I'll go ahead and throw in the obvious qualifier that this stuff is going to vary by individual, because you can have a hella mature teenager or an abysmally immature twenty year old. Genuinely, though, my own experiences and observations tell me that if you set the average 20 year old next to their 15-year-old self, you are going to have essentially the same person.
This is because varied life experience accounts for so much of our growth, and for many of us, there's really not a lot of difference in the range of our life experience at 20 from five years earlier. We typically just have an additional five years of similar experiences.
The reason being is simple: much of a young adult's range of life experience is dictated by their parents/guardians/whomever.
If you had controlling parents, I'd bet dollars to donuts they didn't stop being controlling just because you turned 18. They still leveraged whatever they had over you to keep their sense of control. If you had parents who treated you with respect and wanted you to become a young adult with a sense of dignity and personal accountability, they didn't wait until you were 18 to start that process.
You can very, very easily -- whether it "should" be the case or no -- have two young adults five years apart in age yet still of comparable emotional range and development. I'm not going to begin to find a story like that of LuminAbyss even questionable at the conceptual level until we tack some more years onto him.
This is because varied life experience accounts for so much of our growth, and for many of us, there's really not a lot of difference in the range of our life experience at 20 from five years earlier. We typically just have an additional five years of similar experiences.
The reason being is simple: much of a young adult's range of life experience is dictated by their parents/guardians/whomever.
If you had controlling parents, I'd bet dollars to donuts they didn't stop being controlling just because you turned 18. They still leveraged whatever they had over you to keep their sense of control. If you had parents who treated you with respect and wanted you to become a young adult with a sense of dignity and personal accountability, they didn't wait until you were 18 to start that process.
You can very, very easily -- whether it "should" be the case or no -- have two young adults five years apart in age yet still of comparable emotional range and development. I'm not going to begin to find a story like that of LuminAbyss even questionable at the conceptual level until we tack some more years onto him.
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