The thing you were absolutely certain about at eighteen that you now find almost funny

[Ann]

A gentle thread about the confidence of youth. Tell us something you were completely, unshakeably certain of at eighteen, an opinion, a plan, a belief about yourself or the world, that you now look back on with something between fondness and disbelief

The interesting pattern is not that eighteen year olds are wrong, everyone expects that, it is the SPECIFIC flavour of certainty, the total absence of doubt about things that turned out to be completely wrong, and how strange it is to remember occupying a mind that certain

There is a kindness worth extending to your younger self here rather than pure mockery, because that certainty, however misplaced, was probably doing something useful at the time, giving you the confidence to try things a more doubtful older version of you might have talked yourself out of

So share the certainty, what actually happened instead, and the harder question, whether you miss having that kind of conviction at all even though you know now it was often built on nothing, because a life with zero certainty has its own costs too