Youth includes beginnings that only look inevitable after somebody has survived them.

Looking back makes early paths appear determined, as though the person was always going to end up here. At the time nothing was settled, several things could have gone otherwise, and whoever was living it had no way of knowing which version they were in. Survival supplies the sense of inevitability. It gets applied afterwards and was never available at the time.

When a young person is in the middle of something, resist telling them it will obviously work out, and stay near them instead. Give your own younger self more credit than the tidy story allows, since they were deciding without what you now know.