This is about as far from the point as you can get. What I'm saying is that you can have different goals at different parts of your life, and those goals rarel

This is about as far from the point as you can get. What I'm saying is that you can have different goals at different parts of your life, and those goals rarely match up perfectly with what will actually make you happy. Being young is the state of having less experience living your own life, and by definition you have less information to use when trying to match up your 'conscious goals' (I want to do X sometime in the next Y years) with things that actually make you happy. Specific to the taxi driver example - children are not allowed to drive taxis, they don't know whether they'll enjoy being a taxi driver or whether they're capable of being passionate about driving a taxi and they probably don't know someone who is both psychologically similar to them and has also been or is a taxi driver - whatever judgement they make about taxi driving is probably based on how the culture they grew up in treats taxi drivers, in general, and not on any analysis of whether they themselves would or could be happy driving a taxi for a living. EDIT: you also live in a country where the analysis you gave for the distinction between 17 and 19 year olds doesn't hold, most Israeli kids are coddled until they finish their mandatory service and often until they finish university - most of the undergrads at the technion (and most universities) don't work 'for a living' but rather depend on their parents or the state to a large degree to provide for them, they cannot get to the state of being homeless or starving and they are definitely phased into adulthood over almost a decade between high school and working.