> I'm becoming more and more convinced that the modern adult's emotional maturity now stops developing in middle school. This is probably 99% survivorship bi

> I'm becoming more and more convinced that the modern adult's emotional maturity now stops developing in middle school. This is probably 99% survivorship bias. You don't end up reading about the feelings emotionally mature people on the Internet because they it's not very interesting to read about their feeling or experiences. Here's trick I try to use whenever I find myself believing some generalization about people: Ask myself "How many people do I know in person that fit this generalization?" Now, certainly, my in-person circle is a biased sample in many ways. But the set of poeple you end up reading about on the Internet is also highly biased and in particularly skewed ways. If I find that a generalization doesn't fit most of the people I know, I discard it as mostly a consequence of the natural bias that humans prefer negative news about bad people. Almost everyone is fine. > High school kids are idiots for the most part, why would you be letting their idiocy back then affect you as a grown, independent adult today. Have some self respect for pete's sake. Many people enter high school not just with the random abuse and misbehavior of their fellow kids but also other trauma from earlier in their life. If they were, say, abandoned by their parents, sexually abused by a neighbor, or suffered some other violent act, it may not be so easy to "have some self-respect for pete's sake." Or, put less charitably, what it is about you that prevents you from feeling compassion towards people that are struggling emotionally and instead instead leads you to react in frustration? Who are you to judge? Maybe you aren't as fully healed as you'd like to believe either.