I always had unwavering respect for the elderly, thinking they all had such abundant life experiences that their worldviews, understandings of life, and wisdom should be incomparably deeper, more profound, and more insightful than mines.

But then I started working a part-time job at a gas station and realized that, no, people live such repetitive lifestyles that their wisdom becomes stagnant after they hit 40. And then they decline. No, not because of their brains aging, but because most of them only communicate in the echo chamber that is their small hometown and narrow social network, and because they get all of their information from the news channel which is more often than not opinionated.

I don't know why I'm rambling about this, but I won't stop.

Some time ago, I watched a self-improvement video that advised leaving your hometown to pursue growth. I was skeptical because I thought: "a literal whole town should have enough space to grow and enough different people to meet to be able to learn; this guy is arguing so intently on why you should leave your hometown, but I think he is blinded by his own life experiences-- I believe that towns are big enough that they cannot be said to be restraining, he is simply blaming his prior lack of growth on his hometown".

But now I think I underestimated the cultural echo chamber that a town can be (especially a small one).

People are too comfortable in their hometowns.

This isn't to say that leaving your hometown will turn you into a wise meditator, but what it will do is put you in a foreign environment which will stimulate growth, and it will force you to adapt to new ways of thinking if you don't want to be miserable.

All of this may or may not be completely wrong and merely a product of me tying together a bunch of wrong conclusions that I came to because I spent too much time thinking in my own head without looking for other perspectives and inputs. I'm this skeptical of myself even though this is a very obvious and self-explanatory subject because I have seen too many others do it.

(I wrote in absolutes for the sake of readability.)

Kids have to at least go through a phase where they develop their own identity (and not everyone does go through that, even then). But most children and teens still have their values tied to an idea of how they believe their idols/parents/friends and so on perceive it, it's an active part of brain development to decouple yourself from that and stop thinking about your decisions through a lens of how you think other people think about your decisions/likes/thoughts.