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Comment by robbiep | Hacker News Reader

That's what I thought when I was 15. It's probably what most academically gifted 15 year olds think.

Go back and read some of your stuff in another 5 years, and then another 5. And tally the face palms. It's a good exercise in humility, something that is often hard to appreciate as a 15 year old

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I went back recently and read some of the stuff that I wrote when I was 19 or 20. I came to the sad conclusion that I am getting thicker and more ignorant with age.

Care to share links to some of these insightful posts?

> Care to share links to some of these insightful posts?

Implying that the writings could only have been online?

There once was a time when we wrote on paper, with pencil and pen, or if you were really well off you had a typewriter.

Hey! I am not that old!

(But no, they are not online as they were essays that I did for school).

"Go back and read some of your stuff in another 5 years, and then another 5. And tally the face palms."

If you could run the experiment the other direction, I wonder how different the results would look. That is, what proportion is "growth" and what is simply "difference".

It would be beneficial for the discussion if you could recall any specific examples of things you misinterpreted or missed as a teenage reader.

For context, I'm 34, and like many around here a bright teenager. One thing that I really missed was story coherency, the careful assembly of motivations, events, themes, and characters into a cohesive whole. I don't even know how to describe my standards for a good story as a youth, but they're wildly different than they are now, and in particular many of the things I enjoyed then I now consider incoherent nonsensical trash. Things like Star Trek Voyager, which I always found weak, but now I can explain that weakness, or Final Fantasy X, which merely slightly bothered me at the time, which I now realize is because it was so bad it managed to penetrate the thick fog of blissful ignorance I was living in, but only a little. On the other hand, many of the original Star Trek episodes actually make a great deal more sense to me now than they used to. (It's fun to read the Blish novelizations of them; without the campy 60s videography and terrible effects, the true quality of the underlying stories comes out more clearly.)

I woke up to this around 25 or so. It was actually Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV series, of course, not the forgettable movie) that tripped this for me; I realized I cared far more about the characters than any campy horror show had any right to make me care, and I began to wonder why, and poke into the mechanics of how that was done. That turned out to be a longish and interesting journey.

(I know I've mentioned several media that aren't "reading" here, but it trivially applies there as well.)

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