I'm amazed when ANYONE survives to 25 or 30 given all the incredible damage all those unrealistic expectations do to everyone I have ever met. I have only met one person, My 5 years older cousin who knew what he wanted to do at age 12 and is still happy with being a lawyer now at around 71 years of age and doesn't want to retire ever if he can help it.
But, most of us have a close call with death from unrealistic expectations in one way or another before we are 30.
The problem usually is: "We don't understand how life actually works until it is too late to make a difference." (and that is usually around 30). So, if people haven't destroyed their minds and bodies by 30, then they have a chance at having a wonderful life from then on.
However, I can't really speak for everyone else. I can only speak to what happened to me. I grew up loving the out of doors and nature. I also like science, riding bicycles, climbing mountains and rocks, boogie boarding and then surfing and snorkling and then SCUBA diving in the ocean and then by 16 piloting gliders I flew in the desert. Also, I liked riding motorcycles (dirt bikes) across the desert in the 1960s and 1970s too (I was 21 in 1969).
But, the biggest problem for me was surviving to 26 years of age when my first son was born. From then on I realized I couldn't be so self centered as to consider killing myself or taking risks where I might just have fun and die by accident or something like this.
So, My unrealistic expectations nearly killed me between about age 18 and 25.
What does this look like? Or what did this look like for me?
When I was 8 to 12 I was interested in nature and the out of doors and sort of had decided that religions were only for crazy people even though my parents were Christian Mystic ministers.
But then I got Blunt Trauma childhood epilepsy. (This full diagnoses I didn't get until my son was in Nursing School getting a Bachelor's of Science in Nursing a few years ago now.) So, back then I just was trying not to die. My parents didn't know much about what was happening to me either. And they weren't into doctors much in the 1950s either. People just generally didn't go to doctors much then unless they were dying. It was much different then than today.
My parents sort of encouraged me to get religious as a way to heal myself spiritually and by 14 I listened to them because I didn't want to die.
So, because of my illness I got religious. I'm not sure that would have ever happened otherwise.
However, over time I realized there are spiritual people like me, and then there are religious people who are more like a cultural overlay than anything else. So, over time I learned to separate people tied to churches from people who actually have a personal relationship with God.
This is because many people say all sorts of things but are lying to themselves and to others and just want social interactions with a group of people.
Whereas I want a personal relationship with God and I find religions and churches generally interfere with that. So, over time, I had to separate myself from organized religions to have a real 24 hour a day relationship with God. Otherwise it would have been made fake by organized religions and what they tend to do to people in the short run and in the long run everywhere.
So, I guess my worst unrealistic expectation was that I could remain in my parents church and maybe marry someone there. Thank God that didn't work out. But, at the time the separation nearly killed me for about 5 years from age 21 to 25.
However, from my present age of 67 it likely was the single most important thing that ever happened to me to separate me from any organized religion. IN this way I could become real and genuine and original and stop becoming fake like most people I had known growing up.
Though your experiences in life my tell you otherwise, my experiences to this point in my life make me think that the Catholic church (because of Catholic charities and Tibetan Buddhism) tend to be the worldwide religions that most interest me. But, you might be surprise why. The reason is as I have traveled around the world, most places do NOT have social welfare systems in place. So, if you don't have someone helping you beyond your family or if you have no family, mostly you are just dead in the water, or just plain dead period.
So, I see churches that are benevolent and less judgemental often than protestant churches tend to be can be the most helpful to people to prevent them from dying at various stages in their lives.
I find protestant churches (for whatever the reason tend to be more hellfire and brimstone) and churches like that often just prefer people to be either obedient or dead.
I think churches that demand obedience are stealing loyalty away from God. In other words your first loyalty should be to God, not to a church.
So, any church that comes between a person and their personal relationship with God is evil.
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