The people who seem to have it all figured out at nineteen are mostly guessing confidently.

Confidence is a manner, and it can be learned long before any of the underlying facts arrive. The person with the fluent answer at nineteen is usually working from information as thin as yours, having chosen a story and committed to telling it well, which reads as knowledge from a short distance. They are not further ahead. They are better presented.

Which is a reason to stop using other people’s certainty as a gauge of your own progress. Ask one of them a kind follow-up question about how they know. The answer is often vaguer than the headline, and it puts your own uncertainty back in proportion.