to work with people, especially difficult people. Your experience in classes and on sports teams is a good start, but it hasn't prepared you to figure out what to do when some jerk with a lot of power disapproves your project because he wants to give it to his golf buddy or his son who dropped out of college after two years.

The future never works out quite the way we expect it to. That's just how the universe works. But as you gain education and experience, you will acquire the skills and wisdom to both choose a future that is realistic and achieve something that is close enough to your dreams to be satisfactory.

Ah yes, when you're stressed out you still talk like a child, so you obviously have a long way to go on this "adulthood" thingie. Love is an instinct, it's something that every single human being is born with except for the tiny percentage who are wired wrong--sociopaths etc. Everyone falls in love, usually six or seven times during adolescence but certainly by age 25. These days marriage is a bit passe, but virtually everyone strives to settle down in a loving relationship with someone. To set yourself a goal that you will never have a long-term domestic partner like the rest of us is simply childish and unrealistic, and if you attempt to achieve that goal you will cause yourself a world of emotional turmoil. You may very well be able to suppress it and pretend it's not there, but emotional turmoil takes a heavy toll on your brain and it will reduce your ability to do anything else well. Besides, being married is hardly incompatible with doing great things. Most of the world's great leaders, authors, philosophers, artists, inventors and scientists were married.

As for having children, that is becoming increasingly less common these days. My wife and I never had any and we're just fine. But we still have the normal healthy instinct to be caregivers so we have lots of dogs. A big part of being successful with this caveman body and brain of ours is figuring out how to divert those instincts we have into something we can happily live with, instead of trying to suppress them.

Change is a normal attribute of the universe. You can hardly expect to be exempt from the laws of nature! You will continue to get smarter, wiser, more capable, more confident and more socially adept, so you will see more nuances in the world than you can see today.

You should be mature enough, informed enough and sensible enough at this age to be able to look at your goals objectively and decide whether they are worthwhile, practical, interesting, and something you want to devote your life to. You should be able to hang onto them, but nonetheless they will adapt and adjust as your life progresses, just as you will adapt and adjust.

I intended to become a mathematician or a scientist when I grew up. I didn't quite achieve that, but when I was a kid there was no such career as software development. That uses the same talents and training, and satisfies the same desires, as well as being something for which I am actually quite a bit better suited--pure logic that makes science look like bookkeeping and deep levels of hierarchy that make math look like solitaire. I have done a few great things and I'm proud of myself. I'm positive that the ten-year-old me who was mastering algebra and the twelve-year-old me who was doing differential calculus would not be disappointed to have seen how his life was going to turn out.

No. But our old selves have an obligation, when they are still our young selves, to act like mature, responsible members of civilization, and choose goals that are realistic for us. You can't do that when you're eight, but you can sure do it when you're eighteen. The question is whether you're willing to do it!

The only obligation that every human being should accept is to contribute to civilization rather than just taking and not giving anything back. We don't need a world full of Albert Einsteins and Winston Churchills and Mick Jaggers and Bill Gates and William Shakespeares. We need enough of those people to do the "jobs" that those people do, by advancing civilization and making the future better than the past. But we need millions of people who will simply keep civilization running, making sure that the present is at least as good as the past, and giving those exceptional people something to work with. We continue to automate more of the work of keeping civilization running, yet we still need bookkeepers and auto mechanics and cooks and janitors and bulldozer operators and welfare clerks and teacher's aides... and guys like me who play bass guitar in the band in the bar you go to on Saturday night, without feeling "irrelevant" because I never got to be Paul McCartney or John Entwistle.

This is the child talking. Most jobs these days are done at a desk. Presidents, scholars, scientists, architects and social reformers are all sitting at their computers right now, just like you are. Perhaps all of those jobs look "everyday" and "average" from behind, because you have no idea what they are doing. If you don't want a desk job because you don't want to sit down all day, you're going to have to be a farmer or a surgeon, a soldier or a zookeeper, a traffic cop or an astronaut. Whether you work sitting down or on your feet, in an office or in an airplane, your job can be mundane and repetitive or groundbreaking and challenging. It's up to you.

Ambition is not binary. You can have a small or a large amount of it. Sure there are people who have none, but most people have some ambition. And some of those people whom you accuse of having no ambition may have spectacular parental skills, and their children will be nuclear physicists or concert violinists. There are, after all, people whose ambition is to raise really good children, and we sure need them!

Nothing went wrong in my life. Well obviously that's a wild exaggeration, but I have an impressive list of accomplishments. I'm not going to share my CV with you because I have to maintain anonymity here lest potential clients find out that I think their politics or religion suck and refuse to hire me. I've acquitted myself well and I have much to be proud of. I've contributed to some great advances in software quality, data security and project management, all of which are key to the survival and advance of civilization. I've also made a lot of people happy by selling them adorable, healthy puppies and playing hot music for them to dance to. Making people happy is one of the most important jobs there is! It doesn't matter how spiffy our civilization is, if the people who comprise it aren't happy.

And since you're here asking for advice on SciForums, why in the world do you think that being one of the elders who is providing that advice is not an important service??? I've spent 67 years on this planet and I've figured a few things out. I regard it as yet another one of my jobs to share those discoveries with the rest of you, so you can avoid some of the mistakes I made. Or maybe it's the same job: making people happy.

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You seem to regard life as a destination. It's not, it's a journey. You will have a series of goals. You will fail to achieve a few but as you get older and wiser you'll get more of them right.

That first goal was made by a child, so it was not very realistic. You're an adult now, so you should be much more competent at goal setting. You will surely find that parts of it were unrealistic, or that you simply didn't quite have the energy, talent and luck to achieve them, but if your parents and teachers did a good job, you should be able to look back on it in ten years and say, "Yeah, that was reasonable and I'm still going to do most of those things, but I've got a few new ones too."

Stop putting so much emphasis on something you did when you were a little kid. As I told you above, children of our species remain immature, incompetent, stupid and foolish for almost two decades. You can't put too much stock in what they do. You're now at an age when you have both the maturity and the resources to plan your life. Do a good job of it and you won't be disappointed. Just remember that "doing a good job of it" includes allowing for changes in both you and the world around you.

I will end by repeating a couple of gems of wisdom that I learned from the wiser, more mature people who came before me:

• #1. The only thing that any of us absolutely must do in order to be satisfied with ourselves, is to try to leave the world a little better place than it was when we got here.
• #2 is called the Serenity Prayer and was written by Reinhold Niebuhr about seventy years ago. It has been altered many times, just as it has been by me:
  Goddess, grant me the strength to change the things I can change,
  The serenity to accept the things I can't change,
  And the wisdom to know the damn difference!​
• #3. Fight the battles that you have a fair chance of winning. Otherwise you're wasting energy that you could use to do something important.